(CNSNews.com) – Planned Parenthood’s birth-control campaign in low-income, black neighborhoods is partly to blame for the breakdown of the black family as well as today’s epidemic of out-of-wedlock births, single parent households, sexually transmitted diseases, absent fathers, and high abortion rates, according to panelists who spoke last week at the Frederick Douglass Foundation’s annual conference in Washington, D.C.
Patrick Fagan, director of the Marriage and Religion Research Institute at the Family Research Council, a conservative group, said people do not like to talk about it but the decline of the intact black family dates back to the 1930s when the pro-abortion, family planning agenda was being pushed by groups such as the American Birth Control League, which was renamed the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in the early 1940s.
“The first family targeted by Planned Parenthood in the late 30s, early 40s was the black family,” said Fagan.
“Universally, in all the history of Christianity, contraception was always seen as a grave sin against God,” he said, “a sin by which one lost divine life and the soul.”
“Since the introduction of contraception, everything else has fallen,” Fagan said, citing the “alienation of men from women, the breakdown of marriage,” and “sex outside of marriage.”
Fagan also said that by the 1960s, birth control was widely available and inexpensive, so its impact on the family structure and family values continued to spread.
“[Y]ou had this mass commodification of sex outside of marriage, mainly through contraception,” he said. “Who pushed the whole thing? Planned Parenthood. They first got to the black family. Why? Because they wanted to reduce black kids. They didn’t want black kids.”
According to the Guttmacher Institute’s report, Characteristics of U.S. Abortion Patients, 2008, non-Hispanic black women accounted for 30 percent of abortions. The Census Bureau states that blacks made up 12.9 percent of the U.S. population in 2009.
In an e-mail to CNSNews.com, Fagan said, “Margaret Sanger spearheaded the effort of population control of blacks through the Black church, exemplified in her Harlem Clinic,which started in the 1930’s. Adam Clayton Powell Sr. had her address the Abyssian Baptist Church, Harlem’s largest Black church.”
Sanger was the founder of the American Birth Control League, which became Planned Parenthood.
“By the late 1960’s, after ‘family planning’ clinics were widespread, there was a clear pattern of a preponderance of them being in black neighborhoods,” said Fagan.