To the Editor:

It is ironic that the North Country BLM Solidarity group is demonstrating in Potsdam in favor of abortion. Even Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was against abortion as a means of birth control. Sanger is sometimes portrayed as a racist for a remark she made in a 1939 letter, that she did "not want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population." However, she said this not out of racial animus but because she worried that communities of color, because of their "ignorance, superstitions and doubts," as she put it, might be suspicious of her motives.

It is true that Sanger was a staunch eugenicist who contended that "philanthropy may become positively dysgenic" when it encourages the reproduction of people who "are diseased, feeble-minded, and are of the pauper element dependent entirely upon the normal and fit members of society for their support. There is no doubt in the minds of all thinking people that the procreation of this group should be stopped."

But she was adamant that abortion had no place in her project: "Although abortion may be resorted to in order to save the life of the mother, the practice of it merely for limitation of offspring is dangerous and vicious...Some ill-informed persons have the notion that when we speak of birth control we include abortion as a method. We certainly do not."

Again ironically, it would seem that the lives of black unborn children mattered more to the white eugenicist Margaret Sanger than they do to the local activists of Black Lives Matter.

Kevin Beary
Colton

Editor's Note: Kevin Beary is running in the Republican primary for the District 7 seat on the St. Lawrence County Legislature.