By James L. Lambert
January 24, 2003

(AgapePress) - A black minister in Southern California compares the killing of the unborn today to the national tragedy of slavery in 19th-century America. He also shares a fascinating insight into the nation's largest abortion-provider, Planned Parenthood, and its founder, Margaret Sanger, who he says was a "racist."

Adlai Mack is pastor at Christians United Church in San Diego. Mack was first introduced to the moral dilemma of abortion in 1973 by one of his professors at Princeton University. Dr. Paul Ramsey, a professor of ethics, was particularly appalled by the procedure of prematurely ending the life of an unborn baby. Mack agreed with Ramsey and concluded that abortion also harms those in the black community.

Pastor Adlai Mack

"Abortion is doing harm to black Americans as did slavery in the nineteenth century -- and for similar reasons," Mack explains. "In the past, the Negro slave was considered by many authorities at the time to be not fully human .... Today as well, the 'fetus' [a Latin word meaning "child"] is regarded as not a person and not fully human. [Instead] it is thrown into a bucket in an abortion clinic."

Lasting Impression
As a young student and eventual recipient of a Bachelor of Arts degree at Princeton, Mack never forgot the message conveyed by his teacher. And he feels it is equally important for those in the black community to understand the moral consequences of abortion. He thinks that black leaders -- in particular, most black ministers -- do not convey the horrors of abortion to their congregations.

"Black pastors and black priests are largely doing little or nothing on this issue because of apathy or complicity," Mack says.

The pastor adds that, in his opinion, blacks are conducting their own genocide. "It is striking that the current U.S. abortion movement mostly aborts poor people, black people, and Hispanics," he says.

He points out that according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a research group affiliated with Planned Parenthood of America, those three demographic groups represent 57%, 36%, and 25% respectively of all abortions in the U.S. With blacks making up 12.7% of the U.S. population, that group has a disproportionately greater number of abortions when compared to other racial group categories in America.

Sanger's Legacy
Ultimately Mack is suspicious of the ulterior motives of abortionists themselves. He makes a strong case of his suspicions by referring to quotes from the founder of Planned Parenthood of America, Margaret Sanger.

Margaret Sanger died in 1966. But she has a number of documented statements and positions on record pertaining to family, race, and population control. What pro-life advocates like Mack find particularly appalling are the shamefully "racist" statements from Planned Parenthood's founder.

In a May 1997 Wall Street Journal article, Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, wrote: "In 1939 [Sanger] and Clarence Gamble made an infamous proposal called ‘Birth Control and the Negro,' which asserted that ‘the poorer areas, particularly the South ... are producing alarmingly more than their share of future generations.' Her ‘religion of birth control' would, she wrote, ‘ease the financial load of caring for, with public funds ... children destined to become a burden to themselves, to their family, and ultimately to the nation.'"

In 1934 Sanger published her Code to Stop Overproduction of Children, in which she said that "no woman shall have the legal right to bear a child without a permit ... no permit shall be valid for more than one child."

It is widely known that Sanger associated with followers of the Marxist, Vladimir Lenin, and with advocates of national socialism and eugenics -- the latter being "the science that deals with the improvement of hereditary qualities of a race (by the control of human mating)" [Webster's Dictionary]. Malthusian eugenics played a big part in Nazi Germany's promotion of ‘a master Aryan race.'

In his book Grand Illusions: The Legacy of Planned Parenthood, author George Grant claims Sanger "was thoroughly convinced that ‘inferior races' were in fact ‘human weeds' and a ‘menace to civilization.'.... [Sanger] had come to regard organized charity to ethnic minorities and the poor as a ‘symptom of a malignant social disease' because it encouraged the [influence] of ‘defectives, delinquents, and dependents.'" [p. 91]

This stream of thought follows much of the thinking of Leninists and eugenicists at the time who view religious people with much disdain and consternation. Mack counters that, saying: "Predictably, when black Americans turn from God, the Bible and the church, they find themselves frequently in abortion clinics."

Planned Parenthood disputes the "racist" accusations involving Sanger as false, stating that her quotes are taken out of context. Faye Wattleton, a former black director of Planned Parenthood, however, admitted in an August 1984 Washington Times article that Sanger was indeed an advocate of "eugenics and the perfect race."

Not Alone
It encourages Pastor Adlai Mack to know that, while few, there are other black ministers who share strong pro-life convictions like himself. Rev. Clenard Childress, Rev. Johnny Hunter, and Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson all have deep-rooted pro-life convictions.

Childress is a pastor of New Calvary Baptist Church in Montclair, New Jersey. Hunter, a minister from Texas, is national director of the Life Education and Resource Network (LEARN), the largest African-American, evangelical pro-life ministry in the U.S. And Peterson is director of the Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny (BOND), which runs a home for fatherless young men in Los Angeles.

All of these ministers have their own stories and reasons to oppose abortion. Notably they bring some additional information that makes their case against "black genocide" even more compelling for African-Americans to contemplate:

• Three out of five pregnant African-American women will abort their child.
• An estimated 1,452 African-American children are killed each day by the heinous act of abortion.
• Between 1882 and 1968, 3,446 blacks were lynched in the United States -- a number surpassed in less than three days by abortion.
• Approximately one-third of all abortions are performed on black women.

With so much money at stake, it appears that the beneficiaries of the abortion industry go out of their way to defend individuals such as Margaret Sanger. Pro-Life advocates like Mack and others still hope that more African-Americans will see through the veneer of abortion advocacy groups like Planned Parenthood, the Democratic Party, and NARAL Pro-Choice America..

Mack, Childress, Hunter, and Peterson are hopeful that more within the black community will join their ranks. Childress thinks this issue will "eventually prick the moral conscious of the black community."

For Adlai Mack, that could not come soon enough.