A "Wake-Up Call" for Pro-Life America
by Elena Muller Garcia - All About Issues, May-June 1992
Peg Yorkin recently donated $10 million to the Feminist Majority Foundation to help the organization bring RU-486 (the abortion pill) to the United States.
Ms. Yorkin, 64, has said that she gave the $10 million in the hopes that other women will follow suit and give similar substantial donations to the abortion cause. She has described her move as a "wake-up call for American women."
I mention it here to ensure that the donation will indeed act as a wake-up call, not for pro-abortion women, but rather for all, men and women, in the pro-life movement. None of us, as far as I know, can afford to give away one fourth of our assets, which is what the $10 million represents for Ms. Yorkin, and much less brag, as she did after her donation, that it won’t affect our lifestyle in any way.
I suspect, however, that we in the pro-life movement outnumber pro-aborts, and I am sure our generosity exceeds theirs.
Ms. Yorkin’s donation is the largest donation ever given to a woman's group. The press has compared it to the $2 million that Katherine Dexter McCormick gave in the early ‘5O’s to fund contraceptive research.
What the media has not mentioned is that McCormick gave her money as a result of an appeal from friend Margaret Sanger. In a letter asking Ms. McCormick to fund the research, Ms. Sanger wrote:
I consider that the world and almost our civilization for the next 25 years is going to depend upon a simple, cheap, safe contraception to be used in poverty-stricken slums and jungles, and among the most ignorant people.... I believe that now, immediately, there should be national sterilization for certain dysgenic types of our population who are being encouraged to breed and would die out were the government not feeding them.
Ms. Sanger sought to end poverty by eliminating the poor, not by eliminating the poverty. Although Ms. Sanger seems to have never accepted abortion, the organization which she founded, Planned Parenthood, is today among the chief abortion providers nationally and worldwide.
Ironically, even though Ms. Sanger had the poor and minorities in mind when she dreamed of the contraceptive pill, that pill has never been popular among those groups. It has been the rich, the middle class, and those whom Ms. Sanger would, in her own terms, categorize as "the more fit" who have accepted it. The "less fit" (also a term used by Ms. Sanger) have refused to take it.
The move to rid the world of those considered "less desirable" is alive and thriving among depopulationists. Take, for example, the massive sterilization campaign launched in Brazil in 1974 by the United States Security Council in conjunction with other agencies, in order to prevent that country’s population from equaling that of the United States by the year 2000. Since then some 33 to 44 percent of all Brazilian women of childbearing age have been sterilized, and the programs seem to have concentrated mostly on black women.
Will the abortion pill follow the contraceptive of Sangerian dreams as a eugenic weapon to curtail population growth among the poor?
It won’t if Ms. Yorkin’s donation is matched, and doubled, by the combined generosity of the large numbers of men and women in the pro-life movement.
Elena Muller Garcia writes a column in the Palm Beach Diocese version of The Florida Catholic. She also works as a freelance writer and as a volunteer at Birthline, a Florida Crisis Pregnancy Center. A certified Natural Family Planning instructor with the Couple to Couple league, Elena has a Master’s degree in Religious studies and is the mother of two children.