Last week on “Washington Watch,” Rick Santorum spoke to Family Research Council President Tony Perkins about an anti-choice group’s deceptively edited video targeting Planned Parenthood, arguing that the reproductive health organization has been corrupt from the get-go.
“The person who started Planned Parenthood was a racist, was a segregationist, was a eugenicist, and they have not strayed far at all from their original idea, which is to deconstruct humanity,” Santorum said.
Santorum also suggested that President Obama is hypocritical for supporting Planned Parenthood: “To see a president who talks about civil rights and talks about discrimination and to see him align himself with an organization with this history, and now this present abuse, illegal criminal activity, for him not to step forward and prosecute this fully just shows you that it’s not a moral issue, it’s simply a power and political issue, and that’s what’s driving the current Democratic Party and this president.”
As we’ve noted previously:
While Santorum is correct that Sanger was a supporter of the eugenics movement, as PolitiFact noted, the movement “had been widely accepted” at the time among political leaders including Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover: “In other words, supporting eugenics did not automatically equal racism.” Biographers have also found that Sanger strongly opposed racial segregation. Instead, her critics have relied on a single quote that they have badly distorted.
