Planned Parenthood Sanitizes Document Touting Abortion for Crime Control

When former Reagan Administration official and conservative pundit William Bennett mentioned the possibility — and then quickly denounced it as immoral — that one could reduce crime by aborting black babies, a huge uproar ensued.

Liberals went bananas, at first acting as though Bennett had endorsed aborting black babies and then, when faced with what Bennett had actually said, accusing him of “connecting race and crime.”

As though only a racist could possibly connect race and crime.

We pointed out, at the time, that Planned Parenthood explicitly supported abortion as a means of reducing crime. While they avoided overt mention of race, they clearly knew that black women are much more likely to have an abortion than white women. Indeed, they explicitly cited a scholarly article that pointed out not only that black women are more likely to have abortions, but that blacks are more likely to commit crimes.

But it seems that, in the wake of the Bennett controversy, Planned Parenthood decided to sanitize that argument out of their position paper.

Here is the current version of “Medical and Social Health Benefits Since Abortion Was Made Legal in the U.S.” There is no mention of abortion for crime control.

And here is the version that was current at the time that Bennett made his remarks.

Note the discussion of abortion on page 3, along with citations to the Donohue & Levitt 2001 study that explicitly discusses the racial angle.

Planned Parenthood apparently decided that was an argument they shouldn’t make. But we can’t forget that they were quite willing to make it before the politically correct banshees jumped all over Bill Bennett.