Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain is standing by his assertion that reproductive health care provider Planned Parenthood is carrying out the “planned genocide” of African Americans.

In a March speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation, Cain said the organization’s mission was to “help kill black babies before they came into the world.”

ADVERTISEMENT

On Sunday, CBS host Bob Schieffer asked the candidate if he still believed that statement.

“Yes,” Cain replied. “I still stand by that.”

“Do you have any proof that was the objective of Planned Parenthood?” Schieffer wondered.

“If people go back and look at this history and look at [Planned Parenthood founder] Margaret Sanger’s own words, that’s exactly where that came from,” Cain insisted. “Look at where most of them were built. Seventy-five percent were built in the black community and Margaret Sanger’s own words — she didn’t use the word genocide. She did talk about decreasing the number of poor blacks in this country by preventing black babies from being born.”

Anti-abortion activists often misquote Sanger as saying, “[W]e want to exterminate the Negro population.”

ADVERTISEMENT

But in full context, the quote has the opposite meaning. In a 1939 letter to pro-birth control advocate Clarence J. Gamble, Sanger argued that black leaders should be involved in the effort to deliver birth control to the black community.

“We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs,” she wrote (PDF).

Watch this video from CBS’s Face the Nation, broadcast Oct. 30, 2011.

ADVERTISEMENT



