Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) on Tuesday equated his fight against Planned Parenthood with recent efforts to remove Confederate symbols from public buildings.
"You want to go back and take down the Confederate flag? Let’s take down Planned Parenthood," Santorum said in an interview with Simon Conway, an Iowa-based talk radio host.
The 2016 hopeful appeared on the "Simon Conway Show" to discuss his presidential campaign. The conversation changed tone when Conway voiced his disgust with a recently released sting video allegedly showing Dr. Deborah Nucatola, the senior medical director of Planned Parenthood, discussing the sale of fetal abortion tissue. The mention of the video led Santorum to go off on a tangent about Planned Parenthood’s founder Margaret Sanger, whom conservatives often portray as a racist.
“If you want to scrub all racism from America," Santorum said, "let’s start with Planned Parenthood because it was started by a racist named Margaret Sanger, who was a eugenist, who was someone that believed in the separation of the races, someone that started Planned Parenthood for the purpose of culling out the undesirables, including blacks in America."
Listen to part of Santorum's interview above.
While it's true that Sanger wrote about eugenics, the claim that she "started Planned Parenthood for the purpose of culling out the undesirables” has been proven largely false. An examination of her papers indicates she used the word "race" to refer to the human race more generally. Sanger did not suggest that certain races were inferior; in fact, her work earned the support of civil rights activists from multiple eras, including W.E.B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr.
Santorum railed against Planned Parenthood in his interview on Tuesday, echoing the widely debunked claims from the video.
“Planned Parenthood has continued to do disgusting things, from killing little children in the womb, to now selling their body parts and harvesting them,” he said.
The video that went viral on Tuesday is an edited version of footage that was recorded almost a year ago. The full version makes it clear that the director was discussing the reimbursement cost for tissue donation. After the edited video was released, Eric Ferrero, vice president of communications at Planned Parenthood, was quick to point out that tissue donation is done under the highest ethical and legal standards and that donors do not profit.
That didn’t stop Santorum from calling for government action against Planned Parenthood.
“If local prosecutors are not going to do anything about it, then clearly the state legislature and the Congress can try to hold hearings and force public pressure about the case,” he said Wednesday.
Santorum’s wish may now become a reality, as House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) announced Wednesday that Congress will look into investigating Planned Parenthood.
While Santorum was quick to bring up federal action with regard to Planned Parenthood, he's been cautious about taking an equivalent stance on the Confederate flag issue. Last month, he told ABC’s Martha Raddatz that the decision about removing the flag should be left to individual states.
"I don't think the federal government or federal candidates should be making decisions on everything and opining on everything,” he said.
As a staunch social conservative, Santorum frequently attacks pro-choice organizations, and has specifically targeted Planned Parenthood. In 2012, the Sunlight Foundation found that Santorum said the word “abortion” more than any other senator between 1996 and 2007.
H/T Right Wing Watch