In advance of this Friday’s Colorado March for Life, Colorado Christian University’s Centennial Institute hosted a film screening of Seth Gruber’s anti-abortion film “The 1916 Project,” which demonizes Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger. The film explores Sanger’s alleged connections to the eugenics movement of the early 20th century and to the German Nazi Party. In recent years Planned Parenthood has worked to acknowledge harmful aspects of Sanger’s legacy while working to combat misinformation and disinformation from conservative activists like Gruber, a longtime activist and founder of the White Rose Resistance, an anti-abortion group named after the World War II antifascist group.
In 2016, Planned Parenthood published a fact-sheet addressing common claims made about Sanger by anti-abortion activists, and since then Planned Parenthood affiliates have issued their own statements on Sanger’s legacy.
In 2020, Planned Parenthood North Central States published a statement on Sanger. “Our founder, Margaret Sanger, perpetuated a number of problematic beliefs and actions,” the statement read. “We want to be very clear that we vehemently denounce her ideology that certain people — specifically people of color, people with low incomes, and people with disabilities — should be prevented from having children. This repugnant belief runs directly counter to our organization’s current mission of supporting every person in choosing when and whether to become a parent. Sanger’s promotion of eugenics was egregious and wrong. While we acknowledge the benefits that we have reaped from her advocacy for birth control, we take responsibility for the damage that was done. She willfully ignored the incredible harm that her beliefs caused, especially to people of color, people with disabilities, and people with low incomes. We condemn that behavior.”
In 2021, Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest also issued a statement. “The difficult truth is that Margaret Sanger’s racist alliances and belief in eugenics have caused irreparable damage to the health and lives of Black people, Indigenous people, people of color, people with disabilities, immigrants, and many others,” their statement read. “Her alignment with the eugenics movement, rooted in white supremacy, is in direct opposition to our mission and belief that all people should have the right to determine their own future and decide, without coercion or judgement, whether and when to have children. We must acknowledge the harm done, examine how we have perpetuated this harm, and ensure that we do not repeat Sanger’s mistakes. We denounce the history and legacy of anti-Blackness in gynecology and the reproductive rights movement, and the mistreatment that continues to this day. We value the fundamental freedom of all people to control their own bodies, their lives, and their futures, and we will work every day until full health, dignity, and self-determination are a reality for everyone.”
Despite repeated statements and extensive documentation, Gruber’s film works to portray today’s Planned Parenthood as part of the “neo-Marxist gnostic transgender culture of death.” Gruber sensationalizes Sanger’s 1916 arrest, emphasizing that Sanger was distributing “obscene” materials. Sanger was charged under the Comstock Act of 1873 — which is still being used by anti-abortion activists today — for distributing diaphragms, a contraceptive device widely available today.
The film also describes Sanger’s relationship with noted eugenicists, racists, and Nazis at the time, pointing at reviews of works like Lothrop Stoddard’s “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy.” However, Planned Parenthood notes that “[Sanger’s] interest, insofar as she allowed a review of Stoddard’s book to be published in the Birth Control Review, was in the overall health and quality of life of all races and not in tensions between them. [Havelock] Ellis’s review was critical of the Stoddard book and of distinctions based on race or ethnicity alone.”
Gruber also makes much of Sanger’s tenuous connections to members of the Third Reich, but neglected to mention that Sanger’s books were among the very first burned by the Nazis in their campaign against family planning.
The film also relies on the usual suspects of right-wing media: Eric Metaxas, the author and Salem Media personality whose poor scholarship on Dietrich Bonhoeffer prompted Bonhoeffer’s family to condemn his work, and whose conservative credulity has landed him in a defamation lawsuit from former Dominion Voting Systems executive Eric Coomer; Bill Federer, a Charis Bible College instructor and board member of Truth and Liberty, who last year criss-crossed Colorado spreading conspiracy theories peppered with John Birch Society talking points and a rehashing of Pat Robertson’s 1991 conspiracy tome “The New World Order.”
Anchoring the film with his anti-Sanger “scholarship” was George Grant, an author and pastor. Colorado Times Recorder columnist Logan Davis attended a school led by Grant. In his Society of Professional Journalists award-winning column, Davis writes: “Grant is a leader in [classical Christian education] and a diehard Christian nationalist who has advocated for the death penalty for homosexuality, and openly declared that ‘world conquest’ is the goal of his brand of the faith. At school, Grant taught us – and countless other CCE students up to the present day through his curriculum – that the Crusades were a righteous, Christian struggle. He taught us that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and that Christians should rule it in accordance with Biblical laws. He taught us that the Civil War was not about slavery, and he taught us that, even if it was, slavery was not as bad as it has been made out to be. And those fringe beliefs are not unique to Grant: they are core to the CCE movement, and have been uniformly embraced by Doug Wilson, the movement’s founder. In fact, in 2004, Grant joined Wilson for a speaking tour promoting a controversial new pamphlet by Wilson which argued that American slavery was a largely beneficent institution.”
Following the film, A.J. Hurley, an anti-abortion activist with Gruber’s White Rose Resistance Organization, addressed the audience, urging them to “inform, engage, and enrage” communities over the issue of abortion.
“Whatever you’d do if they were killing five year-olds,” said Hurley, who was arrested in 2022 for stalking and harassing a San Francisco doctor and defacing a statue, “that’s what you should be doing now.”
