On Thursday, Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon and Republican presidential candidate, double downed on his recent assertion that Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger used abortions as a population control tool in order to try and destroy the black population.
When asked by Fox News if he stood by his eyebrow-raising comments, Carson answered unequivocally, “Absolutely. No question about it.”
“Anybody can easily find out about Margaret Sanger and what kind of person she was and how she was a strong advocate of eugenics,” he explained. “She wrote articles about eugenics and believed that certain members of the population weakened the population and was not enamored of black people. And it is quite true that the majority and plurality of their clinics are in minority neighborhoods.”
But Carson then brought the discussion up to 2015. “It brings up a very important issue and that is do those black lives matter?” Carson added. “The number one cause of death for black people is abortion. I wonder if maybe some people might at some point become concerned about that and ask why is that happening and what can be done to alleviate that situation. I think that’s really the important question.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control, heart disease is the number one cause of death for African Americans.
His attack on the women’s health organization comes the same week that it was revealed Carson used fetal tissues to conduct medical research—a practice that has come under fire in recent weeks after an anti-abortion group published a string of a heavily-edited video footage appearing to capture Planned Parenthood officials discussing the sale of fetal tissues.
Despite his very vocal anti-abortion criticism, Carson defended his past research on aborted fetuses and argued that there was no inconsistency with this and his continued attacks on Planned Parenthood. “Killing babies and harvesting tissue for sale is very different than taking a dead specimen and keeping a record of it,” he said. “Which is exactly the source of the tissue used in our research.”
