A Republican from Idaho is demanding the Smithsonian remove a bust honoring Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood.
Sanger has been criticized for years over her support of eugenics as well as her racially charged comments. For example, the abortion clinic’s founder said the government should “give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization.” Sanger also once wrote, “We are paying for, and even submitting to, the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.”
She has also advocated abortion “when either mother or father suffers from such diseases as tuberculosis, gonorrhea, syphilis, cancer, epilepsy, insanity, drunkenness, and mental disorders.”
With these things in mind, Rep. Russ Fulcher (R-Idaho) has called for the “troubling” bust of Sanger to be removed from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.
“As our nation struggles to address racial injustice, it is unconscionable that an avowed racialist and eugenicist is featured so prominently,” he wrote in a letter to the Smithsonian. “Ms. Sanger is not the kind, inspirational figure you refer to when you talk about challenging our nation ‘to live up to its founding ideals.’”
Fulcher’s call for the removal of the Sanger bust comes as protesters and rioters all around the country are calling for the removal of dozens of Confederate statues, as well as memorials of President Abraham Lincoln, from public lands. In addition, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) ordered last month that four portraits of former House speakers who served in the Confederacy be removed.