Conservative commentator Candace Owens is no fan of Planned Parenthood, the nonprofit organization that has provided reproductive health care, including abortion services, for decades.
In a recent tweet, Owens cited a statistic and the organization’s history as proof Planned Parenthood’s goals are unethical.
"79% of Planned Parenthood clinics are in minority neighborhoods," Owens wrote on Twitter May 3, a post that has since been shared on Facebook. "This is not by accident. That is by its founder, Margaret Sanger's, eugenicist design. Go back and read her quotations. The Left sees racism everywhere except for where it actually is."
The post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)
Planned Parenthood and supporters of its mission have indeed wrestled with the legacy left by Sanger, who opened the nation’s first birth control clinic in 1916 and five years later founded the organization that would become Planned Parenthood. Sanger embraced the idea of eugenics, defined by the National Human Genome Research Institute as the "scientifically inaccurate theory that humans can be improved through selective breeding of populations."
But scholars who have studied her life and work say that as she expressed a eugenstic viewpoint, she did not link it to race — and there is no indication she supported abortion access or sought to use abortion as a form of genocide, as some have claimed.
But we were interested in the 79% data point Owens cited. Owens told PolitiFact the source for that figure was a 2015 report by the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., that was submitted to Congress. The report said the number came from "protectingblacklife.org," a website associated with an anti-abortion organization.
But that analysis is in dispute, and data on this matter differs. Further confusing matters, the data that is available has been produced by organizations with clear stances in the abortion debate. Some of the reports are more than10 years old. They also vary in how they analyze neighborhood demographics — and in how they evaluate the meaning of those demographics.
Although Owens’ original post didn’t mention abortion, she pointed us to data specifically about abortion clinics. (Planned Parenthood has many clinics, not all of which provide abortions.)
While Sanger was a champion of birth control, she was largely opposed to abortion. Planned Parenthood did not begin offering abortion services until 1970, fours years after Sanger died.
Taken together, available data is inconclusive
The original source of Owens’ 79% claim, protectingblacklife.org, features a map of what it says are Planned Parenthood surgical abortion facilities that are located "within walking distance of African American or Hispanic/Latino neighborhoods."
"2010 Census results reveal that Planned Parenthood is targeting minority neighborhoods," it says. "79% of its surgical abortion facilities are located within walking distance of African American or Hispanic/Latino neighborhoods."
An abortion clinic is included on the map if it lies within 2 miles of a census tract with at least a 50% minority population or where the minority population percentage is at least 1.5 times higher than that of the surrounding county.
PolitiFact reached out to the website to get more information about the data it used but didn’t hear back.