"#Abortion is the KKK's dream come true. It kills more blacks in 3 days than the KKK did ever. #ProLife #tcot"

On Feb. 19, Mississippi State University's anti-abortion student club, Students for Life, retweeted that statement from Personhood Florida's Twitter account (tcot stands for Top Conservatives on Twitter).

Nick Bell, SFL president and a junior majoring in communication, said in an interview that the club is not a political group and does not advocate for Personhood.

Bell, who is white and handles the club's Twitter account, said referencing the KKK is a way to target and bring awareness to the history of Planned Parenthood, which he says wincludes ties to eugenics and race purification.

Eugenics was a movement popular with both conservatives and progressives in the early 20th century: More than 65,000 supposedly "feeble-minded" men and mostly women, of a variety of races, underwent forced sterilization in mental institutions (then called "insane asylums") across the country to keep them from reproducing and supposedly corrupting the gene pool. That included hundreds of victims in Mississippi, including at the Mississippi State Hospital at Whitfield, just outside Jackson, and the Ellisville State School (then called the Mississippi School and Colony for the Feebleminded) in nearby Jones County.

Planned Parenthood's 'Racist' Goal

Margaret Sanger, birth-control pioneer and founder of Planned Parenthood, was a Ku Klux Klan ally, Bell said. He insists that Sanger believed the purpose of birth control and abortion was "to eradicate the black race and the unfit in society." Sanger did, in fact, speak to a group of KKK women in 1926 as documented in her autobiography. She spoke to many groups of women about contraception during her lifetime.

While eugenics was viewed as less controversial than birth control, Sanger sought to make contraceptives available to all women, especially those who could not afford them. A primary difference between eugenics and abortion was that eugenics did not allow the victims freedom to choose whether to have a child, and abortion does allow that choice. Planned Parenthood has promoted the principle that women should have the right to make their reproductive choices since its inception.

Laurie Bertram Roberts, Mississippi state president of the National Organization of Women and a columnist for the Jackson Free Press, said the historical context of Sanger's involvement in eugenics is important in understanding her goals.

"First of all, Margaret Sanger did not work on abortion. She worked on birth control. Context is everything. I will never deny that Margaret Sanger was connected to the eugenics movement," Roberts said. "What they (abortion opponents) never bothered to say is that eugenicists also wanted to limit the birth rate of poor white people and disabled people. It wasn't just black people; it was a whole lot of people they deemed to be unfit."

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Using the KKK to Fight Abortion Rights