Planned Parenthood draws controversy for saying it's safer for black women to abort than give birth

Planned Parenthood sparked controversy on Tuesday after the abortion provider claimed in a tweet that it is "statistically safer" for a black woman in the U.S. to have an abortion than give birth to a baby.

"If you're a Black woman in America, it's statistically safer to have an abortion than to carry a pregnancy to term or give birth #ScaryStats," Planned Parenthood Black Community wrote on Twitter.

"Between 1998-2015, 16.1mil women accessed abortion care, 108 died. Btwn 2011–'13, BW accounted for 43.5 deaths of every 100,000 live births," the group added, citing CDC data showing black women having the highest maternal mortality rates in the country.

Some critics have described the tweet as "vile," while others suggested that the organization is targeting advocating eugenics.

"Disgusting. To encourage ppl like me to end our future children's lives instead of empowering us to grow healthy human beings. Vile," wrote Antonia Okafor, political commentator and CEO and co-founder of the #emPOWERed movement.

"Planned Parenthood now DIRECTLY targeting unborn Black American children. Just like their founder white supremacist eugenicist M. Sanger," Sebastian Gorka, former special assistant to President Donald Trump, wrote on Tuesday.

Critics have contended that Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was a "eugenics enthusiast" who saw her organization as a way to control the population. The controversy surrounding Sanger has been said to be driven by a letter she wrote in 1939, in which she suggested that preachers can help tamp down suspicions about the organization's work.

"We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members," she stated in the letter, according to The Christian Post.

Planned Parenthood and its supporters have acknowledged that Sanger may have supported some eugenicists ideas, but they asserted that her main argument for Planned Parenthood's services was not eugenics, but rather to give the people the choice to have the children they wanted.

Some members of the African American community have characterized Planned Parenthood's advocacy for abortion access in cities as being "black genocide."

A 2010 census has indicated that 79 percent of the Planned Parenthood's surgical abortion facilities are located within walking distance of black or Hispanic neighborhood, while data from the Alan Guttmacher Institute has shown that about 30 percent of all abortions are performed on black women, with another 25 percent performed on Hispanic women.

Breitbart News reported that 18 million of 59 million abortions that have been performed in the U.S. since the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 was on black unborn babies.