In Bashing Planned Parenthood, Herman Cain Gets His Facts All Wrong

"Margaret Sanger's own words -- she didn't use the word 'genocide,' but she did talk about preventing the increasing number of poor blacks in this country by preventing black babies from being born," he repeated to "Face the Nation" host Bob Schieffer on CBS on Sunday.

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PolitiFact.com took Cain up on his challenge to "check my history" and rated it "pants on fire" -- a designation reserved for statements that are not only inaccurate but "make a ridiculous claim."

His history hasn't become any truer in the intervening months, and when he repeated his allegations, The Washington Post's "Fact Checker" reporter, Glenn Kessler, debunked them once again, giving Cain four Pinocchios -- the worst possible rating on "Fact Checker."

Here's why Cain deserved those awful ratings.

Most Planned Parenthood Clinics Are in White Communities

Cain's first claim is that 75 percent of Planned Parenthood clinics are located in majority-black areas. That sounds convincing enough -- except the actual number is 9 percent.

(Sound familiar? U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., gave a similarly bogus statistic in April when he said on the Senate floor, "If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood, and that's well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does." The real number is 3 percent, but it's close enough for government work.)

So where did Cain get that 75 percent statistic from? It is possible that he got it from Planned Parenthood spokeswoman Tait Sye's statement to The Washington Post that 73 percent of Planned Parenthood clinics are located in rural or high-need areas, defined as areas with "too few primary care providers, high infant mortality, high poverty and/or high elderly population."

But since when is "rural" or "high-need" synonymous with majority-black? In truth, most of those rural and high-need communities are predominantly white.

Of all the abortion clinics in the United States -- both Planned Parenthood clinics and any other facility that provides 400 or more abortions per year -- 63 percent are located in majority-white neighborhoods, 12 percent in majority-Hispanic neighborhoods, 9 percent in majority-black neighborhoods and 15 percent in neighborhoods where no one racial or ethnic group is in the majority, according to a Guttmacher Institute study.