Margaret Sanger: The Foundress
Planned Parenthood was founded in 1921 by Margaret Sanger. Initially named the Birth Control League of America, its mission was: “To promote eugenic birth selection throughout the United States so that there may be more well-born and fewer ill-born children – a stronger, healthier and more intelligent race.”(1)
Margaret Sanger was one of the main proponents of both the birth control movement and the eugenics movement. Eugenics is the “practice or advocacy of controlled selective breeding of human populations (as by sterilization) to improve the population’s genetic composition.”(2) Eugenics goes even deeper than racism because it claims the right to determine who should live, who should reproduce, and who should die.
She started publishing the Birth Control Review in 1917, which ran until 1940 and was “a haven for racists, eugenicists, and even Nazi writers.”(3) In her articles and speeches, Sanger gave evidence time and again that she considered there to be a close link between birth control and eugenics.
Sanger even claimed that organized acts of charity, along with improved healthcare and sanitary conditions, were cruel and counterproductive to the betterment of the human race because they kept the unfit and “dysgenic” from being naturally selected out, allowing them to reproduce and pollute the human race.
PP Defends Sanger
When confronted with its founder’s racist and eugenic career, Planned Parenthood tries to defend her, saying:
“Her words are taken out of context”
The context of many of Sanger’s more objectionable beliefs and quotes is the Birth Control Review, which had a 24-year run and a total of 5,631 pages of content. The pages of the Birth Control Review are saturated with noxious ideas and statements – eugenic, racist, anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, and so on.
“Most of the material in the Birth Control Review was not written by Margaret Sanger”
This is certainly true, but irrelevant. Sanger wrote a relatively small portion of the total volume of information contained in her journal, yet she still managed to provide several dozen quotes that demand very close scrutiny. She also edited the Birth Control Review from its founding to 1928, and was an officer of the American Birth Control League throughout its entire run, which means that she is responsible for its contents.
“The Birth Control Review does not reflect our current thinking”
No Planned Parenthood spokesperson – at any level – has ever disavowed Margaret Sanger. In fact, for 50+ years, Planned Parenthood gave its annual Margaret Sanger Award to the person that it perceived as most advancing the cause of “reproductive rights.” Up until recently, Planned Parenthood even had a photo album of her life and work on their website.
In recent years, Planned Parenthood has made a show of “reckoning” with Sanger’s eugenic and racist history but without implementing any concrete reforms. Removing her name from an award and the side of a New York abortion facility is optics. That does not reverse or atone for her lasting legacy and influence on the corporation she founded.
Today, Planned Parenthood does everything it can to eliminate the “unfit” of society and to profit off women in crisis pregnancies. It builds abortion facilities in impoverished and ethnic neighborhoods, targets blacks and Hispanics, and worms its way into our schools so that it can increase its client base by corrupting our children.
