From Margaret Sanger’s American Birth Control League to today’s abortion industry, Planned Parenthood’s origins raise questions that cannot be erased by changing names.
This weekend marks 110 years since Margaret Sanger opened her first birth control facility in Brooklyn on October 16, 1916. That facility marked the beginning of her movement, but beneath the glossy facade lies a century-long history of eugenics, racism, and systemic killing. Planned Parenthood’s modern image coexists with a documented history involving eugenics and well-established efforts to drive genocidal levels of abortion among vulnerable, low-income populations.
Planned Parenthood itself acknowledges that Sanger embraced eugenics, an ideology that classified certain people as genetically or socially unfit to reproduce. That history matters to our mission to end abortion and defend preborn children as Students for Life of America (SFLA) and Students for Life Action (SFLAction) challenge Planned Parenthood’s access to taxpayer funding.
Three Name Changes, Same Extermination Agenda
The American Birth Control League (ABCL), founded by Margaret Sanger, was a eugenics-driven organization that promoted birth control as a means to ‘purify’ society by suppressing reproduction among those deemed ‘defective’ or ‘unfit.’ Sanger’s own writings consistently advocated for the elimination of ‘defective stocks’ — a framework that she and her contemporaries applied to the poor, the mentally ill, and racial minorities, systematically targeting these populations under the guise of public health.
In her essay "The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda" (1921), she stated: "Birth control is not contraception indiscriminately and thoughtlessly practiced. It means the release and cultivation of the better racial elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extirpation of defective stocks..."
In her book "The Pivot of Civilization" (1922), Sanger argued that providing welfare to the "unfit" was a mistake, stating: "We are paying for, and even submitting to, the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all."
In 1939, ABCL merged with Sanger’s Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau (BCCRB) to form the Birth Control Federation of America (BCFA). The 1939 consolidation of the ABCL and the BCCRB into the BCFA was a deliberate institutional maneuver. Following the 1936 United States v. One Package ruling, which legalized the distribution of contraceptives by physicians, the leadership recognized that overt ideological agitation had reached its limit.
To secure lasting power, the movement systematically sanitized its image, trading the inflammatory rhetoric of street-level radicalism for the clinical authority of the medical establishment. By forming the BCFA, the movement successfully shifted the conversation from "women’s rebellion" to "clinical science." As the Sanger Papers note, this restructuring allowed them to pursue a national policy that was more palatable to political and medical elites who had previously been wary of the movement’s more scandalous early image.
When the BCFA rebranded as Planned Parenthood in 1942, it was not an ideological conversion but a calculated public relations maneuver. For two decades, Sanger and her league had operated openly within the mainstream American eugenics movement, explicitly advocating population control, the elimination of “human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization,” and the compulsory sterilization of those deemed unfit. However, as the horrors of National Socialist race hygiene became undeniable during World War II, the language of overt social engineering and selective breeding transformed from elite dogma into a massive public liability.
To survive, the apparatus of population control required a sanitized veneer. The rebranding neutralized grassroots resistance, paved the way for institutional acceptance, and ultimately laid the groundwork for government subsidies. The name change merely gave a radical, eugenics-driven crusade a respectable mask, easing its transition into the corporate, multibillion-dollar abortion empire operating today.
The Eugenic Roots of Planned Parenthood: A Century of Targeting Minority Communities
Planned Parenthood’s origins are rooted in Sanger’s belief that certain races, particularly Black Americans and people she deemed “unfit,” should be sterilized or aborted to purify society. Sanger’s Negro Project (1939-1942), documented in The Pivot of Civilization, aimed to reduce Black births through “voluntary” sterilization and birth control. Partnering with black pastors, including the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Sr., she enlisted religious leaders to promote her agenda as “healthcare” and “family planning.”
In a December 10, 1939, letter to American physician Clarence Gamble concerning the Negro Project, Sanger wrote, “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population,” while proposing the use of Black ministers to ease community suspicions about the program. Sanger also addressed a women’s auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in 1926. Her willingness to address the KKK serves as a chilling testament to her alignment with a movement that sought to weaponize population management to enforce racial hierarchies.
Sanger also endorsed the Supreme Court’s 1927 Buck v. Bell decision permitting the forced sterilization of people deemed unfit. That decision legitimized forced-sterilization policies that affected tens of thousands of Americans. Organizations with missions similar to Planned Parenthood’s, such as the Indian Health Service, sterilized thousands of Native American women without consent in the 1960s and 1970s. Sanger’s legacy continues. More recently, a 2018 California State Auditor report found that more than 3,000 Latinas were coercively sterilized in California prisons between 2006 and 2010.
According to historian Linda Gordon, author of The Moral Property of Women, Planned Parenthood shifted its focus from explicit eugenics to “reproductive rights” while targeting low-income communities of color with strategically placed facilities.
Planned Parenthood currently operates more than 600 facilities in the United States, disproportionately in minority neighborhoods. A 2020 study by Protecting Black Life found that 79 percent of Planned Parenthood facilities are within walking distance of Black or Hispanic communities. The result: Black women account for only 13 percent of the female population but undergo 38 percent of abortions.
SFLA’s Crusade for Racial Justice and Life: Dismantling the Modern-Day Eugenics Machine
Today, Planned Parenthood continues to disproportionately affect communities of color in low-income neighborhoods while also targeting abortion-seeking women of every race who live in or near those neighborhoods. For this reason, SFLA is spearheading the cause of saving preborn lives and ending abortion in our lifetime.
SFLA has led modern efforts to expose Planned Parenthood’s agenda. Our campaigns highlight how Planned Parenthood’s business model thrives on exploiting vulnerable populations across racial lines under the guise of “choice.” SFLA President Kristan Hawkins has condemned what she describes as Planned Parenthood’s racist past and present, arguing that abortion disproportionately harms Black communities.
For nearly two decades, SFLA has worked to end Planned Parenthood’s taxpayer funding and challenge its influence through nationwide campus activism, protests, advertising, congressional lobbying, and grassroots mobilization.
In 2025 alone, our efforts included more than 100 Life Chain events across 33 states and Washington, D.C.; more than 57,000 petitions delivered to congressional leadership; and a national television and digital campaign that reached nearly 45 million Americans.
Following a temporary federal Medicaid funding restriction enacted in 2025, SFLAction intensified its campaign to permanently defund Planned Parenthood and secure its federal debarment. Debarment is an administrative action that formally excludes an organization from receiving certain federal funds. The campaign included coordinating nearly 40 pro-life organizations in calling for federal investigations and supporting an October 2026 congressional request for greater scrutiny of the abortion vendor’s taxpayer funding.
The Uncomfortable Truth: Defending Planned Parenthood Means Defending Eugenics
Democrats defending Planned Parenthood today must confront its racist origins and ongoing practices. Supporting Planned Parenthood means supporting an organization founded on eugenics principles that it continues to enact under different names and justifications. The parallel is stark: Defending Planned Parenthood means defending systemic racism and the targeting of low-income populations.
As SFLAction mobilizes protests and legislative challenges nationwide, the question remains: Will Democrats finally recognize that their “reproductive rights” icon is a monument to racial cleansing? Or will they continue enabling Planned Parenthood’s modern-day abortion mills, cloaked in progressive rhetoric but rooted in Sanger’s twisted dream of a “pure” society? The blood of millions across races demands an answer.
Nicholas DeSimone is a Press Specialist and Online Editor for Students for Life Action (SFLA), where he works to advance the organization’s national media presence through strategic communications, editorial content, and media relations.