Reckoning With The Feminist, Eugenicist Founder Of Planned Parenthood

Margaret Sanger is a walking contradiction.

The founder of the birth control movement spent his life arguing that women’s liberation was based on their ability to control their own reproduction. “No woman can call herself free until she can choose whether she will be a mother or not,” she wrote in 1919. At the same time, she bought into the ideology of eugenics — the belief that genetics could be improved through selective breeding — and supported the sterilization of those deemed unfit to reproduce. In other words, she believed that the choice to become a mother was reserved only for those deemed worthy by society, a judgment that was inherently shaped by the racism and prejudice of her contemporaries against people with disabilities.

Sanger’s complicated legacy and the long shadow it cast over Planned Parenthood, the organization she founded, are now under the microscope.

Last week, the larger New York chapter of Planned Parenthood (PPGNY) announced it was renaming a Manhattan building that bears his name. Removing Sanger’s name is “both a necessary and overdue step to consider our legacy and recognize Planned Parenthood’s contributions to historical reproductive harm within communities of color,” said Karen Seltzer, board chair at PPGNY, in a statement. “Margaret Sanger’s concerns and advocacy for reproductive health are well documented, but so is her racist legacy.”

The national organization, which supports the PPGNY decision, said it is also embarking on a historical self-examination, examining Sanger’s place in its origin story as part of a larger reckoning around institutional racism in its health centers.

Sanger’s rejection comes amid an electrifying movement for racial justice that has brought new scrutiny to once-revered historical figures, monuments and institutions. In a short time, the country witnessed marks of the statues broke, a football team change its racist name, and NASCAR banned the Confederate flag. Progressive heroes with troubled pasts, like Sanger, were not spared. Her groundbreaking work ultimately led to reproductive health for millions of women, but her association with eugenics also shaped how Planned Parenthood serves Black women today.

HuffPost spoke with scholars who have studied Sanger to understand how she went from advocating for women’s reproductive freedom to embracing an ideology inextricably linked to racism.

Sanger, who trained as a nurse, opened a first birth control clinic in the country in 1916, at a time when both birth control and abortion were illegal. He was arrested almost immediately. Undeterred, he went on to found the American Birth Control League, the predecessor to Planned Parenthood. Her work was based on the belief that women had a fundamental right to control their own reproduction, a radical idea at the time. “Enforced motherhood is the most complete denial of a woman’s right to life and liberty,” he wrote in an essay.

However, in the 1920s and ’30s, Sanger began to align with the then widely supported eugenics movement, which argued that humanity could be improved by encouraging people with positive traits such as intelligence and hard work to reproduce. Sanger believed that birth control, in addition to freeing women from unwanted pregnancies, would also help improve society.

Scholars such as Ellen Chesler, who wrote “Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America,” have argued that she adopted the language of the eugenics movement to bolster the legitimacy of her ideas.

“[H]Today, eugenics has acquired a level of respectability that birth control did not,” he wrote in a 2010 afterword to his book. Nobody wants to talk about women’s sexual freedom; the policies to encourage public improvement is a better sell.

In an interview with HuffPost, Chesler argued that Sanger held racist beliefs, or equated the ability to reproduce with any particular ethnicity or race. Sanger thought women should have fewer children, Chesler said. But he added that Sanger supported “negative eugenics,” which refers to efforts designed to reduce undesirable traits in people. He promotes sterilization for people with hereditary disabilities, seeing them as threats to the gene pool.

“His views are so unsupported in that respect, in modern times, but they were so widely held in the 1920s and ’30s that it’s hard to judge him entirely for them,” Chesler said.

Historian Linda Gordon, who wrote about Sanger in her 1976 book, “Woman’s Body, Woman’s Rights: The History of Birth Control Politics in America,” said the crusader was single-mindedly focused on promoting birth control. “In his time eugenics was widely accepted as science, even by some Black leaders,” he wrote on Facebook. “Treating Sanger the way we treat defenders of slavery and segregation doesn’t help us understand the history of racism in this country.”

Whether Sanger’s relationship with eugenicists was born out of necessity or because she shared their underlying ideology, the partnership dramatically changed the birth control conversation, said Dorothy Roberts, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. who wrote about Sanger in his 1997 book, “Killing the Black Body.” From the belief that women should be able to control their ability to conceive to the belief that society also has the right to do that for them through forced sterilization.

“As the movement veered from its radical, feminist origins toward a eugenic agenda, birth control became a tool to protect the poor, immigrants, and Black Americans,” Roberts writes.

Ultimately Sanger was not motivated by racism, Roberts said, although her writings show her to have a paternalistic attitude toward Black people. However, Sanger believed that society’s ills were caused by the reproduction of the poor in society, and that their reproduction should be controlled for the good of humanity. “In a society marked by racial hierarchy, these principles inevitably produce policies designed to reduce Black women’s fertility,” Roberts writes in her book. “Judging who is worthy and who is not, who should reproduce and who should not, embodied the racist ideologies of the time.”

In a call with HuffPost, Roberts said the most damaging legacy of Sanger’s work is linking birth control — a form of liberation — to a coercive plan for population control. Today, Roberts said, some people still promote birth control as a way of solving povertyframing it as a remedy for social problems, rather than a human right to control one’s body.

“That’s what we have to address,” he said, “not just whether Margaret Sanger’s name should remain on the buildings.”

In the past, Planned Parenthood has been reluctant to completely disavow itself from Sanger, in part because anti-abortion groups, both Black and white, have inadvertently invoked her legacy. For years, anti-abortion groups have distorted Sanger’s views, saying she wanted to exterminate the Black race. Many statements attributed to him in anti-abortion literature are either taken out of context or outright made of. However, the conspiracy theory that Planned Parenthood’s real goal was to lower the Black birth rate persisted. Earlier this month, Kanye West told Forbes that he believes Planned Parenthood centers are “put inside cities by white supremacists to do the Devil’s work.” Prominent public figures such as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas there is a false theory that abortion was designed to control the Black population.

Planned Parenthood counters that these claims of racism championed by anti-abortion groups are actually racist in themselves, because they assume that Black women should not have the agency to control their own bodies. .

Sanger’s history has been cynically exploited by abortion foes, said Yoruba Richen, a filmmaker who explored the issue in 2017 documentary among Black anti-abortion activists. “There have been some anti-choice factions that have used his legacy to promote suspicion in the Black community around Planned Parenthood,” he said. “It’s anti-Black women and anti-all women.”

However, reproductive rights groups have not adequately grappled with Sanger’s history, Richen said, giving ammunition to its opponents. Planned Parenthood now has an opportunity to confront what it means to have eugenic ideology tied to its origin story — not as a capitulation to anti-abortion groups, but as a way to view its history through of the lens of race.

Melanie Newman, senior vice president of communications at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said the organization has condemned Sanger’s racist and ableist remarks, and will continue to do so.

In 2016, the organization released a fact-sheet to Sanger who attempted to separate fact from myth. While Planned Parenthood defended her from claims of racism, it acknowledged “fundamental flaws in Sanger’s views.”

Sanger’s intent was never to promote Black genocide, Newman said in a statement to HuffPost, despite claims to the contrary. “Anti-abortion opponents have perpetuated lies about her heritage for years that hurt and harm Black women, hindering their ability to receive care,” she said. “At Planned Parenthood, we stand for and trust Black women to make their own decisions. Most importantly, we are committed to institutional and structural change that will allow us to work toward truly achieving reproductive freedom for everyone.”