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Saturday, September 10, 2016

Planned Parenthood’s Ties to Eugenics Go Far Beyond Margaret Sanger

Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger

By Carole Novielli
Live Action News


One of the more frustrating things pro-lifers hear from abortion supporters is the claim that Planned Parenthood has never been about eugenics. It is simply intellectually dishonest as well as a total denial of history to make such a claim. Such was the case recently when MSNBC’s Joy Reid defended Planned Parenthood and cut off a guest who criticized Hillary Clinton because she once admitted that she admired Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger.

[Sanger] began to build the work of the American Birth Control League, and ultimately, of Planned Parenthood. Margaret relied heavily on the men, women, ideas, and resources of the Eugenics movement. Virtually all of the organization’s board members were Eugenicists. Financing for the early projects from the opening of the birth control clinics to the publishing of the revolutionary literature – came from Eugenicists. 


The speakers at the conferences, the authors of the literature and the providers of the services were almost without exception avid Eugenicists. And the international work of Planned Parenthood were originally housed in the offices of the Eugenics Society while the organizations themselves were institutionally intertwined for years.According to author George Grant in his book Grand Illusions: The Legacy of Planned Parenthood:

Sanger was an avowed eugenicist and a member of the American Eugenics Society, and she also proudly spoke to the Ku Klux Klan, something she described in her autobiography…


I accepted an invitation to talk to the women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan…I saw through the door dim figures parading with banners and illuminated crosses…I was escorted to the platform, was introduced, and began to speak…In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered. (Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography, P.366

But, as abortion supporters who view Sanger as a heroine often do, they make the claim that Sanger is dead and therefore we are to simply ignore her Klan interactions, eugenics connections, rants about immigrants, push for forced sterilization and her failed goal of merging with the Eugenics Society.

Today, we are told that Sanger was a product of her day and that her attempt to have the “unfit” sterilized, the “feebleminded” shipped off, or her radical suggestion that couples be forced to get a permit from the state to have children she wrote: 


“No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child, and no man shall have the right to become a father, without a permit for parenthood“ had no lasting impact on the organization she founded, namely, Planned Parenthood.

The fact is that despite the claims of their supporters, not only does Planned Parenthood have a connection to eugenics separate from their founder, but many of Planned Parenthood’s officials were members or leaders of the American Eugenics Society. The following is a very abbreviated list of examples:



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