Planned Parenthood's Margeret Sanger reckoning

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We need to talk about Margaret Sanger.

For the 11 years that I’ve been involved with Planned Parenthood, founded by Sanger, her legacy on race has been debated. Sanger, a nurse, opened the nation’s first birth control clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in 1916, and dedicated her life to promoting birth control to improve women’s lives. But was she, or was she not, racist?

It’s a question that we’ve tried to avoid, but we no longer can. We must reckon with it.

Up until now, Planned Parenthood has failed to own the impact of our founder’s actions. We have defended Sanger as a protector of bodily autonomy and self-determination, while excusing her association with white supremacist groups and eugenics as an unfortunate “product of her time.” Until recently, we have hidden behind the assertion that her beliefs were the norm for people of her class and era, always being sure to name her work alongside that of W.E.B. Dubois and other Black freedom fighters. But the facts are complicated.

Sanger spoke to the women’s auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan at a rally in New Jersey to generate support for birth control. And even though she eventually distanced herself from the eugenics movement because of its hard turn to explicit racism, she endorsed the Supreme Court’s 1927 decision in Buck v. Bell, which allowed states to sterilize people deemed “unfit” without their consent and sometimes without their knowledge — a ruling that led to the sterilization of tens of thousands of people in the 20th century.

The first human trials of the birth control pill — a project that was Sanger’s passion later in her life — were conducted with her backing in Puerto Rico, where as many as 1,500 women were not told that the drug was experimental or that they might experience dangerous side effects.

We don’t know what was in Sanger’s heart, and we don’t need to in order to condemn her harmful choices. What we have is a history of focusing on white womanhood relentlessly. Whether our founder was a racist is not a simple yes or no question. Our reckoning is understanding her full legacy, and its impact. Our reckoning is the work that comes next.

And the first step is making Margaret Sanger less prominent in our present and future. The Planned Parent Federation of America has already renamed awards previously given in her honor, and Planned Parenthood of Greater New York renamed its Manhattan health center in 2020. Other independently managed affiliates may choose to follow.

Sanger remains an influential part of our history and will not be erased, but as we tell the history of Planned Parenthood’s founding, we must fully take responsibility for the harm that Sanger caused to generations of people with disabilities and Black, Latino, Asian-American, and Indigenous people.

Sanger thought birth control would liberate women, and in so many ways it has. According to a University of Michigan study, the availability of the birth control pill is responsible for roughly a third of women’s wage gains since the 1960s. Reassessing Sanger’s history doesn’t negate her feminist fight, but it does tarnish it. In the name of political expedience, she chose to engage white supremacists to further her cause. In doing that, she devalued and dehumanized people of color.

We will no longer make excuses or apologize for Margaret Sanger’s actions. But we can’t simply call her racist, scrub her from our history, and move on. We must examine how we have perpetuated her harms over the last century — as an organization, an institution, and as individuals.

What we don’t want to be, as an organization, is a Karen. You know Karen: She escalates small confrontations because of her own racial anxiety. She calls the manager. She calls the police. She stands with other white parents to maintain school segregation. And then there are the organizational Karens. The groups who show up, assert themselves, and tell you where to march. Those who pursue freedom and fairness, but also leverage their privilege in ways that are dehumanizing.

And sometimes, that’s how Planned Parenthood has acted. By privileging whiteness, we’ve contributed to America harming Black women and other women of color. And when we focus too narrowly on “women’s health,” we have excluded trans and nonbinary people.

As we face relentless attacks on our ability to keep providing sexual and reproductive health care, including abortion, we’ve claimed the mantle of women’s rights, to the exclusion of other causes that women of color and trans people cannot afford to ignore. And when we are rightfully called out by other leaders in the movement for reproductive justice who have pushed us for years to do better, we cry. In doing so, we’re failing in our mission to care for all the communities we serve.

Some might see this as virtue signaling, but Planned Parenthood is taking this work seriously.

Margaret Sanger harmed generations with her beliefs. In our second century, Planned Parenthood has a chance to heal those harms. Reckoning with Margaret Sanger is one thing. We also need to reckon with ourselves.

The wars over so-called "cancel culture" are often cast as a conflict between the left and the right. But more often than not, they are about the left eating its own. One new casualty of "cancellation" by radical social justice activists is a 20th century progressive feminist long reviled by conservatives and admired by liberals: birth control crusader Margaret Sanger.

It is also true that, in her zeal to teach birth control methods to any woman willing to learn, Sanger once addressed a women’s Ku Klux Klan chapter in New Jersey. Shocking? Misguided? Yes. But was Sanger a racist? In fact, as Johnson acknowledges, she eventually distanced herself from the eugenics movement precisely because of its embrace of racism. She also worked with W.E.B. Du Bois, Adam Clayton Powell and other Black civil rights leaders to promote family planning.

Sanger’s readiness, as a white woman, to partner with Black activists makes her much more than a woman of her era; it makes her a woman willing to defy her era’s racial barriers.

Johnson’s text, filled with trendy social justice jargon, ultimately admits that it’s hard to say whether Sanger was racist. Still, it offers a lengthy guilty plea to vague charges such as "focusing on white womanhood," "privileging whiteness," and excluding "trans and nonbinary people." Johnson asserts that Planned Parenthood must "take responsibility for the harm that Sanger caused to generations of people with disabilities and Black, Latino, Asian-American, and Indigenous people" and for supposedly perpetuating these harms.

Just what the "harms" are is never specified. Regarding the alleged focus on white womanhood, Planned Parenthood has a long record of work in low-income minority communities, where its clinics have offered not only abortion and birth control but numerous health services. Many clinics have also provided hormone treatments to transgender people for years.

While Johnson asserts that Planned Parenthood will not "scrub" Sanger from its history, she encourages affiliates to make her "less prominent." That’s a shameful way to treat a woman who, unlike today’s feminists, endured real persecution in her fight for women’s reproductive freedom.

What’s more, this mea culpa is a gift to anti-abortion activists who have long tried to vilify Sanger as a bigot and portray Planned Parenthood’s services to minority women as a covert racist genocide. Now, Planned Parenthood itself seems to agree. What a brilliant move