The Troubled History of Planned Parenthood

It's no secret that Planned Parenthood occupies a complex position in our society. The organization is a troubled fixture even for feminists as simultaneously one of the largest providers of lifesaving reproductive healthcare and a group with a deeply racist past. Since Planned Parenthood has been around for over 105 years now, this blog post isn’t exactly a complete history, but rather highlights snippets that help us understand its foundation, and knowing the organization’s history allows us to better critically and thoughtfully engage with its work today.

To know the history of Planned Parenthood, it’s imperative to know the name Margaret Sanger. Born in 1879, Sanger grew up in Corning, New York with 10 siblings and a mother who suffered seven miscarriages and several other health issues throughout her pregnancies. Sanger was inspired to become a nurse, and eventually traveled to Europe to study birth control methods when contraceptive education was illegal in the United States. In 1916, she opened the first U.S. birth control clinic in Brooklyn with her sister Ethel Byrne and their friend Fania Mindell, a feminist activist & theater actress. The police shut the clinic down only 9 days later and all three of them were incarcerated for sharing birth control information (read more on PP’s website: https://www.plannedparenthood.org/about-us/who-we-are/our-history). 

Sanger’s failed first clinic sparked the beginning of her career in U.S. birth control education (and implementation). In 1923, she opened a research bureau in Manhattan to study birth control methods and devices given to American women, and in the same year created the American Birth Control League to study population growth and other relevant global impacts. These two organizations eventually became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America as we know it today. 

When you read about Sanger’s work it’s easy to think, “Wow, what a kickass woman.” While she is a huge reason anyone has access to birth control and family planning resources, Sanger was really only a hero to white, able-bodied America. Planned Parenthood opened in 1916, when eugenics was still an extremely popular movement with widespread public support during WWI. Sanger was among those who openly supported the notion that an essential part of liberating women from enforced motherhood was to encourage (or force) certain women not to reproduce. This eugenicist logic promoted that disabled, queer, poor, people of color needed to be eliminated from the U.S., and that contraception and abortions were a useful form of genocidal population control. 

Sanger particularly believed in ableist eugenics and was vocal about eliminating “the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective” (read her full letter here: https://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/webedition/app/documents/show.php?sangerDoc=238946.xml). Moreover, anyone in support of eugenics thinking at the time was invested in the myth of white superiority (and specifically Black inferiority). More than now, constructions of race were entangled with ideas of disability -- so even though Sanger wasn’t as vocal about using eugenics as a form of racial purity, she was still promoting a deeply racist movement. 

Historians argue different positions on how Sanger’s view of race played into her support of eugenics. There is evidence of her corresponding with Black ministers in the South to promote reproductive education through churches (check out this link to learn more: https://time.com/4081760/margaret-sanger-history-eugenics/). There is also speculation that she only addressed those Black ministers as an indirect means for slowing down Black population growth in order to reduce or even eliminate Black communities. In any case, the person who has gone down in history as the reproductive hero of the 20th century was an ableist white supremacist. Sanger is the essence of a white feminist: by falsely claiming to fight for all women, she dangerously reproduced the patriarchy’s pattern of abuse.

Conservatives have long used Sanger’s story in support of their agenda to destroy Planned Parenthood and everything that has come to be associated with its name (i.e. body autonomy, reproductive freedom, sex education, STD/STI prevention, abortion, birth control). Sanger’s support of eugenics caused an early prioritization of white women gaining body autonomy and reproductive healthcare before anyone else in need of reproductive health services. There’s no question that the struggles Planned Parenthood faces today, particularly with clinic locations being closest to wealthier communities, are deeply rooted in Sanger’s white supremacy and elitism. 

The controversial history attached to Planned Parenthood doesn’t end in the early 20th Century. Just fast forward to 1948 when Planned Parenthood was at the forefront of contraceptive invention, namely the development of birth control pills. Researchers enlisted to develop the pill tested the medication specifically on poor Puerto Rican women (which Sanger was rumored to encourage because of her desire to eliminate populations of people in poverty) without their knowledge or consent. These researchers targeted women based on class status, race, and inability to self-advocate due to language barriers; it was an extreme human rights offense. Ultimately, nearly one-third of Puerto Rican women were sterilized from these tests and left with both short- and long-term effects. The short-term effects included dizziness, vomiting, and cramps (learn more here: https://www.plannedparenthood.org/about-us/who-we-are/our-history). The long-term effects included fertility issues and hysterectomies, among other issues (learn more here: https://www.panoramas.pitt.edu/health-and-society/dark-history-forced-sterilization-latina-women).

The pill became widely available to wealthy, white women (*eye roll*) and eventually to communities of color and women of different class statuses. The widespread access to birth control, and eventually abortion and sex education to follow, was an extremely slow process. This is thanks to all of the white folks with political power setting up barriers in any way possible, namely state-wide bans or religious-based philosophies turned enforced law. If you want to look up some interesting court cases and laws affiliated with Planned Parenthood’s services, I recommend Griswold v. Connecticut (1965, birth control legalization), Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972, contraceptives & unmarried couples), Roe v. Wade (1973, abortion legalization), Title X (1970, family planning), the Hyde Amendment (1976, abortion access). With these famous court cases and political organizing of the 70s, reproductive freedom and education became top-of-mind across the country. Women were (slowly) starting to gain more social power, and issues of gender and sexuality were no longer so hush-hush.

Planned Parenthood continued to establish itself as the leader in sex education and family planning during the 80s and 90s, which brought new fights for the reproductive rights movement. Planned Parenthood was heavily involved in HIV & AIDS testing across the country, as well as testing new forms of birth control, including Plan B. Planned Parenthood was also one of the first organizations to support trans folks in need of hormone replacement therapy, and led the fight against the global gag rule, a law put in place to prevent other countries from receiving the same abortion and other reproductive care American people could receive.

As you can imagine, Planned Parenthood’s foundation in eugenics-influenced education, research, testing, and care has not magically faded away throughout time. With a history of serving white, wealthy women tracing to the very beginning, Planned Parenthood still struggles to serve communities who need access to its services the most. White, wealthy, cis women have been the face of Planned Parenthood on all fronts: they are who we remember as the heroes who rallied behind the fight for reproductive freedom, the creators and providers of Planned Parenthood’s care, and the reference point for who Planned Parenthood should be caring for. But these women have failed to acknowledge the relationships between reproductive health, climate justice, racial justice, and other intersectional issues -- that has been the work of the people sidelined, or worse targeted, by Planned Parenthood’s entanglement with white supremacy.

It’s still important to remember that people, particularly women, of different backgrounds suffered in order to get Planned Parenthood where it is today: Black people faced the threat of eugenics, state-sanctioned violence against people attending rallies for reproductive freedom, Puerto Rican women faced non-consensual sterilization, other lower-class communities were targeted for various reproductive medical research, and non-white folks were erased from the history of the reproductive justice movement, among other examples. Planned Parenthood’s history is ugly -- but the organization still serves a purpose in our fight today.


Uterish recognizes and considers this history as part of our positioning as a reproductive justice organization that donates our proceeds to Planned Parenthood. We also recognize that a direct result of Planned Parenthood’s troubling climb to the place it now occupies also means that it is uniquely positioned to provide access to reproductive education, research, medicine, and direct health services. Uterish is a reproductive justice organization, and as such, Planned Parenthood is not our beacon of hope nor where we look for political inspiration -- we have Sister Song and other BIPOC organizations for that. Instead, Planned Parenthood is something we support in order to directly fund reproductive healthcare services that are, sadly, barely accessible otherwise.

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