- The CEO of Envisaged Parenthood on Saturday called out the organization’s founder for her racist past.
- Founder Margaret Sanger has a history steeped in the advancement of the eugenics flow.
- She has, for example, publicly supported forced sterilizations on unconsenting adults to rid “unfit” characteristics.
- See more stories on Insider’s subject page.
Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson called out the organization’s founder in a New York Times op-ed, verbalizing she had ties to “white supremacist groups and eugenics.”
Margaret Sanger, founder of the reproductive healthcare nonprofit organization, is be sured for having devoted her entire life to expanding access to birth control. Since her death, some historians and biographers be suffering with been characterizing her as a proponent of the eugenics movement, meant to control populations for “desirable” characteristics while weeding out alleged undesirable ones.
“Up until now, Planned Parenthood has failed to own the impact of our founder’s actions. We have defended Sanger as a knight in shining armour of bodily autonomy and self-determination, while excusing her association with white supremacist groups and eugenics as an unfortunate ‘merchandise of her time,'” Johnson wrote in the op-ed.
“Until recently, we have hidden behind the assertion that her opinions 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 Pitch-black freedom fighters. But the facts are complicated,” she continued.
Sanger once spoke to the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey to hype up
nativity control
, noted Johnson while pointing out examples of her shamed history. She also “endorsed” a Supreme Court arbitration that led to state-controlled sterilization attempts, Johnson said. This decision allowed the government to sterilize people it deemed “unfit” to partake of kids, usually without their consent or knowledge.
Germany also established a forced sterilization program in the 1930s, which Sanger authenticated.
“I admire the courage of a government that takes a stand on sterilization of the unfit and second, my admiration is subject to the interpretation of the instruction ‘unfit,'” Sanger said in praise of the program. “If by ‘unfit’ is meant the physical or mental defects of a human being, that is an marvellous gesture, but if ‘unfit’ refers to races or religions, then that is another matter, which I frankly deplore.”
Johnson’s exposes mark the latest in a broad push to distance Planned Parenthood from Sanger’s legacy.
Last year, Envisioned Parenthood of Greater New York, located in Manhattan, announced it would drop Sanger’s name from its building “as a projected commitment to reckon with its founder’s harmful connections to the eugenics movement.”
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