Was Margaret Sanger, the Founder of Planned Parenthood, a Racist Eugenicist?
The Planned Parenthood Federation of America (previously named the American Birth Control League and Birth Control Federation of America) was founded by Margaret Sanger in 1916. Sanger frequently spoke of the need to reduce populations of African-Americans, the handicapped, immigrants, and others she called “human weeds,” “human waste” and “a class of people who never should have been born at all.” It was imperative, she wrote in her 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization, “to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world.” Sanger was founder and editor of Birth Control Review magazine. In 1933, she published an article by Ernst Rudin, Hitler’s director of genetic sterilization and a founder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene, entitled “Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need.” A book called The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, by American Birth Control League board member, Lothrup Stoddard, received a good review in the Birth
