In a strangely revealing move, Planned Parenthood of Greater New York announced on July 21 that it would strike the name of Margaret Sanger, one of Planned Parenthood’s original founders, from its health center in Manhattan, reports Forbes.
The group said Sanger’s name is being expunged because of her “harmful connections to the eugenics movement.” That is, Sanger espoused killing fetuses to better the human race, instead of merely to let women engage more freely in sex.
The clinic will now be known simply as the Manhattan Health Center, PPGNY said. There was no indication that the center would stop killing babies, or even African-American babies.
Sanger helped open the country’s first birth control clinic in 1916 and was a founder of Planned Parenthood. She is generally regarded as a feminist, but she has been more recently vilified for her support of eugenics, which is “selective breeding, often targeted at poor people, those with disabilities, immigrants and people of color,” according to The New York Times.
Sanger wrote “the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective,” in a 1921 letter, and spoke about birth control to Ku Klux Klan members five years later, the New York Times once reported.
Conservative groups have cited Sanger’s ties to the eugenics movement to condemn Planned Parenthood and the abortions it provides, one of the more recent opposing voices being Kanye West, who told Forbes this month that “Planned Parenthoods have been placed inside cities by white supremacists to do the Devil’s work.”
