Margaret Sanger, the birth control activist who started Planned Parenthood, will have her name nixed from its Manhattan clinic over her links to eugenics, it was announced Tuesday.
Planned Parenthood of Greater New York said it will remove its founder’s name from its Manhattan Health Center and a nearby honorary street sign marking “Margaret Sanger Square.”
The group explained Sanger, who started Planned Parenthood’s predecessor in 1921, also had “harmful connections to the eugenics movement,” whose adherents promoted selective breeding as a means of purportedly improving the human race.
“The removal of Margaret Sanger’s name from our building is both a necessary and overdue step to reckon with our legacy and acknowledge Planned Parenthood’s contributions to historical reproductive harm within communities of color,” said Karen Seltzer, the chair of Planned Parenthood of Greater New York’s board.
“Sanger’s concerns and advocacy for reproductive health have been clearly documented, but so too has her racist legacy,” Ms. Seltzer said in a statement “There is overwhelming evidence for Sanger’s deep belief in eugenic ideology, which runs completely counter to our values at PPGNY. Removing her name is an important step toward representing who we are as an organization and who we serve.”
Sanger, who was born in 1879, opened the nation’s first birth control clinic in Brooklyn in 1916 and founded the American Birth Control League five years later. The group became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942, and she died in 1966.
A spokesperson for the national organization said in a statement that it supported the New York chapter’s decision to remove Sanger’s name, The New York Times reported.
“Planned Parenthood, like many other organizations that have existed for a century or more, is reckoning with our history, and working to address historical inequities to better serve patients and our mission,” said spokeswoman Melanie Roussell Newman, The Times reported.
Additional plans for renaming the clinic will be announced later, PPGNY said in a press release.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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