Planned Parenthood: Eugenics and Population Control

Planned Parenthood isn’t just about abortion.

It’s about population control and eugenics— it always has been. Population control advocacy, often based on the 18th-century Malthusian Theory of Population falsely stated there would not be enough food to feed the world’s future population, has led to forced sterilization and abortion on demand.

Eugenics, a discredited and dangerous movement meant to prevent people of certain intelligence, chronic diseases, income level, race and other traits from having children, has been championed by Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and Planned Parenthood.

Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood (PP), made sure her organization would primarily focus on African Americans, Hispanics, the poor, immigrants, those with mental and developmental issues as well as other minority groups. This plan, however, was not put into place out of a sense of empathy, charity or social justice.

Instead, Sanger, who stated,

no more children should be born when the parents, though healthy themselves, find that their children are physically or mentally defective

and advocated to,

keep the doors of immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race,

worked to create an America with segregation, discrimination and systematic abortion targeting these minority groups.

This clientele with children in the womb remains the primary target for PP today. Sanger wrote that

the campaign for Birth Control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical in ideal with the final aims of Eugenics

and wanted to incorporate the goals of eugenicists and population-control activists into PP. This is evident in the content of the notorious Jaffe Memo. Abby Johnson, former PP director and the author of Unplanned wrote:

When I worked at Planned Parenthood, there was something that we were not allowed to talk about. If we didn’t talk about it, then maybe no one else would either. It was called the Jaffe Memo.

In 1969, Frederick Jaffe, then Vice President of PP, sent a memo to Bernard Berelson, head of the Population Council. It included a table of “Proposed Measures to Reduce U.S. Fertility.” achieve population control:

• Restructure the family

• Postpone or avoid marriage

• Alter image of ideal family size

• Encourage increased homosexuality

• Fertility control agents in water supply

• Encourage women to work and provide few child care facilities •

Compulsory abortion of out-of-wedlock pregnancies

• Compulsory sterilization of all who have two children except for a few who would be allowed three

• Confine childbearing to a limited number of adults

• Payments to encourage sterilization

• Payments to encourage contraception

• Payments to encourage abortion

• Abortion and sterilization on demand

Many of these measures have been achieved over the last 50 plus years. Scare tactics, propaganda and public ideologues have convinced people that there is an “overpopulation problem” and that it poses a great threat to humanity. Advocates have brainwashed many into believing that the only way to save humanity or the planet from climate change is to implement these goals. No matter how often and loud they say it, PP has never been about “helping women.” They were founded on and are still today focus on population control and eugenics. It’s no accident that 79% of PP surgical abortion facilities are “located within walking distance of African and/ or Hispanic communities.”

In Sanger’s 1932 speech ironically called, “My Plan for Peace,” she proposed,

[One of] the main objectives of the Population Congress is to… apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.

Sanger as well and many past PP board presidents were members and associates of the American Eugenics Society.

Need more proof of PP’s agenda? Margaret Sanger wrote in a letter to Clarence Gamble, Founder of Pathfinder—a militant organization promoting population control throughout the world—about her “Negro Project”:

“We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. The minister’s work is also important and also he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation [of Eugenicists] as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

Dr. La Verne Tolbert, former New York City PP board member, stated: “During the course of my five-year tenure, we received a lot of literature discussing population control and concern for the growing number of poor people in the United States and developing countries. As a blac woman, I wondered why abortion was more necessary for my ethnic group and why this organization fought so hard to give us this "right" when the rights for better education, better jobs, and better housing, seemed paramount to me.

Taxpayers are forced to support this agenda through the hundreds of millions of dollars the federal government gives to PP every year.

“PP moved into [the African American] community with the abortion killing centers claiming, ‘We’re here to help you. Let’s kill your baby, so you can have a better life,’” Dr. Alveda King, niece of Martin Luther King Jr., said in an interview with Dr. Jerry Newcombe in 2019. “Well, killing our babies doesn’t give us a better life."