Margaret Sanger’s Ghost: Planned Parenthood Terminates More Black Lives Than Any Other Demographic

Let me tell you about a woman who believed that certain human beings were weeds — her word, not mine — and who built an institution to pull them out of the earth. Her name was Margaret Sanger, and the institution she founded in 1916 is still operating today, still pulling, still funded by your tax dollars, still defended by the organizations that claim to speak in your name. The institution is Planned Parenthood. And if you are Black in America, the statistics of what it has accomplished in your community are so staggering, so relentless, so disproportionate, that if any other entity produced the same numbers, every civil rights leader in the country would call it exactly what it is: a targeted destruction of Black life. But because this particular destruction comes wrapped in the language of choice and empowerment, because it is funded by the political allies of the civil rights establishment, because the money flows in the right direction and the endorsements follow the money — the silence is absolute. And the silence is killing us.

I am not interested in politeness about this. I am interested in the documented record. I am interested in what Margaret Sanger actually wrote, what she actually said, what the organization she built actually does, and what the numbers actually show. You can decide for yourself what it means. But you cannot decide that the facts are not facts. They are.

The Founder’s Own Words

Margaret Sanger was not a closeted eugenicist. She was a proud one. She served on the board of directors of the American Eugenics Society. She spoke at Ku Klux Klan rallies — a fact she documents herself in her autobiography An Autobiography (1938), writing that she accepted an invitation to speak to the women’s branch of the KKK in Silver Lake, New Jersey, and that the visit was so successful she received “a dozen invitations to speak to similar groups.”

Her publication, The Birth Control Review, which she edited from 1917 to 1938, regularly featured articles by prominent eugenicists. In November 1921, the magazine published “The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda” by Sanger herself, in which she argued that birth control was “the most constructive and necessary of the means to racial health.” In April 1932, she published her “Plan for Peace” in the same journal, which called for the segregation and sterilization of those she deemed “unfit” — including the “illiterate” and the “paupers.”

In her 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization, Sanger wrote explicitly about the “menace” of what she called the “unfit” reproducing. She called for the elimination of “human weeds,” for the cessation of charity because it enabled the “defective and diseased” to breed, and for a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted.

“Those least fit to carry on the race are increasing most rapidly. Funds that should be used to raise the standard of our civilization are diverted to the maintenance of those who should never have been born.” — Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization (1922), Chapter 8

The Negro Project

In 1939, Sanger launched what she called “The Negro Project” — a campaign to bring birth control services to Southern Black communities. The project’s stated goal was to reduce the Black birth rate. Sanger sought the cooperation of Black ministers and community leaders, not because she valued their input, but because she understood the strategic necessity of a Black face on a white agenda. In a December 1939 letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble, heir to the Procter & Gamble fortune and a fellow eugenicist, Sanger wrote the sentence that has haunted her legacy ever since:

“We do not want 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.” — Margaret Sanger, letter to Dr. Clarence J. Gamble, December 10, 1939

Planned Parenthood’s defenders have spent decades trying to recontextualize this sentence. They say Sanger was merely expressing concern about misperception. Read the letter yourself. It is available in the Smith College archives. Read the full context of the Negro Project. Read the proposal documents, which describe Black people in the South as a population that “breeds carelessly and disastrously.” Decide for yourself whether this was a woman worried about misperception or a woman managing public relations for a campaign whose aims were exactly what the sentence describes.

What is not debatable is this: the Negro Project was designed, from its inception, to reduce the number of Black children born in America. That was its purpose. That was its funding rationale. That was its operational goal. And the institution that grew from it is still operating, still in the same communities, still producing the same result — at a scale that Margaret Sanger could not have dreamed of.

The Modern Numbers

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publishes annual abortion surveillance data. The numbers are not ambiguous. They are not open to interpretation. They are the most devastating indictment of any institution operating in the Black community today.

Black women have abortions at 3.5 times the rate of white women. According to the CDC’s most recent Abortion Surveillance report, Black women account for approximately 33 percent of all abortions performed in the United States — while Black Americans constitute approximately 13 percent of the total population. In raw numbers, this means that abortion terminates more Black lives than heart disease, cancer, accidents, HIV, and homicide combined.

In New York City, the numbers cross a threshold that should stop every conversation in the room. According to the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s Vital Statistics reports, in multiple recent years more Black babies were aborted than were born alive. In 2018, there were 25,889 Black non-Hispanic live births and 23,116 Black non-Hispanic abortions in New York City. In several prior years, the abortion number exceeded the live birth number. For every 1,000 Black babies born alive in New York City, approximately 893 were aborted.

Read those numbers again. Let them settle. In the most progressive city in the most progressive state in America, the rate of Black termination is approaching one for one. For every Black child who draws breath, another does not — and the institution facilitating this result is celebrated by the civil rights establishment as a guardian of freedom.

The Geography of Targeting

In 2012, the Protecting Black Life initiative — a project documenting the locations of abortion facilities relative to minority communities — published a comprehensive mapping analysis of Planned Parenthood surgical abortion facilities in the United States. Their finding: 79 percent of Planned Parenthood’s surgical abortion facilities are located within walking distance of African American or Hispanic neighborhoods.

Consider what this means. If a fast-food chain placed 79 percent of its locations in minority neighborhoods, public health advocates would call it predatory targeting. If a payday lending operation concentrated its offices at this rate in communities of color, the NAACP would demand investigation. If a tobacco company distributed its products at this geographic concentration in Black neighborhoods, the Congressional Black Caucus would hold hearings. But when the institution performing this targeting is Planned Parenthood, the response from the civil rights establishment is not investigation. It is not outrage. It is endorsement.

Why? Follow the money.

The Funding and the Silence

Planned Parenthood’s political action committees and affiliated organizations contribute millions of dollars each election cycle to political campaigns. According to OpenSecrets (formerly the Center for Responsive Politics), Planned Parenthood’s political spending in the 2020 election cycle exceeded $45 million, virtually all of it directed to Democratic candidates and progressive organizations — the same candidates and organizations that receive the near-universal endorsement of established civil rights groups.

The financial architecture is elegant in its simplicity. Planned Parenthood funds the politicians. The politicians fund Planned Parenthood — the organization receives more than $600 million annually in government funding, primarily through Medicaid reimbursements. The civil rights organizations endorse the politicians. The politicians protect Planned Parenthood from scrutiny. And the circle closes, seamless, lubricated by money, insulated by endorsements, defended by an establishment whose loyalty to its donors exceeds its loyalty to the community it claims to represent.

Every major civil rights organization in America — the NAACP, the National Urban League, the Congressional Black Caucus — defends Planned Parenthood. Not one of them has publicly asked the question that the data demands: why does an institution founded by a eugenicist, placed disproportionately in Black neighborhoods, producing the termination of Black life at rates that exceed every other demographic, enjoy the protection of every organization that claims to advocate for Black life?

The Voices That Will Not Be Silenced

Not everyone has accepted the silence. Dr. Alveda King, the niece of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the daughter of civil rights activist A.D. King, has spent decades speaking against what she calls “the great deception.” King has argued publicly and repeatedly that her uncle’s vision of justice is incompatible with an institution that disproportionately eliminates Black children. She has pointed out that Margaret Sanger’s 1966 posthumous receipt of the Planned Parenthood “Margaret Sanger Award” — named after the founder herself — was also given to Martin Luther King Jr. in 1966, a fact that Planned Parenthood has used for decades to claim his endorsement, even though King never spoke publicly in support of abortion and the award was accepted on his behalf by his wife, Coretta Scott King, for his work on family planning broadly defined.

The late Dr. Mildred Fay Jefferson, the first Black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School, spent decades fighting Planned Parenthood’s presence in minority communities. She served as president of the National Right to Life Committee and argued, with the precision of a surgeon and the fury of a prophet, that the targeting of Black communities with abortion services was the continuation of the eugenics movement by other means.

These voices exist. They are documented. They are credentialed. They are ignored — not because their arguments lack merit, but because their arguments threaten the financial and political infrastructure that benefits from the silence.

The Question That Must Be Asked

Since the legalization of abortion in 1973 with Roe v. Wade, an estimated 20 million Black pregnancies have been terminated in the United States. Twenty million. To place that number in context: the entire Black population of the United States in 1960 was 18.9 million. The abortion industry has eliminated a number of Black lives that exceeds the total Black population of America at the dawn of the civil rights movement.

Every institution, every organization, every leader that defends the status quo must answer this question: if Margaret Sanger could see the current numbers — the disproportionate termination rates, the strategic facility placement, the elimination of Black life at a pace that exceeds every other demographic in America — would she be horrified, or would she be satisfied?

Read her writings. Read the Negro Project proposal. Read the letter to Clarence Gamble. Read the plan for peace. Read the language about weeds and the unfit and the menace of the feebleminded. And then look at the numbers. The CDC numbers. The New York City numbers. The geographic mapping data. The funding flows. The endorsements.

And ask yourself whether what is happening is an accident or a fulfillment.

The Complicity of Consent

I need to say this plainly, because the alternative is dishonesty, and dishonesty is what got us here. The civil rights establishment has not merely failed to oppose the disproportionate termination of Black life. It has actively facilitated it. It has endorsed the institution that performs it. It has attacked the Black voices that question it. It has accepted the funding that buys its silence. And it has done all of this while wearing the mantle of Black advocacy, while claiming the legacy of Dr. King, while invoking the language of justice and freedom and empowerment to defend an outcome that would have been recognized as catastrophe by every generation of Black leaders that preceded this one.

Frederick Douglass escaped slavery so that Black people could live free. Harriet Tubman risked her life so that Black people could live at all. Ida B. Wells fought lynching because every Black life taken was an abomination. Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of a day when Black children would be judged by the content of their character — a dream that presupposes those children being born.

And now, in the name of the movement these giants built, the establishment they left behind defends an institution that terminates Black life at a rate that dwarfs every other threat to Black existence in America. Not because the data supports it. Not because the history justifies it. Not because the outcomes warrant it. Because the money demands it.

James Baldwin wrote that “people who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.” The reality is the CDC data. The reality is the New York City vital statistics. The reality is the facility mapping. The reality is the founder’s own letters, in her own handwriting, in a college archive in Massachusetts, available for anyone to read who has the courage to look.

“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” — James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (1955)

Margaret Sanger built a machine. She aimed it at the Black community. She wrapped it in the language of liberation. She recruited Black leaders to sell it. And then she wrote a letter warning that no one should find out the real purpose. Eighty-seven years later, the machine is still running. The language is still liberation. The leaders are still selling. And the numbers — the merciless, documented, undeniable numbers — tell you everything you need to know about whose vision is being fulfilled.

The founder’s ghost does not haunt this institution. It runs it. And the consent of the community it targets is the most bitter triumph of all — because Margaret Sanger understood, in 1939, that the most effective way to eliminate a people is to convince them they are eliminating themselves by choice.