Planned Parenthood President and CEO Alexis McGill Johnson recently spoke with a Black influencer about Margaret Sanger's legacy of racism and eugenics, downplaying the seriousness of both. She also failed to acknowledge modern accusations of racism, including from the corporation's own employees.

Planned Parenthood was founded by Margaret Sanger, who was lauded as a hero until recent years, when her racist and eugenicist mindset and actions became inescapable, even for the organization she founded. A landmark New York city facility (now closed) was originally named the Margaret Sanger Center until the organization removed her name from the facility in 2020; Planned Parenthood also used to bestow an annual Margaret Sanger Award, but this has not been awarded since 2015.

Alexis McGill Johnson, a Black woman, was named the permanent president and CEO of Planned Parenthood in 2020, and the organization reluctantly admitted to Sanger's controversial legacy, though much of what was done amounted to lip service and an attempt to either whitewash Sanger's legacy or sweep it under the proverbial rug.

Key Takeaways:

• Alexis McGill Johnson spoke with Black influencer Kahlil Greene on Instagram about Margaret Sanger's legacy of racism and eugenics.

• She downplayed Sanger's views, arguing that while Sanger's actions were wrong, her intentions were good.

• Planned Parenthood has been steeped in this same mindset from its founding, and it continues to be accused of racist practices today.

The Details:

Influencer Kahlil Greene posted a snippet of his interview with Johnson on his Instagram page, in a reel sponsored by Planned Parenthood.

He captioned it, "How does Planned Parenthood reckon with its beginnings and founder? I sat down with the CEO of Planned Parenthood Action Fund [Alexis McGill Johnson], to talk about the importance of learning from history and how they’ve moved forward."

However, Johnson's response was to largely downplay Sanger's actions and seemingly argue that, while Sanger's actions were wrong, her intentions were good — and that today, the organization has left its historical racism behind it:

"I have no idea what was in Margaret Sanger's heart. That's not really, one way or the other, of importance, right? Because you can have very well-meaning people or people who purport to believe in equality or egalitarianism still engaging in practices that are blatantly racist or discriminatory at best. And I think that's what I saw unpacking some of the history of Margaret Sanger, right? 

She did have tactics and beliefs that were rooted in eugenics. Many Black leaders at the time also held some of those beliefs, but that does not justify the fact that they existed and her participation in them. 

She did recommend or was an advisor to studies around women living in Puerto Rico related to sterilization — again, you know, a practice at the time does not justify that. And I think we needed to call that out and actually name that, you know, she created some very real harms, and then raise the question of what is it that we need to do as an organization to move forward, right?

The work that we as leaders, a multiracial group of leaders of this entire federation, that serves a multiracial group of patients, that we will become strong only to the extent that we do our own work, to ensure that every single patient, regardless of their race, documentation status, their income status, their language speaking, their sexual identity, deserves the best high quality care in the world. And we can't do that until we unpack our own biases as it relates to that. 

So that was the impetus of doing that. It wasn't just to kind of attack Margaret Sanger and be like, OK, we did that. It was to ask the question of, who do we want to be over the next century, and how are we going to ensure that the lessons that we draw from her behaviors are put into the appropriate context, and force us to behave differently for the future generation."

The Backstory:

In a 2020 series of tweets, Planned Parenthood said:

Access to health care and freedom from violence are reproductive justice issues. We’re proud to stand in solidarity with our partners in the Reproductive Justice movement, but we must also acknowledge our own racist history.

Our commitments to you are to:
→ Reckon publicly with our own racist history.
→ Improve the delivery of our health care by addressing and correcting implicit bias.
→ Step back to create space for Black organizations and leaders organizing in this moment.

The question is, what, exactly, is the racist history of Planned Parenthood — and did they actually reckon with it? Based on Johnson's comments six years later, this remains a valid question.

As the pro-life movement has been pointing out for years, Sanger has a disturbing legacy. As Live Action News previously reported:

In 1926, as Live Action News has previously detailed, Margaret Sanger met with the women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan at the group’s request, entertaining additional invitations, according to her own report of the meeting. The event took place in Silver Lake, New Jersey, and Sanger described in it in her autobiography:

I accepted an invitation to talk to the women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan…. I saw through the door dim figures parading with banners and illuminated crosses…. I was escorted to the platform, was introduced, and began to speak…. In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered. (Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography, P.366)

Sanger called that event “one of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing.”

Then, in 1934, Sanger suggested that couples apply for a governmental “license” to have children.

Just five years later, in 1939, Sanger created her “Negro Project,” as described in a letter she penned to Clarence Gamble regarding her desire to use Black ministers in furthering her organization’s agenda. “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population,” she said, and if it did, these ministers could “straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

Sanger populated her board with known eugenicists and racists, like the aforementioned Gamble and Lothrop Stoddard, the latter of whom was an outspoken white supremacist and member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Gamble, a eugenicist, was the heir to the Procter and Gamble fortune, and received $1 million for his 21st birthday in 1914. He often used Procter and Gamble stock to promote birth control, abortion, and eugenics, and also founded Pathfinder International to promote population control under the auspices of "reproductive health" in places like Africa and South Asia.

Stoddard and Gamble both wanted to limit the population growth of certain people groups.

In addition to these men, Sanger worked with Gregory Pincus to create the birth control pill. Pincus used Puerto Rico to test the pill in the midst of a population boom, while many of the people there lived in poverty. Before that, the birth control pill was tested on mentally ill women at the Worcester State Hospital. After the women took the pill, the doctors sliced into the women's uteruses to see how the pill affected them, despite birth control being "heavily regulated" in the state of Massachusetts at the time.

The women were largely left in the dark about what was to happen to them.

As Gabriela Soto Laveaga, a professor of the history of science at Harvard, commented, “The regulations were more lax, but also you had this belief that some people could be experimented on: the ‘feeble-minded,’ people of color, the poor.” History.com notes in an article written in 2018 and last updated in 2025:

In the eyes of Pincus and Sanger, Puerto Rico was the perfect place. At the time, it was in the midst of a population boom, and poverty was rampant. It was also home to birth control clinics that had once been funded by the U.S. government under New Deal programs. Now, Procter & Gamble heir and American eugenicist Clarence Gamble funded and ran many himself.

Gamble believed that Puerto Ricans and others living in poverty should be wiped out to make room for more “fit” members of the population, and birth control was part of that vision.

And as Erin Blakemore further explained for History.com, “Women who took the drug knew that it prevented pregnancy, but had no idea it was experimental or even that they were participating in a clinical trial. They weren’t given safety information about the product, either… and women experienced serious side effects like blood clots and nausea.”

Women who reported experiencing side effects were dismissed as “unreliable.”

Reality Check:

While Johnson paints a picture of an organization that has "moved forward," Planned Parenthood still grapples with allegations of racism today, including from its own employees.

Nicole Moore, who previously worked for Planned Parenthood, sued the abortion business in 2022, alleging "structural racism." Moore claimed:

While Planned Parenthood has publicly boasted its commitment to racial equality, the organization – whose tagline is ‘Care. No matter what’ – has blatantly ignored reports by dozens of its Black employees of systemic unequal hiring and promotion, more work for lower pay, overt hostility, and trafficking in stereotypes by leadership.

Instead of addressing the issues, Planned Parenthood has doubled down by punishing employees of color who dare to speak up, pretextually disciplining them and creating working conditions so intolerable that they are effectively forced to leave.

In July 2020, hundreds of current and former Planned Parenthood of Greater New York (PPGNY) employees signed an open letter, which claimed the abortion organization was “founded by a racist, white woman” and had a “present steeped in white supremacy" in which Black employees faced discrimination on a regular basis.

When the PPGNY CEO Laura McQuade was fired, the person hired as the affiliate's COO filed a lawsuit of his own, with the lawsuit noting, "... [T]he reality is that Planned Parenthood continues to be run by people who are openly hostile to racial minorities, the disabled, older workers and those who complain about discriminatory practices.”

An internal audit also confirmed that Planned Parenthood Federation of America has a racism problem — not just at one affiliate, but nationwide.

Also in 2020, 26 Planned Parenthood staffers from multiple affiliates accused Planned Parenthood of “open racism” and preferential treatment of white employees over staffers of color.

They alleged that they had been “berated and belittled by their bosses,” held back from promotions, and were “unable to move up within the organization, while their white colleagues were promoted,” Buzzfeed reported.

Ultimately, over two dozen lawsuits have been filed by former employees alleging systemic racism.

Planned Parenthood of Illinois was also fined $500k for alleged racial discrimination, as recently as March of 2026.

The Bottom Line:

Margaret Sanger wasn't a saintly woman who just wanted to help people but had a pesky little eugenicist view (which, by the way, Black people allegedly held too, according to Johnson).

Racism, eugenics, and discrimination were a key element in the founding of Planned Parenthood, and it doesn't appear to have left them in the past.