 [Washington Examiner] Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson acknowledged that the abortion giant’s founder, Margaret Sanger, was a proponent of eugenics but stopped short of labeling her a "racist."
"We will no longer make excuses or apologize for Margaret Sanger’s actions. But we can’t simply call her racist, scrub her from our history, and move on. We must examine how we have perpetuated her harms over the last century — as an organization, an institution, and as individuals," Johnson wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times on Saturday.
"Up until now, Planned Parenthood has failed to own the impact of our founder's actions. We have defended Sanger as a protector of bodily autonomy and self-determination, while excusing her association with white supremacist groups and eugenics as an unfortunate 'product of her time,'" she wrote. "Until recently, we have hidden behind the assertion that her beliefs were the norm for people of her class and era, always being sure to name her work alongside that of W.E.B. Dubois and other Black freedom fighters. But the facts are complicated."
Sanger founded Planned Parenthood in 1916 when she and two others established the country’s first birth control clinic in Brooklyn. Sanger was a noted supporter of eugenics, a movement based on improving human civilization through selective breeding, and published an article in 1919 titled "Birth Control and Racial Betterment," among other published pieces and speeches.
In some of her writings, she referred to black Americans, immigrants, and indigenous Americans as "human weeds," "reckless breeders," who are "spawning ... human beings who never should have been born." 
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