The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

Planned Parenthood was founded in 1916 as a grassroots movement to provide family planning to poor women. The trouble for Planned Parenthood in 2025 stems from its dual and often dueling roles as both a national advocacy organization and a local healthcare provider, one inherently political and the other necessarily nonpartisan. [More about that later in this essay.] Planned Parenthood is actually 48 independently incorporated affiliates operating under the national organization’s umbrella.  As Pamela Paul writes in the Wall Street Journal, “To American feminists, the Planned Parenthood brand symbolizes liberation and empowerment. To Medicaid recipients and rural women, it means access to affordable contraceptives, testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections, and cancer screenings. To conservatives and opponents of abortion, it means the devaluation of human life and dissolution of the family.”

Planned Parenthood evolved in response to political, medical and legal changes: the arrival of the birth-control pill in 1962, the legalization of abortion in 1973, the passage of the Hyde amendment in 1976 (which restricted the use of federal money for abortions), the murders and bombings of abortion providers in the ‘90s, the passage of the Affordable Care Act (which gave many patients alternatives to Planned Parenthood), the development of medical abortion alternatives and now the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Paul’s essay provides an overview of the current confusion as to the actual mission of Planned Parenthood today:

• Under Cecile Richards, president between 2006 and 2018, abortion rights moved front and center; new bylaws established that any clinic that did not want to provide abortions had to leave the network.
• But, today on Instagram, where young people are most likely to seek information, for example, Planned Parenthood offers decidedly liberationist advice, including graphic descriptions of sexual techniques. Posts celebrate Pansexual Pride Day and declare that “virginity is a social construct.” In keeping with the organization’s racial justice agenda, which includes support for #DefundthePolice, its TikTok account displays a video of a Black woman seemingly fleeing and then laughing, with the tag, “Running from the police, but then they say, suspect is an abortion-rights baddie.”
• Recently, a kind of mission creep has set in, with the organization tethering itself to causes like democracy reform (including support for expanding the Supreme Court and ending the filibuster in the Senate) and gun control—actions that have alienated some donors, according to former employees. These moves reflect the political motivations of its workforce, increasingly populated by what some employees refer to as social justice warriors—young people who come to the organization for its progressive values more than for its provision of healthcare.
• Planned Parenthood no longer positions itself as the leading healthcare provider for women and has largely stopped referring to women on its website and in policy statements. In testimony before Congress, Dr. Bhavik Kumar, then a Planned Parenthood medical director and now chief medical officer at the Greater Ohio affiliate, said that “men can have pregnancies, especially transmen.”  The organization’s pervasive language around “pregnant people” is intended to be inclusive of transgender people, a cause that the organization connects to abortion rights under the umbrella of “bodily autonomy.” As Planned Parenthood put it on Threads, “trans and nonbinary people are essential to the movement for sexual and reproductive health and rights—the fight for trans rights is our fight.”
• Planned Parenthood has also rapidly expanded its services into one of the most contested and politicized areas of healthcare, gender transitions. Its national office does not reveal numbers on these services, instead grouping them into an “other services” category in its annual report. In 2019, that category included 17,791 cases. It rose to 77,858 in 2023. With trans-identified minors, Planned Parenthood follows an “informed consent” model, which, according to its patient guidelines, enables patients to get a same-day prescription for cross-sex hormones after a 30-minute in-person or remote consultation with a staff member. No professional diagnosis is required.
• Planned Parenthood is now the country’s second largest provider of cross-sex hormones for transgender treatments.  According to an analysis of insurance claim information by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, at least 40,000 patients went to Planned Parenthood for gender medicine in 2023. About 40% of them were 18- to 22-year-olds. Between 2017 and 2023, it also treated 12,000 kids aged 12 to 17 for gender dysphoria.

The utter confusion of Planned Parenthood’s actual mission goes back to its founder, Margaret Sanger (1879-1966).  Charles A. Donovan and Robert G. Marshall have shown that Sanger was deeply committed to the eugenics movement in the early 20th century:  “Sanger’s ideas about racial betterment—the elimination of ‘human weeds,’ as she called them—weren’t merely the regrettably common views of ‘a different time.’ She went further than most. In her proposed ‘baby code’ of 1934, Sanger recommended that licenses to marry should be separated from licenses to have children. Article 4, meant to apply nationwide, stated: ‘No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child, and no man shall have the right to become a father, without a permit for parenthood.’ Article 8 would have provided that ‘feeble-minded persons, habitual congenital criminals, those afflicted with heritable disease, and others found biologically unfit by authorities qualified [to] judge should be sterilized or, in cases of doubt, should be so isolated as to prevent the perpetuation of their afflictions by breeding.’  These lines were written not at the beginning of Sanger’s career but nearly two decades after she opened her first birth-control clinic in Brooklyn, N.Y. Coercion lay at the core of her strategy to stop the propagation of ‘the unfit.’”

Kevin G. Long provides a helpful summary of several salient aspects of Sanger’s life:  “Sanger grew up in New York, one of 11 children of a poor Irish immigrant. With the help of two older sisters, she attended a private school in order to become a nurse. In 1912, after only three months of training, she married a wealthy architect, moved to the better part of town and settled down to raising a family of three children. After 10 years of the daily routine of a suburban housewife, she became bored and restless, and urged her husband to move to Greenwich Village where the intellectuals of the day gathered to discuss the latest ideas.  Sanger began to frequent the lectures of socialists like Eugene Debs and the early radical feminists like Emma Goldman and Ellen Key. Under the influence of the latter, Sanger began to reject the traditional role of women and the bourgeois concept of the family. Instead, she adopted the view that a woman’s individual fulfillment required a degree of sexual satisfaction to which permanent marriage and motherhood were often obstacles. Sexual associations, with the option of motherhood, should be completely voluntary, unencumbered by either law or social custom. Birth control, she reasoned, could go a long way in the liberation of women.”  He goes on:

• “The socialists taught Sanger that the poverty she had suffered as a child was caused by the exploitation of the worker by greedy capitalists. Sanger, however, departed from the classical Marxist line when she concluded that wages were low whenever labor was plentiful. The working class, in other words, had bred too many children for its own good. In Sanger’s mind, birth control was also a tool in the class struggle for bettering the conditions of the poor.”
• “In 1914 Sanger traveled to England where she met Dr. Havelock Ellis, a proponent of eugenics. Three years earlier Ellis had published a book advocating sterilization as a precondition for government relief to the poor. Ellis also proposed that the ‘random breeding’ of traditional marriage be replaced by eugenic farms in which carefully selected and scientifically matched couples would breed genetically superior children.”
• “Thus Sanger learned a third use for contraception: the purification of the human race through the application of eugenic science . . . By 1920, Sanger had abandoned all attempts to help the poor. It was not unjust social conditions which caused poverty, she concluded, but the genetic inferiority and indiscriminate breeding habit of the poor which perpetuated their misery.”

As the Family Research Council shows, “Planned Parenthood’s troubled eugenic legacy does not begin and end with the personal views of its founder, however. For many years, it permeated the organization’s leadership. In 1933, Planned Parenthood (then known as the American Birth Control League) and the American Eugenics Society (AES) attempted an unsuccessful merger. Dr. Alan Guttmacher, the namesake of a leading abortion research organization the Guttmacher Institute, was a eugenicist and served both as vice president of the AES and president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America from 1962-1974.”

Planned Parenthood has disavowed its founder and removed her name from its buildings, for example.  But, has Planned Parenthood abandoned Sanger’s commitment to eugenics?  Not according to Donovan and Marshall:

• A 1991 New York Times article related the experience of Barbara Faye Waxman, a former employee at a Los Angeles Planned Parenthood clinic. “There was a strong eugenics mentality that exhibited disdain, discomfort and ignorance toward disabled babies,” said Waxman, who used a wheelchair and respirator because of a neuromuscular impairment. Planned Parenthood considered disabled infants to be “bad babies,” she said.
• In 2021, Planned Parenthood continued to endorse abortion based on prenatal diagnosis of disabilities. What is that if not an updated application of Sanger’s vision and a century of Planned Parenthood practice?
• The organization has been involved in lawsuits against legislation in Ohio and Indiana barring abortion of babies suspected of having Down syndrome.

Thankfully, as Pamela Paul demonstrates, “All of these aspects of Planned Parenthood are now under threat, and from all three branches of the federal government. In March, Trump withheld Title X grants, which fund contraceptive, reproductive and sexual health services for poor people, from at least nine Planned Parenthood affiliates while the administration investigates their compliance with its policies on D.E.I. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that patients do not have the right to sue states for denying state Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood clinics, making it easier for more states to withdraw funding. And earlier this month, Congress passed Trump’s megabill, which effectively ends federal Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood for the next year . . . ‘We are in a fight for survival,’ said Rebecca Gibron, CEO of Planned Parenthood of the Greater Northwest, which includes Hawaii, Alaska, Washington, Kentucky, Indiana and Idaho, and is the country’s largest affiliate. She said the organization may face a deficit as high as $800 million. ‘This is a catastrophic situation. So we are doing an analysis of the impact, looking at where we may need to consolidate. It’s a moving target . . .’  Trump’s policies will only intensify these problems. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a healthcare policy and advocacy organization, the administration’s cuts mean that 834,000 people will lose access to Title X-funded care, a large portion of which would have been delivered by Planned Parenthood clinics. Planned Parenthood estimates that 200 clinics could close, affecting 1.1 million patients, due to the Medicaid cuts alone.”

Planned Parenthood remains an organization committed to that which is abominable in the sight of God.  From its founding under Margaret Sanger, it has exemplified the pronouncement in Isaiah 5:20: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!”  [ESV]  By the grace of God, may this embodiment of pernicious evil come to an end.

See Pamela Paul in the Wall Street Journal (19-20 July 2025;  Charles A. Donovan and Robert G. Marshall in the Wall Street Journal (22 April 2021); “Disavowing Margaret Sanger Doesn’t Change Planned Parenthood’s Culture of Eugenics, Racism, and Death,” Family Research Council (22 July 2022); The Christian Observer (19 January 2023); and Kevin G. Long, “Margaret Sanger and the Cult of Racism” in Claremont Review of Books (Spring 1983).