Planned Parenthood Pushes To Drop Founder's Name From NoHo Street

LOWER MANHATTAN, NY — A Planned Parenthood representative was on hand at the latest Community Board 2 monthly meeting to discuss an application from the reproductive health care nonprofit to remove the Margaret Sanger Square sign from a NoHo street.

Sanger, born in 1879, opened America's first birth control clinic in Brooklyn in 1916. The organization she founded along with that first birth control clinic would go on to become Planned Parenthood.

In July 2020, Planned Parenthood of Greater New York announced that it was removing her name from the group's Manhattan clinic. According to a press release from the nonprofit at the time, the removal of its founder's name was part of the organization's "public commitment to reckon with its founder's harmful connections to the eugenics movement."

The concept of eugenics supports the effort to "improve" the human population by controlling certain "desirable" traits in arranged reproductions. The method had some popularity in the early 20th century — but was increasingly discredited for being unscientific and racist — culminating in its complete rejection after the adoption of the practice by the Nazis as a justification for their treatment of Jewish people.

During the July 2020 announcement of the removal of Sanger's name from the Planned Parenthood center at 26 Bleecker Street, the nonprofit also said that it would work with the City Council and community members to remove the name from the nearby Margaret Sanger Square.

The square is located at the intersection of Mott and Bleecker Street just minutes from Washington Square Park.

That conversation was brought to Community Board 2, which represents the West Village along with much of Lower Manhattan, in a recent monthly meeting.

Merle McGee, the Chief Equity and Engagement Officer of Planned Parenthood New York, introduced the application to remove the sign.

"We need to acknowledge, like many institutions, that we have to reckon with our history and our founder's legacy," McGee said during the May Monthly Meeting. "Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was a champion for birth control, which expanded bodily autonomy for many, including women of color, but Sanger also embraced eugenics, which was an ableist and racist philosophy to advance the birth control campaign."

McGee explained that the group was submitting an application to Community Board 2 to remove the square's name and eventually work with the board to find a new name for the area. The Lower Manhattan Community Board actually approved the naming of the square after Sanger in 1992.

The majority of Community Board 2 members who spoke were in support of removing Sanger's name from the street sign.

"I'm a hundred percent in support of the Planned Parenthood proposal," one board member said.

Not every board member, though, rushed to support the renaming of the square.

"Many of the statements you just made about Margaret Sanger are highly controversial and a number of respected historians have debunked some of these things and demonstrated with detail that the connection between Margaret Sanger and eugenics is vastly inflated," board member Cormac Flynn said. He proceeded to ask McGee if Planned Parenthood had looked into those lines of thought.

The Planned Parenthood employee quickly responded that the nonprofit had done extensive research into the issue and that there many documented records from authors and historians who supported Sanger's work in reproductive rights but still found an immense issue with her connection to eugenics.

"I would hope Community Board 2 members would not try to parse out how racist someone is," a different board member said, not long after Flynn finished speaking.

During the public session, community resident Darlene Lutz delivered a passionate plea not to remove Sanger's name.

"With all due respect, the 2021 resolution as written is an embarrassment to this Community Board and should be rejected and withdrawn," Lutz said. "The application presented to the Community Board was declared without fact, truth or context."

While the ties between Sanger and the eugenics movement are well documented, in 2020, Time Magazine provided a detailed breakdown explaining a handful of the complicated dynamics between her fight for reproductive rights and the racist movement.