Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger didn’t call Black people ‘human weeds’ that should be ‘exterminated’

In May 2026, a claim (archived) circulated online that Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger said, “Colored people are like human weeds and need to be exterminated.”

Sanger founded a birth control clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in 1916, and her activism would later grow into the Planned Parenthood organization in the U.S. Due to Sanger’s belief in eugenics, meaning the selective breeding of human populations to improve their genetic composition, the organization has long been dogged by accusations that it has a racist agenda.

One X user who shared Sanger’s alleged quote also wrote, “Sanger created what eventually became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The group that has aborted millions of black babies.”

The alleged quote also circulated on Facebook (archived). Both users shared it alongside a genuine quote from former First Lady Hillary Clinton, who said in 2009 that she admired Sanger’s courage, tenacity and vision. Snopes readers contacted us, asking about the claimed quote.

Snopes debunked a near-identical quote attributed to Sanger in 2015. At that time, social media users claimed Sanger called “Slavs, Latin and Hebrew immigrants” human weeds. We found no proof that Sanger ever spoke or wrote those words. 

Likewise, more than a decade later, we found no proof Sanger said or wrote that Black people “are like human weeds and need to be exterminated.” The quote did not appear credibly attributed to Sanger in online searches on Google, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo (archived, archived, archived). According to a Planned Parenthood fact sheet about Sanger, the quote has been circulating since at least 2004 and comes from a flyer shared by anti-abortion activists. In 2022, Ellen Chesler, a Sanger biographer, told Reuters the quote was fabricated.

Given the above, we find social media users incorrectly attributed the quote to Sanger. (In 2015, we rated a similar version of this quote false. Snopes has since updated and expanded our ratings and find incorrect attribution to be the best fit.)

Snopes contacted Chesler to confirm she still regarded the quote in question as a fabrication in 2026. We await a reply.

The origin of the quote was unclear. While Planned Parenthood attributed it to an anti-abortion flyer in 2004, similar wording about Sanger appeared in conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza’s 1995 book “The End of Racism.” In that book, D’Souza wrote (Page 188) that Sanger:

… coined the slogan “More children from the fit, less from the unfit.” In language that many of her contemporary admirers would probably like to forget, she described blacks and Eastern European immigrants as “a menace to civilization” and “human weeds.” 

The primary sources D’Souza cited in the footnote to that paragraph were a 1939 letter Snopes previously investigated and Sanger’s 1922 book “The Pivot of Civilization.” We found no instances of the phrase “human weeds” in either of those sources.

As we note below, while Sanger did repeatedly used the term “human weeds” on other occasions, there was no evidence she ever explicitly said the label applied to specific racial or religious groups.

Sanger likely adopted ‘human weeds’ from eugenics movement

While there was no evidence Sanger spoke or wrote the exact words attributed to her, she did use the term “human weeds” when talking about how she imagined birth control could shape the population. 

For example, writing in the New York Times on April 8, 1923, in what would these days likely be categorized as an opinion piece, Sanger described birth control as follows (emphasis ours): 

Birth control is not contraception indiscriminately and thoughtlessly practiced. It means the release and cultivation of the better racial elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extirpation of defective stocks—those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.

Sanger did not name any specific racial or religious group as “human weeds.” 

Nonetheless, “human weed” was to be a term Sanger would repeatedly use in the coming years. For example, in 1924 the term appeared in The Birth Control Review, a magazine Sanger edited and published.

Years later, in 1937, Sanger reportedly (Page 27) used the term again while receiving a medal for her birth control activism in New York City.

There was no evidence, however, that Sanger invented the phrase. Rather, it appeared popular within the eugenics movement from at least the late 1800s.

In fact sheets from 2004 and 2021, Planned Parenthood acknowledged Sanger’s belief in eugenics, which became abundantly clear later in the New York Times article when she wrote:

The results of the intelligence tests, the menace of indiscriminate immigration, the fertility of the unfit and the increasing burden upon the healthful and vigorous members of American society of the delinquent and dependent classes, together with the growing danger of the abnormal fecundity of the feeble-minded, all emphasize the necessity of clear-sightedness and courageously facing the problem and the possibilities of birth control as a practical and feasible weapon against national and racial decadence.

In the paragraph above, Sanger essentially argued that birth control was necessary to preserve “the healthful and vigorous” people in American society who were threatened by high birth rates among what she viewed as “unfit,” “delinquent,” “dependent” and “feeble-minded” people. Such ideas are the foundation of eugenics. Again, Sanger did not specify what she believed qualified a person to be “healthful and vigorous” or “delinquent and dependent.”

Planned Parenthood denounced Sanger’s support for eugenics in the 2004 and 2021 fact sheets, noting that the movement was popular in the 1920s and ’30s, meaning that Sanger was, at least in that regard, a product of her time. 

In 2021, Planned Parenthood of Greater New York announced it would remove a sign with Sanger’s name outside a Manhattan health center in an effort to “reckon with the totality of its founder’s legacy and systemic racism and ableism, which negatively impacts the well-being of Planned Parenthood patients and staff.”

For further reading, Snopes frequently investigates claims related to Planned Parenthood.

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