Planned Parenthood

Planned Parenthood traces its origins to 1916, when the nurse and activist Margaret Sanger opened the first birth-control clinic in the United States, in Brooklyn, and was promptly arrested for it. Sanger's campaign to make contraception legal and available grew into the American Birth Control League and, in 1942, into the organization renamed Planned Parenthood. It set out to give women the means to decide whether and when to have children.

Over the following century it became the nation's largest provider of reproductive health care, operating a network of clinics that offer contraception, cancer and disease screening, and sex education, alongside abortion services. Its reach expanded after the Supreme Court struck down bans on contraception in 1965 and recognized a constitutional right to abortion in Roe v. Wade in 1973.

Those services placed Planned Parenthood at the white-hot center of the American abortion debate. To its supporters it is an essential provider of women's health care and a defender of reproductive freedom. To the pro-life movement and much of the Religious Right it is the country's leading abortion provider and a moral wrong to be defunded and shut down, making it a perennial target of protest, legislation, and litigation. Its founder Sanger's documented support for eugenics remains a genuine stain that critics raise and the organization has acknowledged.

Few organizations sit so squarely on the fault line of American politics. As courts and legislatures have expanded and then, with the overturning of Roe, sharply curtailed abortion rights, Planned Parenthood has remained both a practical health-care provider for millions and a symbol over which the nation's deepest cultural divide is fought.