Planned Parenthood

Planned Parenthood, American organization that, since its founding in 1942, has worked as an advocate for education and personal liberties in the areas of birth control, family planning, and reproductive health care. Clinics operated by Planned Parenthood provide a range of reproductive health care services, including abortion, sex education, prenatal care, infertility services, and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, as well as vaccinations and cancer screenings for millions of mostly low-income and rural patients.

Planned Parenthood traces its beginnings to the birth control movement led by Margaret Sanger and her colleagues, who opened the nation’s first birth control clinic in 1916 in a poverty-stricken neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York. Created to free women from the “chronic condition” of pregnancy and the dangers of self-induced abortion, the clinic was shut down by police after only 10 days. Sanger and the others were imprisoned for violating the anti-obscenity Comstock Act of 1873. Sanger’s continuing efforts led to the foundation of both the American Birth Control League in 1921 and the Birth Control Federation of America in 1939, which became Planned Parenthood in 1942.

From the 1940s through the early 1970s, Planned Parenthood consolidated and expanded the earlier crusade to raise public consciousness about the need for birth control and to win the federal government’s support for family planning. The organization provided family-planning counseling across the country, played a role in the development of the birth control pill (approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960) and the intrauterine device (IUD; 1968), and reached out to less-developed countries by establishing its Family Planning International Assistance program (1971).

Discover how ordinary objects work, and expand your understanding of the familiar.

SIGN UP

" height="20" alt="HEW Logo">

Thank you for signing up!"

Back to homepage

By clicking "Sign Up", you consent to the Britannica Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Acutely aware of the issue of privacy related to women’s reproductive freedom, Planned Parenthood was a plaintiff in Griswold v. State of Connecticut (1965), in which the Supreme Court recognized the right of married couples to use contraception, and it joined the grassroots movement to legalize abortion, which culminated in the court’s historic ruling in Roe v. Wade (1973). Following the latter decision, Planned Parenthood and its local affiliates were involved in several legal suits concerning the issue of access to abortion, notably Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992), in which the Supreme Court upheld Roe v. Wade and established the principle that states may not place an “undue burden” on a woman’s ability to obtain an abortion. The undue burden standard itself was reaffirmed by the court in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt (2016).

Clinics operated by Planned Parenthood were frequently the site of angry demonstrations by antiabortion (“pro-life”) activists, prompting some states to adopt laws preventing protestors from blocking entry to the organization’s facilities. Clinics and their staff were also violently attacked in acts of arson, bombings, and murders. Some antiabortion groups attempted to undermine political support for Planned Parenthood by producing deceptively edited undercover videos purporting to show illegal activity by the organization. After the release of one such video in 2015, which falsely implied that Planned Parenthood engaged in the illegal sale of fetal tissue from abortions, Congress passed legislation that would have cut off federal funding of Planned Parenthood (through Medicaid reimbursements and Title X family-planning grants); the measure was vetoed by Pres. Barack Obama. Some states also adopted laws reducing or prohibiting state funding of the organization. In 2017 Pres. Donald Trump signed legislation that permitted individual states to block federal funding of clinics in their territories that perform abortions, including those of Planned Parenthood.