Maggie, we really do know you

American Life League Statement on ‘The Hundred Years Video’

By Jim Sedlak, executive director

With almost two million views in 48 hours, the Lena Dunham animated video about Planned Parenthood and its founder, Margaret Sanger, has gone viral. Like most viral videos, it is interesting to watch, but contains little information of value. In these days where Planned Parenthood is under fire across the country for a myriad of reasons, this is clearly a propaganda piece meant to deflect people from the truth.

The video opens stating that Sanger was a woman “who sacrifices everything to bring us safe and affordable reproductive healthcare.” That’s one way to describe a woman who abandoned her two children in boarding schools while she flittered around the world having numerous sexual interludes and settling into an open marriage with one of the richest men in the country.

It then attributes all kinds of lofty goals to Sanger’s search for the perfect birth control product, while it ignores Sanger’s own statement in her 1920 book Woman and the New Race which pronounces (Chapter XVIII): “Birth control is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defective.”

From this statement, it is clear that Sanger was involved in the eugenics movement. The video gives passing mention to this involvement and tries to downplay its significance. It simply states that “Margaret left behind a conflicting legacy.”

Moving to a discussion of modern day Planned Parenthood, the video simply vomits the misleading information heard daily from PP spokespersons. “One in five women visit Planned Parenthood” sounds impressive until you realize there are 62 million women of reproductive age in the country, and Planned Parenthood only sees 2.5 million a year.

The video also claims that 75 percent of PP’s clients are “low income women,” yet it fails to mention that the majority of PP clients are high school and college girls. Since only their personal income counts, these students naturally fall into the misleading classification of “low income women.”

It then regurgitates PP’s slogan that “these doors stay open,” while ignoring the 300 clinics PP has permanently closed in the last 20 years.

Everything considered, the thing missing from this video is a final legal statement that reads: “Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.”

American Life League’s Culture of Life Studies Program has produced a well-researched video on Margaret Sanger that teaches the truth about the founder of Planned Parenthood. To watch the trailer for Who Was the Real Margaret Sanger? and to learn how you can order a copy of this educational video, visit