The American Birth Control League (ABCL) was founded by Margaret Sanger in 1921 at the First American Birth Control Conference in New York City. Among the more prominent early leaders of the ABCL were Katharine Hepburn, Lothrop Stoddard, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Sanger herself. Stoddard, a prominent leader among eugenicists, was a close personal friend of Sanger.
In 1934, the ABCL unanimously passed a resolution which called for the sterilization of “defectives”. It changed its name to Planned Parenthood in 1942.
