21 August 2026
If you mean Martin Luther King Jr.’s views on contraception, there’s an important connection to his 1966 Planned Parenthood Margaret Sanger Award.
King publicly supported family planning and access to contraception, viewing it in the context of poverty, women’s wellbeing, and the ability of families to make responsible decisions about having children. In his acceptance remarks for the award, he connected family planning with broader struggles for economic and social justice.
If you’re asking because of King’s religious views, there’s a useful distinction: his support for contraception was not simply a statement about sexual morality; he framed family planning primarily as a social-justice and economic issue.
There are two particularly clear MLK statements on contraception/family planning, and they come from different contexts.
1. His 1957 statement explicitly defending birth control
In his Ebony “Advice for Living” column, December 1957, King answered a reader who asked whether birth control was sinful. He wrote:
“I do not think it is correct to argue that birth control is sinful.”
"Dr. King and those who marched with him proved that people who love their country can change it. As Americans, we all owe them a great deal." —President Obama on Martin Luther King Day. pic.twitter.com/NNMmwoXDYK
— The Obama White House (@LeandroDeyvison) August 21, 2026
He went on to say:
“The truth is that the natural order is given us, not as an absolute finality, but as something to be guided and controlled.”
And, most explicitly:
“And this means birth control in some form. All of these factors, seem to me, to make birth control rationally and morally justifiable.”
Source: Martin Luther King Jr., “Advice for Living,” December 1957, Ebony. The King Institute at Stanford has the original column and identifies it as part of the King Papers.
2. His 1966 Planned Parenthood speech
On May 5, 1966, King received the Margaret Sanger Award in Human Rights from Planned Parenthood. He couldn’t attend personally, so Coretta Scott King read his acceptance speech.
One of the strongest passages is:
“For the Negro, therefore, intelligent guides of family planning are a profoundly important ingredient in his quest for security and a decent life.”
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. reacts in St. Augustine, Fla., after learning that the senate passed the civil rights bill, June 19, 1964. pic.twitter.com/nG6DmKPnaG
— AFRICAN & BLACK HISTORY (@AfricanArchives) June 20, 2026
He continued:
“Yet one element in stabilizing his life would be an understanding of and easy access to the means to develop a family related in size to his community environment and to the income potential he can command.”
And he explicitly linked family planning with unwanted pregnancies:
“Like all poor, Negro and white, they have many unwanted children. There is scarcely anything more tragic in human life than a child who is not wanted.”
Source: Martin Luther King Jr., “Family Planning—A Special and Urgent Concern,” May 5, 1966, acceptance speech for the Margaret Sanger Award, Planned Parenthood–World Population / Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington. The speech was also entered into the Congressional Record in 1966, providing a contemporary government record of the text.
One important distinction
King’s 1966 speech is about family planning and contraception, not specifically abortion. It is therefore misleading to use his statements about family planning as though they were automatically statements about his position on abortion.
The 1957 quote is particularly unambiguous: King explicitly called birth control “rationally and morally justifiable.”
Adapted from Chat-GPT.
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