Evangelist Alveda King told Breitbart News in a phone interview Friday that Planned Parenthood’s decision to remove the name of Margaret Sanger from its flagship abortion clinic in New York City because of her eugenicist ties is “just window dressing.”
King, the director of Civil Rights for the Unborn, said:
In America, many Planned Parenthood abortion facilities are located in minority neighborhoods. Margaret Sanger and the organization she founded have been working to annihilate the Black community for 100. This name change is literally just window dressing unless Planned Parenthood stops killing babies and instead helps mothers to choose life.
On July 21, Planned Parenthood of Greater New York (PPGNY) announced plans to remove the name of its founder, Margaret Sanger, from its flagship abortion facility because of her “harmful connections to the eugenics movement.”
“The removal of Margaret Sanger’s name from our building is both a necessary and overdue step to reckon with our legacy and acknowledge Planned Parenthood’s contributions to historical reproductive harm within communities of color,” said Karen Seltzer, PPGNY board chair, in a statement.
“Margaret Sanger’s concerns and advocacy for reproductive health have been clearly documented, but so too has her racist legacy,” she added. “There is overwhelming evidence for Sanger’s deep belief in eugenic ideology, which runs completely counter to our values at PPGNY.”
However, just a year ago, Planned Parenthood Federation of America CEO Alexis McGill Johnson denounced Wall Street Journal editorial board member Bill McGurn’s depiction of Sanger’s involvement in the eugenics movement as “callous and incorrect.”
Johnson wrote in a letter to the editor:
Framing access to reproductive health care and bodily autonomy as eugenics exposes a fundamental misunderstanding of the racialized gender oppression on which antiabortionists stand. The truth is, the antiabortion movement was born out of racist and xenophobic concerns about the falling white birth rate—echoes of which you still hear in today’s white supremacist rhetoric.
“We stand with black women and refuse to cower to the misogyny and white supremacy that seek to deny access to our autonomy and the full spectrum of reproductive health care, including abortion,” she continued, “because more than any antiabortion politician or activist, we know what is best for our lives, our bodies and our families.”
Planned Parenthood still does not acknowledge “racism” associated with terminating the lives of unborn black babies. Instead, the “racism” label is applied to Americans who refuse to support taxpayer-funded abortions for black women.
Last week, House Democrats introduced the Abortion is Health Care Everywhere Act of 2020, which would repeal the Helms Amendment, a long-standing provision that blocks U.S. foreign aid programs from donating to groups that provide or promote abortion overseas.
Using the abortion industry’s definition of “racism,” Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) said the Helms Amendment “is a policy deeply rooted in racism”:
It imposes our arbitrary and medically unnecessary abortion restrictions on international communities, allowing the United States to control the health care and bodily autonomy of billions Black and brown people around the world. Just like the Hyde Amendment, the Helms Amendment puts reproductive and economic freedom out of reach for women of color. But enough is enough, and both amendments must fall if we want to realize true health equity and reproductive justice.
Nevertheless, King, who is the niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said the Helms Amendment “protects women overseas from the harmful impact of abortion.”
“The women in Congress who support the repeal effort by playing the tired old race card should be ashamed,” she added. “Women everywhere could be better served by choosing life over killing innocent babies in the womb. One Blood/One Race, from the womb to the tomb.”
King’s organization, an outreach to the black community of Priests for Life, aims to end abortion and to reach “Black Americans and the general population with the truth about the harmful impact of abortion and its byproducts.”