After announcing his interest in a 2020 presidential run, rapper and fashion mogul Kanye West came out swinging against abortion, specifically singling out Planned Parenthood, which he suggested was targeting black women and killing black babies.
“Planned Parenthoods have been placed inside cities by white supremacists to do the Devil’s work,” he said.
In response, Planned Parenthood — whose founder promoted racist ideas and openly described her movement as “practically identical in ideal, with the final aims of Eugenics” — tapped Nia Martin-Robinson, the organization’s Director of Black Leadership and Engagement, to rebuke the rapper’s forceful statement.
“Black women are free to make our own decisions about our bodies and pregnancies, and want and deserve to have the best medical care available,” Martin-Robinson said. “Any insinuation that abortion is Black genocide is offensive and infantilizing.”
Martin-Robinson went on to say that the greatest threat to the black community is lack of access to quality health care.
“The real threat to Black communities’ safety, health, and lives stems from lack of access to quality, affordable health care, police violence, and the criminalization of reproductive health care by anti-abortion opposition,” she continued. “At Planned Parenthood, we trust and we stand with Black women who have, and continue to lead the charge when it comes to health, rights, and bodily autonomy of those in their communities.”
Over at Bustle, Jake Viswanath even went as far as to argue that pro-lifers have been tied to white supremacy, even though leaders of the racist Alt-Right movement have expressed support for abortion, arguing that it rids the country of undesirables.
“There has been more ties between white supremacy and pro-life activism in recent years, like when anti-abortion group New Wave Feminists was forced to oust their former leader Kristen Walker Hatten in 2018 after she shared white supremacist messages on Twitter and admitted that she was ‘racist by today’s standards.’ Basically, if Planned Parenthood clinics were planted by anyone, it definitely wasn’t by white supremacists,” argued Viswanath.
In a 2017 piece for National Review titled “The Alt-Right Carries On Margaret Sanger’s Legacy Of Eugenics,” Elliott Kaufman presents a far different take on the relationship between white supremacists and abortion:
Richard Spencer, the keynote speaker in Charlottesville and the central figure of the alt-right movement, finds abortion useful. He has explained that abortion will help to bring about his vision of an elite, white America: “The people who are having abortions are generally very often Black or Hispanic or from very poor circumstances.” The people whom Spencer wants to reproduce, he says, “are using abortion when you have a situation like Down Syndrome.” It is only “the unintelligent and blacks and Hispanics,” he claims, “who use abortion as birth control.”
He has openly mocked conservatives who worry about a “black genocide” or “how [abortion] is destroying black communities.” He knows that an estimated 75 percent of women who have abortions are poor. He knows that black women, receiving an outsize 36 percent of all American abortions, are almost five times as likely to terminate their pregnancies as white women. Nothing could make him happier.
Aylmer Fisher wrote in Spencer’s Radix Journal: “It is important we not fall prey to the pro-life temptation. The only ones who can’t [avoid an unwanted pregnancy] are the least intelligent and responsible members of society: women who are disproportionately Black, Hispanic, and poor.”