“It’s modern day eugenics.” That’s how musician and host of the hit show “America’s Got Talent” Nick Cannon described Planned Parenthood’s work last week. Cannon assailed the organization’s work in black communities as a “genocide” aimed at “population control.” Sadly, he’s right. Nearly 80 percent of Planned Parenthood’s abortion facilities are located in low-income, minority neighborhoods; approximately one-third of all abortions are performed on black women, far out of proportion to the 13 percent African-American share of the U.S. population.
Targeting minorities for abortion services is in keeping with the mission of Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, who described her goal as the “release and cultivation of the better racial elements in our society” and the eventual “extirpation” of “human weeds.” More recently, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg echoed Sanger’s comments, saying in an interview with The New York Times that the abortion on demand regime legalized by Roe v. Wade was needed to eliminate “populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”
The American people reject this hateful philosophy, and are repelled by Planned Parenthood’s side-business of selling the body parts of aborted babies for a profit. What they may not know, however, is that their tax dollars subsidize this loathsome work — under current law, more than $500 million in federal funding is directed to Planned Parenthood each year.
Among the top priorities of the new Congress in 2017 must be to redirect these funds to community health clinics that offer comprehensive health care services to women and their families — without abortion. These clinics outnumber Planned Parenthood facilities by 20 to 1, and are widely accessible to the people they serve. There are more than 13,000 qualified health centers providing a full range of health care services to women, including 4,000 in underserved rural areas. Research done by the Charlotte Lozier Institute documented that on average, there is at least one federally qualified health center within five miles of every Planned Parenthood location.
Providing more taxpayer funds to community health centers will significantly improve medical care for women. Planned Parenthood reduces a woman’s health to her reproductive organs; it only provides birth control, pap smears, and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases (as well as abortion). But high-quality health care focuses on the well-being of the whole woman. The health centers that will receive the funds that currently go to Planned Parenthood provide a full range of medical services and diagnostic screenings to patients, including treatment for hypertension, diabetes, depression, osteoporosis and other conditions.
Congress passed a bill to defund Planned Parenthood and redirect its funding to organizations that truly support women’s health in 2015. That law was vetoed by President Barack Obama. President-elect Trump, however, has laid out a pro-life agenda that includes “defunding Planned Parenthood as long as they continue to perform abortions, and re-allocating their funding to community health centers that provide comprehensive health care,” and promised that he and Vice-President Pence would be “advocates for the unborn and their mothers every day we are in the White House.” Under the Trump Administration, Planned Parenthood’s days as a purveyor of death and despair to women and their babies are numbered.
Nick Cannon, whose own mother walked out of an abortion facility just minutes before she was scheduled to undergo an abortion that would have ended his life, wrote a hip-hop song about her decision. In it his unborn self speaks to his mother: “I will always be a part of you…If I could talk I would say to you. Can I live?” In 2017, with a pro-life Congress and President Donald Trump, the answer to that question for the more than 300,000 babies whose lives are now ended in Planned Parenthood abortion facilities each year will be a resounding “yes.”