Planned Parenthood official slams Kanye West for claiming group is doing 'the devil's work'
His remarks were 'offensive and infantilizing,' says Planned Parenthood
Planned Parenthood on Thursday slammed Kanye West for his recent purported claims that the organization is part of an historical "white supremacist plot to to do the devil’s work."
West, who also this week declared a 2020 White House bid, made the statement during an interview with Forbes.
The context of his remark is not clear because Forbes has yet to release a transcript of the interview. However, West has in the past been critical of abortions, which Planned Parenthood performs as part of its reproductives services program. The rapper, producer and entrepreneur once claimed that Democrats have been "making [black people] abort our children."
Planned Parenthood affiliates reportedly perform roughly 300,000 abortions annually.
On Thursday, Nia Martin-Robinson, the director of black leadership and engagement at Planned Parenthood's national headquarters, slammed West's purported comment.
"Black women are free to make our own decisions about our bodies and pregnancies," Martin-Robinson told TMZ, "and [they] want and deserve to have access to the best medical care available."
"Any insinuation that abortion is Black genocide is offensive and infantilizing," she continued. "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."
Pro-life activists have long claimed that Planned Parenthood has white supremacist roots and that its founder, Margaret Sanger, was a white supremacist.
Historical evidence to support that claim is thin, though Sanger's advocacy of eugenics – a policy regularly adopted and championed by racists and white supremacists over the last century and a half – is well-documented.
Black women account for about 40% of women in the United States who have abortions, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Black Americans make up roughly 13% of the U.S. population.
In his interview with Forbes, West also reportedly said that he is pro-life "because [he is] following the word of the Bible."
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