Pro-life advocate and former National Football League player Benjamin Watson has a lot to say about Planned Parenthood's attempt to distance itself from its racist origins.
In response to an op-ed by the abortion provider's president and CEO Alexis McGill Johnson, Watson said that instead of disavowing the founder Margaret Sanger's ties to white supremacists, the organization must stop performing abortions.
"We're done making excuses for our founder," the title of the New York Times op-ed by McGill Johnson read in big, bold letters. In it, she admitted that Sanger had an "association with white supremacist groups and eugenics" and that the abortion provider is now working towards "making Margaret Sanger less prominent in our present and future."
She wrote that the organization is committed to "fully [taking] responsibility for the harm that Sanger caused to generations of people with disabilities and Black, Latino, Asian-American, and Indigenous people."
But for Watson, who is the Vice President of the pro-life group Human Coalition, Johnson's words are not enough. CBN News reported that the 40-year-old football athlete believes the admission about Sanger's beliefs and the organization's racist origins "does not absolve them from the blood on their hands as they take advantage of victims of the very racism they decry."
Watson, who called McGill Johnson's admission "hollow," said that as Planned Parenthood is trying to "distance themselves from [Sanger], they are still perpetuating her mission that is systematically targeting young, largely African American, largely poor women and families and children." And the statistics do not lie.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported in 2016 that non-Hispanic black women had the highest abortion rate with up to 25.1 abortions per 1,000 women aged between 15 to 44. In fact, the report read, "non-Hispanic black women accounted for the largest percentages of all abortions" at 38%.
These statistics, to Watson, are "problematic." The former NFL star condemned the abortion provider and the organization's racist origins, saying, "The millions of dollars coming into Planned Parenthood are disproportionately from the termination of Black preborn children."
According to Kentucky Today, Planned Parenthood's founder had in fact spoken to the women's auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan, asking them to support her birth control campaign. She also endorsed the 1927 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Buck v. Bell, which enabled states to sterilize people who were believed to be "unfit" to reproduce.
For Watson, if the abortion provider truly wanted to backtrack and undo the pain that Sanger and the organization's racist origins had caused, Planned Parenthood should instead "walk with these mothers in crisis and these families in crisis and provide for them long past the decision to abort but push them toward a decision to parent."
Watson, who is a believer of the sanctity of human life, called upon churches to welcome individuals who are going through an unwanted pregnancy to be a "place for restoration," to be open to adopt and act against "factors shown to lead to abortion, such as poverty and abuse."
