During a live conversation with anti-abortion activist Abby Johnson on the Truth and Liberty broadcast Monday, right-wing pastor Andrew Wommack claimed Planned Parenthood was started “to eliminate or decrease the African American population.”
Johnson, who formerly worked at Planned Parenthood but now leads an organization to convert abortion workers to the anti-choice side, claimed that the abortions performed in minority communities are “intentionally being done by the abortion industry.”
“We see a disproportionate number of African American women having abortions,” Johnson said. “We see more and more abortions taking place in the Hispanic community. So that’s on the rise, and that’s intentionally being done by the abortion industry because of where they put these clinics and who they are specifically targeting.”
“Abby, are you familiar with Margaret Sanger and her beliefs in starting Planned Parenthood?” Wommack asked.
“We see her dreams coming to fruition when we look at the abortion rate in the minority communities,” Johnson replied. “This is what she wanted all along.”
“It was actually eugenics,” Wommack said, answering his own question. “And she started Planned Parenthood to eliminate or decrease the African American population. I tell you if they knew that, they wouldn’t be so supportive of it.”
In truth, Sanger worked with NAACP founder W.E.B. DuBois on a “Negro Project” to get safe contraception to African Americans.
The claim is a common one among anti-abortion activists and purposefully misrepresents history. During the 1920s, eugenics and the birth control movement did intersect, and Sanger did promote birth control at eugenics conferences, as this NPR fact check notes. But Sanger’s driving force behind promoting birth control was her belief that women should have control over how many children they wanted — not the elimination of the African American population, as Wommack and Johnson assert.
Earlier in the broadcast, Johnson described arguments for keeping abortion legal as the work of the devil, whom she said “has a very slick tongue.” She continued, “We have not prepared ourselves as Christians, and we have not prepared our children well enough to face sin when it comes to them and reject it.”
But Johnson sees progress in the anti-abortion movement in the recent “heartbeat” legislation passed in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky, as evidenced, she said, by the reaction of those who support choice. “The litmus test for how I see our culture responding is based on how our opponents are responding,” Johnson said. “And I can tell you those that are opposed to the lord right now in our culture, it’s almost like you can hear the demons hissing.”
