Planned Parenthood has issued a response to Kanye West‘s recent Forbes interview in which he takes the organization to task amid a flurry of bizarre claims about his presidential candidacy announcement.
In the interview, Kanye said, “I am pro-life because I’m following the word of the bible,” while expressing a not-uncommon belief that Planned Parenthood clinics were “placed inside cities by white supremacists to do the devil’s work.”
Now, the organization’s Director of Black Leadership and Engagement, Nia Martin-Robinson, has issued a response. In an interview with TMZ, Robinson shot down West’s characterization of the organization, saying, “Black women are free to make our own decisions about our bodies and pregnancies, and want and deserve to have access to the best medical care available. Any insinuation that abortion is Black genocide is offensive and infantilizing. 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.”
Planned Parenthood has previously responded to anti-abortion activists by reminding the public that abortions are only a small part of what they do and that no abortions actually take place at their facilities. They’ve also taken other prominent public figures, such as rapper T.I., to task for making unscientific claims about women’s reproductive health through their Twitter and other outlets to try to re-educate the nation about things we all should have been learning before high school. Meanwhile, Brooklyn Vegan points out that the Supreme Court ruled to “uphold a Trump administration rule that allows institutions with religious or moral objections to opt out of the Affordable Care Act’s birth control coverage mandate.” This could lose up to 126,000 people access to birth control coverage in their employer-provided healthcare.