I saw it coming from the first interview on her first day. Dr. Leana Wen was robotic. She didn’t have the poise of her Planned Parenthood predecessor, Cecile Richards. Both enjoyed hostility-free media interviews, of course, but Richards had some charisma. Wen had none. Richards could lie with such finesse. Wen wasn’t believable.
Her recent Op-ed in the Washington Post was filled with bizarre contradictions. As she mourned her miscarriage (why would anyone mourn a “clump of cells?") she used it as an opportunity to promote the violence of abortion. She never referred to her unborn child as a “child,” or “human,” but only as “a potential life.” She said the experience moved her to encourage her 2-year-old son, Eli, “to be more gentle” as she led the most violent profit-driven institution in America. Contrary to some reports, she even threw a bone to the LGBT activist community by referring to “pregnant people” instead of “pregnant women." One wouldn’t want to exclude all those men who give birth through their…magical birth canal.
And so now she’s gone with the Wen…uh, wind. Planned Parenthood kicked her to the curb. Despite her embarrassing attempts to pretend she was being a medical professional instead of a typical pro-abortion activist, she wasn’t extreme enough for the billion-dollar abortion business. Like a previous ousted temporary president – Pamela Maraldo (a nurse) – Wen foolishly thought she was dealing with an organization that was focused on being medical. Planned Parenthood has always been political…from day one.
Richards even declared it in a New York Times article: “We aim to be the largest kick-butt political organization.” Clearly, Wen didn’t get the memo.
And now the billion-dollar political organization, which received $563.8 million in taxpayer funds in its latest reported year, has been partially defunded (an estimated $60 million) by the Trump administration’s Health and Human Services Protect Life Rule. So after eight months inside the leadership womb of Planned Parenthood, Dr. Wen’s role was – ironically – abruptly aborted.
Enter Alexis McGill-Johnson, the activist they’ve been looking for. She’s much more adept at public speaking. She’s of multiracial descent but gives Planned Parenthood what it’s been longing for since its previous African-American president Faye Wattleton: someone to try to dispel the truth of the organization’s unaltered racist DNA.
When McGill-Johnson was appointed the Board Chair of Planned Parenthood (March 2013-March 2015) she was trotted out briefly and then seemingly disappeared into the background, returning to her work about victimhood racism and bias at the Perception Institute. Her participation in a 2014 panel at Al Sharpton’s National Action Network conference caught my attention. There she proclaimed her Christianity in an effort to affirm that Christians can wholeheartedly support violence against the most vulnerable human beings, you know, because Jesus totally would’ve rallied for dismembering the least of these.
She launched into a tirade of historically-challenged accusations that would be amusing if she hadn’t been shilling for the nation’s leading killer of innocent human lives. She declared that pro-life efforts to end the injustice of abortion were “the same as those who brought us poll taxes and literacy tests.” So, prolifers are like racists, which is strange since I don’t recall any effort by [presumably white] racists to save black lives – you know, the ones dying at far higher rates than any other demographic. More black babies have been aborted in NYC (for years) than born alive, but the “racists” are the ones trying to stop what Fannie Lou Hamer considered to be genocide in the black community?
And let’s not forget where those Jim Crow racist social policies emanated from – the Democratic Party. The GOP fought against poll taxes and literacy tests and overwhelmingly voted in favor of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act; in the Senate, 94 percent of the GOP voted for the VRA while only 69 percent of Dems did. Perhaps McGill-Johnson slept through her political science classes at her alma maters, Princeton and Yale.
The same party that liberated those of my complexion also fought for the government to recognize our humanity, passing every civil rights law through the late 50s and voting in far larger margins than Democrats for each bill. It is now the same GOP whose Party platform explicitly declares its pro-life worldview, while the Democrats’ platform espouses a radical pro-abortion policy position with no restrictions throughout the entire pregnancy. Just a little side note: Planned Parenthood is the only company/organization mentioned in either platform, appearing – of course – in the Democrats' version with the declaration that they will protect the abortion business, no matter what.
I covered many of McGill-Johnson’s ludicrous accusations back in 2014, but there is one that is the continual and laughable narrative of Planned Parenthood activists: that the abortion business is a leader in “general healthcare” and often the “only health care provider for many.” Now, while nearly every major medical service to women has been plummeting at Planned Parenthood for over a decade, as Board Chair, McGill-Johnson tried to boost their status by falsely claiming they lead in providing “basic medical needs.” CVS Minute Clinics provide over 10 times more basic medical needs than the abortion giant.
You can’t even have a cold treated at Planned Parenthood. They’re not a general health care provider. They commit abortions and provide lots of carcinogenic contraception (that significantly increases risks of triple-negative breast cancer, by the way) which is available…everywhere else. Anytime I’ve ever challenged a Planned Parenthood activist on social media regarding the organization’s plunging healthcare (breast cancer screenings down 64 percent in the last 10 years, pap tests down 74 percent, prenatal care only 0.1 percent of their services), they refuse to answer. They’re good at making up numbers, but not that good.
Planned Parenthood needs activists like McGill-Johnson. Activists don’t care about the facts. They don’t care about science. They don’t even care about biological women anymore. And despite all the talk about equality and human flourishing, they don’t care about the collateral damage in the extremist pursuit to protect abortion.
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