As a Black woman who works to expand reproductive rights and justice every day, I feel personally incensed by Baltimore Ravens’ Ben Watson’s comments claiming that Planned Parenthood was created to exterminate Blacks. The “plan,” Watson claims, “is working.”
This is a playing field he shouldn’t step on.
Planned Parenthood is a key provider of primary care for families across the country —providing reproductive health care services, including abortion. Without their services, the constitutionally protected right to an abortion for women in some states would be just a notion.
Watson criticizes Planned Parenthood by erroneously equating the reproductive health organization that we know today, with the family planning clinic that Margaret Sanger created over 100 years ago. Think about it— what did the rest of the country look like a full century ago?
One of the original NFL teams, the Dayton Triangles, debuted in 1913. They did not all wear helmets. The team was made up of a hodgepodge of employees from three local factories. The team was all white.
Unlike the NFL, Margaret Sanger was a progressive for her time. Her birth control movement got support in Black neighborhoods, as many saw birth control as a key to self-determination. “The Negro race has reached a place in its history when every possible effort should be made to have every Negro child count as a valuable contribution to the future of America," she wrote. “Negro parents, like all parents, must create the next generation from strength, not from weakness; from health, not from despair.”
That said, Margaret Sanger was far from perfect. She embraced the prominent science of the time, eugenics, which thankfully has been widely debunked now. While timing does not excuse, nor justify, her complicated feelings — we can understand how Sanger came to believe those things and still champion her belief in reproductive freedom and women’s full equality.
Watson goes on to posit that abortion is “pushed” on minority communities. I take offense to the notion of “pushed,” in part, because I don’t even know what that actually means. But more importantly it is based on an assertion that Black women are not capable of making important decisions on their own. It presumes that if a woman decides to have an abortion, she was clearly “pushed” into such a decision.
Let’s not follow Watson’s path of confusion by wrongly focusing on race — it is a red herring. There are real reasons that inform many women’s decision to have an abortion. And we do not have to speculate to know why women have abortions.
We can ask them.
The three most common reasons women cite for having abortions are the inability to afford a child; the belief that having a baby would interfere with work, school, or the ability to care for dependents; and concern for or responsibility to other individuals. Many report that they did not want to be a single parent or were having problems with their husband or partner.
Women do not have abortions because the procedures are pushed on Black communities. Women have abortions because they weigh the myriad factors in their lives and decide an abortion is the right choice. For Black women, and many women of color, those factors are often quite complicated, including lack of access to healthcare and pregnancy prevention options as well as wealth and income disparities. Far too many women feel the overwhelming effect of the U.S. jail and prison policies. All of these factors together influence a women’s decision to raise children.
Obscuring facts to create an unfounded race-based claim distracts us from really working toward social justice: The radical notion that all women should be able to determine if and when to have children and to be able to raise the children they have.
Watson, an NFL football player who married his high school sweetheart, may not know these issues first hand. But as a tight end who is "never afraid to voice his opinion," in this moment he could serve social justice a great favor by taking a much needed time out.
