Alveda King cites personal experience in call to defund Planned Parenthood

Washington D.C., Oct 1, 2008 / 00:48 am

Pro-life leader Dr. Alveda King, niece of civil rights leader Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., recently discussed her past experiences seeking services from a Planned Parenthood clinic in an interview. Saying the organization gave her “bad advice, bad counsel” and lied about her abortion, she called for taxpayer funding to be pulled from Planned Parenthood.

Speaking to Cybercast News Service, Dr. King described how she had two abortions and then later a miscarriage in the early 1970s, years before she joined the pro-life movement.

Describing herself as “uninformed and misinformed” about abortion, King said the doctor who performed the first abortion sent her to Planned Parenthood for the second.

There, counselors told her that the unborn child was not a baby, “it’s just a blob of tissue.”

“…between the two abortions and the surgical procedures, the IUD (intra-uterine device), and the birth-control pill, I got pregnant again later and had a miscarriage,” she continued. “So Planned Parenthood, [which] was supposed to be my health provider, continued to give me bad advice, bad counsel, and lied to me.”

King told Cybercast News Service that she believes the damage from the two abortions and the birth control devices prescribed by Planned Parenthood contributed to her subsequent miscarriage.

She went on to describe how she asked her grandfather, the late Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr., who was the pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, for advice during a later pregnancy.

“He told me, ‘No, that’s a baby, not a blob of tissue. They’re lying, that’s a child,’” King said, explaining that her grandfather helped break what she called her family’s “cycle of death.”

Alveda King also reported that her grandfather had convinced her own mother not to abort her.

“Congress must defund Planned Parenthood,” King told Cybercast News Service. “Planned Parenthood is hurting our communities, it’s taking away lives.”

According to Planned Parenthood’s 2006-2007 annual report, the organization received over $300 million in federal grants and contracts last year, a figure which composes one third of its total revenue. The organization is the largest abortion provider in the United States, performing 264,943 abortions in 2005 and 289,750 abortions in 2006.

King also charged that Planned Parenthood targets the black community.

“Most of the Planned Parenthood clinics are in African American communities,” she stated.

Alveda King additionally charged that Planned Parenthood lied to her uncle, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., when it presented to him its Margaret Sanger Award in 1966.

Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger is regarded by some as a racist who wanted to control the black population.

“They said that, as a Negro leader, we want to commend you for caring about the community and of course we want to help you build a stronger community,” King explained, speaking of her uncle’s award. “But they [Planned Parenthood] had every intention, not of building a strong black community, but rather of becoming the largest abortion provider in America, being primarily responsible for the massive amount of black people that have been aborted.”

King said her uncle’s own statement “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” can be brought to bear on abortion.

“None of us can win, if we continue to abort our children,” she said.