Stacey Dash still loves spreading outrageous lies about Planned Parenthood

Stacey Dash, a star of the 90s classic Clueless who is now an ultra conservative contributor to Fox News, has tried once again to discredit Planned Parenthood with false, far-right wing talking points.

“If you are so pro African American communities, Planned Parenthood, stop targeting black women and aborting our children,” she wrote in a recent post on the faith-based website Patheos.

Dash, who has written on the subject before, claims that Planned Parenthood doesn’t care about black lives because clinics provide abortion services. “Black lives do matter.  And that includes the lives of black unborn children,” she wrote in an earlier post for the same website.

Last month on Fusion, I made the exact opposite point: that Planned Parenthood is in fact a wing of the Black Lives Matter movement. Planned Parenthood clinics disproportionately screen black and brown women for breast cancer and provide testing and treatment for STDs and STIs to communities of color.

Dash is drawing on old talking points about abortion in black communities. While she is technically correct—black women do have abortions at a higher rate than their white counterparts—the reasons for the disparity are not because Planned Parenthood is a nefarious baby-killing machine. It’s because black women do not have access to the affordable and comprehensive health care that would actually prevent abortions. Health care much like Planned Parenthood provides.

“[H]igher unintended pregnancy rates reflect the particular difficulties that many women in minority communities face in accessing high-quality contraceptive services and in using their chosen method of birth control consistently and effectively over long periods of time,” writes Susan Cohen in a 2008 policy review for Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit organization working to advance women’s reproductive health care. “Moreover, these realities must be seen in a larger context in which significant racial and ethnic disparities persist for a wide range of health outcomes, from diabetes to heart disease to breast and cervical cancer to sexually transmitted infections (STI), including HIV.”

“[Planned Parenthood’s] “vital” work actually means they are aborting a disproportionate number of black babies and profiting from charging their mothers for the abortion and then selling their body parts,” writes Dash.

It’s been three months since the release of a slanderous, edited video claiming Planned Parenthood sells fetal tissue. And it’s been that same amount of time since the rumor was dispelled by Planned Parenthood.

But Stacey Dash still clings to the lies, cause that’s all she’s got.

Collier Meyerson is a reporter at Fusion with a focus on race and politics. She lives in Brooklyn.