‘Ain’t I a Woman?’ – Sojourner Truth’s Life Repudiates Planned Parenthood’s Agenda

It’s Women’s History Month, yet another opportunity for abortion advocates to promote their cause by hijacking the legacy of God-fearing women. Planned Parenthood—whose use of the #blacklivesmatter hashtag raised more than a few eyebrows—decided to raise their irony quotient by tweeting a tribute to Sojourner Truth as a “former slave, abolitionist, women’s rights advocate.”

Now all those terms may indeed accurately describe Sojourner Truth, but how comfortable would this great woman have been with Planned Parenthood’s practices and agenda? Let’s start with Sojourner Truth’s own words. In her famous “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech, she notes:

I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?

Nowhere does she ever speak of her children with anything but maternal affection and grief over separation. She was in fact the first black woman in America to win a lawsuit against a white man, suing to have her five year old son returned to her after he was sold illegally. Does that sound like the action of a woman who would have fought for the right to kill her son in the womb?

Born into slavery as Isabella, she escaped to freedom with her infant daughter in 1826. After a life-changing encounter with God, she joined the Magdelene Society, a Methodist mission devoted to reforming prostitutes. Her autobiography, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, recalls this time in her life:

At that time, the ‘moral reform’ movement was awakening the attention of the benevolent in that city. Many women, among whom were Mrs. Latourette and Miss Grear, became deeply interested in making an attempt to reform their fallen sisters, even the most degraded of them; and in this enterprise of labor and danger, they enlisted Isabella and others, who for a time put forth their most zealous efforts, and performed the work of missionaries with much apparent success. Isabella accompanied those ladies to the most wretched abodes of vice and misery, and sometimes she went where they dared not follow. They even succeeded in establishing prayer-meetings in several places, where such a thing might least have been expected.

Celebrated by Pro-Life heroine Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth’s work with prostitutes was to lead them to Christ and rescue them from a life of degradation. How would she have responded to Planned Parenthood’s “safe sex” propaganda, which reduces women of all ages to unpaid prostitutes?

Sojourner Truth’s message was one of hope, holiness, freedom, and the equal value of all people. In her day, it was blacks and women who were being dehumanized in law, and she fought bravely for their rights. I believe that if she were alive today, she would have nothing but disgust for Planned Parenthood’s agenda.

Dean Nelson is the National Outreach Director at Online for Life, working out the Washington D.C. area. He is also the Chairman of the Board for the Frederick Douglass Foundation. He has worked for other major pro-life and Christian organizations including CareNet and Global Outreach Campus Ministries. Rev. Nelson also served as part of the Wellington Boone Ministries’ senior strategic planning team, which planted ministries in capital cities like Richmond, Virginia, Atlanta, Georgia, Raleigh, North Carolina and the greater Washington, DC area.

Photo credit: American Life League (Creative Commons) – Some Rights Reserved