By KK Ottesen
Dec. 29, 2020
Alexis McGill Johnson, 48, is a political scientist, social justice advocate, and president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood. She is co-founder and former co-director of the Perception Institute, an anti-bias research group.
You served on the board of Planned Parenthood for nearly a decade [before] actually running the organization. Can you talk about how you first got involved?
I literally was just walking down the street and saw a billboard that I now know was run by [Life Always]. It had a little Black girl’s face on it, and she just was cute. [Laughs.] And so I got closer, and I saw the words underneath that said, “The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb.” I’m from New Jersey. My family had moved to Georgia. And so I would travel on holidays and see billboards like that and would totally write that off as being, you know, something that happened in really conservative states. And when I saw it in New York City — it was in SoHo — I just was shocked, like, What is going on here?
Continued: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/planned-parenthood-president-saying-abortion-is-a-small-part-of-what-group-does-is-stigmatizing/2020/12/18/e85b88f6-2dd1-11eb-860d-f7999599cbc2_story.html