A recent MSNBC panel of women in a little-watched show called “The Cross Connection” stooped to a new low in smearing pro-life women as being racists and seeing black women as human “incubators.” They smeared Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch's filing in the upcoming Supreme Court case defending Mississippi’s law prohibiting abortion after 15 weeks as “acting in the interest of conservatives and other wealthy white women.”

That noxious statement’s meanness is only surpassed by its ignorance. If MSNBC had any credibility left, it’s gone now. Here are the facts they conveniently missed: pro-life advocates’ true mission is to protect unborn babies from being killed in abortions and love, compassion, and care for mothers.

MSNBC insulted not just white women, but millions of women of color who count themselves pro-life. Concerned Women for America’s diverse leaders and activists find our identity in Christ and deep unity in purpose of speaking for the defenseless. We know those on the panel to be complicit in false and harmful othering. For some people, woke ideology and race have become a religion without grace, and the Democratic Party is running itself off the cliff following their lead.

Like so much of woke ideology, the truth is the opposite of the allegations. Women of color from the very beginning have been leaders in the pro-life movement. For instance, Dr. Mildred Jefferson, the first African American woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School and the first woman to become a member of the Boston Surgical Society, was so important to history that her papers are archived at Harvard. She an early leader of the pro-life movement and served as president of the National Right to Life Committee for three terms from 1975 to 1978.

Add to her ranks women like Kay Coles James, Dr. Alevda King, Star Parker, Sancha Smith, and millions of other black women active in the pro-life movement, many of whom are members of Concerned Women for America and our collegiate arm, Young Women for America. We are grateful for young minority women stepping forward to lead today. I welcome the MSNBC commentators to the next March for Life to meet some of these amazing women.

Yes, there are racists, but they’re not the pro-life women who give their time and treasure to pregnancy care medical clinics and walk alongside women for years, helping them to find their way, even taking them into their own homes for support. The panel needed to instead look at Planned Parenthood of America (PPA) and the abortion movement to find racists.

Without smearing everyone within the abortion movement the way they did to us, we can acknowledge the movement is replete with historic and systemic racism. Beginning with PPA’s founder, Margaret Sanger, the abortion rights movement has set themselves up as the arbiters of who is worthy of life with themselves as the judge.

In the 1920s, Sanger was one of the top leaders of the American eugenics movement who succeeded in passing laws and forced sterilizations of people she called “feeble minded” and “human weeds,” mainly black women and Jewish immigrants. They were successful in adding eugenics curriculum in 350 universities.

Sanger advanced what she called a “Negro Project,” written about in her own autobiography, about speaking to a KKK group to advocate a eugenics approach to breeding for “the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extinction of defective stocks.”

Sanger and her friends, notably Harry Laughlin, even petitioned the Supreme Court and won in the case Buck v. Bell, named after rape victim Carrie Buck, whom the Commonwealth of Virginia forced into sterilization after she had a child out of wedlock. That case became the permission slip for states all over the nation to do the same. Then they exported their hateful ideology to Nazi Germany into the open arms of Adolf Hitler and his henchmen.

True to its original mission, Planned Parenthood today continues to target minorities. Almost 80 percent of their surgical abortion facilities are located within walking distance of African American or Hispanic communities, and 60 percent are in minority ZIP codes.

African American mothers have a disproportionately high number of abortions compared to other racial groups. They make up 13 percent of the U.S. population, and have nearly 40 percent of all abortions. In New York City alone, health statistics show that more African American babies are aborted than are born in the city most years.

The billion-dollar abortion industry directly profits from the death of minority babies, whereas the pro-life movement works to support life and liberty for them. It’s hard to know which is more offensive: the ugly lies or the blatant, and perhaps willful, ignorance. Regardless, pro-life women will continue to joyfully link arms across racial barriers and enjoy the unity others in our nation should seek.