Milo Yiannopoulos once called Saturday Night Live diversity hire Leslie Jones “barely literate,” a move that earned him a permanent suspension from Jack Dorsey’s Twitter; but now, Yiannopoulos has been exonerated, and Dorsey owes him a big fat apology.
Less than two weeks ago Jones’s new memoir (grossly titled Leslie F*cking Jones) hit shelves, and last week, Insider published an article on the book, highlighting one particular part of Jones’s story: the “lifeline” of abortion, and specifically, the “saviorhood” of Planned Parenthood. From Insider:
Leslie Jones revealed that she had three abortions by her mid-twenties, and wasn’t educated about using protection until she visited a Planned Parenthood.
…
‘Prevention is what we should be teaching. If I’d even had an inkling of how to protect myself… I didn't know any of that stuff. By my mid-twenties, I had had three abortions, and I thought, This is not a birth control method,’ Jones wrote.
…
Jones first got pregnant when she was 18 years old, and got an abortion without her parents' knowledge or support.
‘With the abortion, just the idea of having to go do this grown-ass thing, and I don’t have my mom to help me?’ Jones wrote. ‘I didn't have anyone.’
(Sex is a “grown-ass thing” and it’s an indescribable tragedy that no one was there to teach her that.)
Yiannopoulos’s original judgment against Jones’s intellect seems far too mild—she isn’t just “barely literate” she’s evidently mentally challenged—18 years old, but no “inkling” on how to prevent pregnancy? Really? No “inkling” whatsoever? What did she think, that the stork dropped babies at the doorstep? She said things didn’t click until her “mid-twenties,” so how did she exist more than two decades on this planet without learning about condoms, or the basic biology of what happens when egg meets sperm? Is it even possible to be that clueless without being legitimately low-IQ?
Was she voting this whole time too? Deeming herself qualified to cast ballots to shape the future of the country, affecting everyone, at the time she was sleeping around and getting “mysteriously” knocked up, not once, not twice, but thrice, while still unable to figure out how in the world these babies kept getting into her womb?
Also from the article:
‘Planned Parenthood saved my life,’ she said. ‘I still give money to them to this day. When I went to Planned Parenthood, I finally learned how to prevent pregnancies and take care of myself.’
(If Margaret Sanger were alive, I bet she’d get a kick out of a black woman paying for a hit that Sanger’s institutional legacy would happily provide as charity, then continuing the fund the work for years to come.)
I can’t tell given the limited content of the Insider article, and I will absolutely never read Jones’s book, but given the emphasis on Planned Parenthood, I assume that’s where Jones went for all three of her abortions—if so, why was the first one not her last? Jones says she “finally learned” about preventing pregnancy when she visited PP, crediting the organization with giving her the information and knowledge she somehow couldn’t access on her own… as an adult….
Now, it’s possible that Jones visited non-PP abortuaries to kill the babies conceived the first and second time around, but if she did in fact go to PP at 18, the staff either did the worst job at explaining preventative measures and basic biology, or… they manipulated a useful idiot into becoming a repeat customer. (I suspect the latter.)