Posted on July 29,
2015
What If Planned Parenthood
Was Law-Abiding?
by
Daniel
Clark
Public outrage over the undercover videos of Planned
Parenthood by the pro-life Center for Medical Progress has been driven largely
by PP’s apparent admissions of illegal activities. It’s plain to see that the population control
organization is involved in the illegal marketing of fetal body parts, and its
senior medical director, Deborah Nucatola, basically
admitted that the abortionists are still using the partial-birth procedure that
has been illegal since 2003. Mary Gatter, another PP medical director, ghoulishly suggested
“using a less crunchy technique to get more whole specimens,” even though it is
also illegal to alter an abortion procedure in order to procure organs.
Not
that flouting the law is anything new for Planned Parenthood, one of whose main
societal functions has been to aid and abet statutory rapists. The “women’s health care providers” have also
illegally endangered countless women by administering the abortion drug
combination RU-486 in ways that are contraindicated by FDA guidelines.
There’s no doubt that Planned Parenthood is a
thoroughly criminal enterprise, but is that really why we should be so
mad? The truth be known, what’s got the
abortionists’ spin machine churning is not their legal culpability, because
they are confident that their political allies will protect them from
prosecution. It’s the exposure of what
their business consists of, even when they’re obeying the law.
For decades, they’ve succeeded in censoring the speech
of their critics. One mustn’t call them
“baby killers,” for instance. In polite
society, they’re referred to as “women’s reproductive healthy-choicey-body-thingey rights
providers,” or some such drivel. Those
rules of decorum may soon be abandoned, however, now that these videos are
peeling away all the layers of euphemism, and broadcasting to the world that Planned
Parenthood is killing babies.
To focus on the criminal facet of the scandal will
only give the liberal media an excuse to dismiss everything, by mischaracterizing
the absence of prosecution as an exoneration.
Then, no matter how damning any new information about Planned Parenthood
may be, they can say it’s already been investigated and found to be nothing. It’s the same approach that has spared the Clintons
from the consequences of their actions for decades.
Besides, our government has already known about the
sale of fetal organs at least as far back as 2000, when two body part
wholesalers named Opening Lines and the Anatomic Gift Foundation were the
subjects of congressional hearings. Like
Planned Parenthood, those wholesalers denied the charges by describing the
transactions as “donations.” Their story
was that the abortion clinics “donated” the organs, with the wholesalers only
paying a “site fee” for the use of the rooms where the dissections took place,
and that the wholesalers in turn “donated” the parts to their clients, who paid
a considerable lot for shipping and handling.
They got away with that evasion, despite the discovery of an Opening
Lines price list detailing how much was being charged for each organ (“Brain [less
than or equal to 8 weeks] $999 – 30% discount if significantly fragmented.”) Listening to the PPFA’s rhetoric, its
officials must be acutely aware of that precedent.
Just
because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s not an atrocity, or that its
practitioners should not be condemned and ostracized. Partial-birth abortion did not suddenly
become evil when George W. Bush signed the law banning it; otherwise, public
outrage over the practice would have been unjustified, just as long as the
abortionists had Bill Clinton’s veto pen to protect them.
The same is true about the abortion industry in
general. The most horrifying thing about
Gatter’s “less crunchy technique” remark is not that
Planned Parenthood is breaking the law, but that it routinely employs techniques
of varying degrees of crunchiness to separate tiny hearts, lungs and livers
from their rightful owners. If we allow
ourselves to lose sight of that, the rest will mean nothing. If it’s not a national scandal that more than
a million innocent people are being dismembered and killed every year, then how
much can it really matter what’s done with their organs once they’re dead?
Let’s pretend for a minute that Planned Parenthood
isn’t really selling fetal body parts.
Let’s assume instead that they are using standard abortion procedures,
and then simply disposing of the babies’ bodies as medical waste. If our only concern is that the law be
obeyed, then there can’t be any cause for outrage, can there? Babies, schmabies. As long as they’re using the crunchy technique,
it’s none of anyone’s business. There’s
nothing to see here. Move along.
The Shinbone: The
Frontier of the Free Press