Planned Parenthood has been “vindicated” in a scandal involving its controversial practice of harvesting of organs from the remains of aborted children, the New York Times’ editorial board declared this week.
The newspaper’s declaration comes after a Houston grand jury declined this month to indict the nation’s largest provider of abortions, and instead indicted two pro-life activists, David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, who are responsible for bringing the fetal organ scandal to light.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said after indictment was announced that the state attorney general’s office and the State Health and Human Services Commission would continue to investigate Planned Parenthood over a series of secretly recorded videos showing affiliates and executives haggling over compensation for donated organs.
“This is a purely political campaign of intimidation and persecution meant to destroy an organization whose mission to serve women’s health care needs the governor abhors,” the Times editorial board wrote.
The group behind the secret videos, the Center for Medical Progress, has released more than 20 hours of raw footage, as well as complete audio transcripts. Their investigation has resulted in both chambers of Congress launching investigations, and renewed efforts by lawmakers to see the abortion provider defunded.
Planned Parenthoods’ go-to defense has been to accuse CMP of “selectively editing” the tapes. (A Planned Parenthood-commissioned analysis agreed that the tapes raised questions about editing, but the research firm behind the report, Fusion GPS, admitted to watching only four videos.)
Several reporters have repeated this accusation, but many of them have also declined to say whether they’ve actually watched all of the footage released by CMP.
The Times is included in the list of newsrooms that have said repeatedly that they videos reveal nothing disconcerting, but refuse to say whether they’ve actually viewed all the available footage.
“Neither the videos nor the many investigations that followed have found any evidence that Planned Parenthood employees offered to sell fetal tissue for a profit,” the newspaper said, referring to several state-run investigations that have revealed no wrongdoing.
The Times concluded that Daleiden and his group have caused great harm to a group that has been clearly “vindicated,” they added.
“These efforts threaten to deprive the country’s poorest women of health services they need, including cancer screenings, contraceptive care and sexually transmitted infection testing. In many parts of the country, Planned Parenthood is the only source of contraceptive services for low-income women,” the Times argued.
Hopefully, the paper continued, the indictments of Daleiden and Merritt will convince politicians to, “back away from an antiabortion group that will stop at nothing to attack Planned Parenthood.”
Still, even if they’re convicted, the penalties facing Daleiden and Merritt “will not undo the damage the videos have already done to Planned Parenthood and women’s health and reproductive rights,” they concluded. “State and federal officials who care about the truth should work to remedy that damage in any way they can.”
The Times is not alone in using the indictments as an excuse to proclaim Planned Parenthood innocent.
CNN also published an op-ed this week, titled “The truth behind Planned Parenthood’s vindication,” wherein the author, Sally Kohn, argued that the real villains in the story are “anti-abortion-extremists.”
