A seventh undercover video has been released exposing legally dubious and morally repugnant practices by Planned Parenthood officials.
In this latest video, Holly O’Donnell, a former technician who collected aborted fetal tissue from Planned Parenthood facilities, says she extracted the brain from an aborted fetus whose heart was still beating. In past videos, high-ranking Planned Parenthood employees have been shown haggling over prices for fetal organs.
Whatever else abortion may be about, it fundamentally involves the taking of a human life, brutally with scalpel, forceps, scissors or vacuum. Yet, abortion has always been clouded in euphemism.
A fetus isn’t an unborn baby, its advocates claim; rather, it is the “product of conception.” The killing of a fetus or unborn child isn’t even called an abortion (a euphemism to begin with); instead, it is grouped in with notions of “the right to choose,” “reproductive rights” “reproductive health” or just “women’s health care.” Killing a baby after she emerges from her mother’s womb isn’t infanticide, it’s “snipping,” as infamous (and now imprisoned) abortion practitioner Kermit Gosnell put it.
Nowadays, the abortion-rights crowd isn’t even comfortable using the word “abortion.” Review any speech President Obama has given on the subject and you’ll be hard-pressed to find him uttering the word, much less describing the procedure.
Tellingly, more than a decade ago the National Abortion Rights Action League officially changed its name to NARAL Pro-Choice America. The acronym no longer stands for anything. One suspects it’s because the group figured many Americans were uneasy about an organization whose title combines the words “abortion” and “action.”
Pro-life advocates have long accused their adversaries of being unwilling to speak candidly about abortion. But that’s not exactly right. While it’s true that abortion-rights supporters don’t speak honestly about abortion in public, they can be quite candid in private.
The Planned Parenthood videos show senior people in the abortion industry discussing abortion in a way that makes the humanity of the fetus impossible to deny. They casually discuss harvesting intact livers, hearts and lungs.
In a previous undercover video, O’Donnell talked about how she fainted on the first day of her job. “I thought I was going to be just drawing blood, not procuring tissue from aborted fetuses,” she said. In the most recent video, she says, “I’m sitting here and looking at this fetus and its heart is beating.” She recounts how a colleague then instructed her to extract the brain by first cutting open the baby’s face.
If nothing else comes of these videos, they will at least expose the graphic truth about what an abortion entails — the killing of a being whose humanity cannot be denied.
Daniel Allott is deputy commentary editor for the Washington Examiner
