Recently, citizen journalists from the Center for Medical Progress produced an undercover video showing Dr. Deborah Nucatola, senior director of medical services for Planned Parenthood, discussing the sale of organs from aborted babies.
Nucatola’s comments included her saying, “We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.”
A second undercover video shows Mary Gatter, president of Planned Parenthood’s medical directors’ council, discussing “less crunchy” methods to abort in order to obtain intact organs and engage in thinly-veiled price negotiation. More videos have subsequently been released revealing similarly morally repellant activities by Planned Parenthood employees.
Mainstream media’s coverage was notably slow and downplayed the most jarring aspects of the videos, even using Planned Parenthood’s talking points in several instances. The New York Times did so in many of its feature stories before running a July 22 editorial venting against the news-breakers.
Titled “The Campaign of Deception Against Planned Parenthood,” the editorial blasted the notion that the first video showed that Planned Parenthood “illegally sells tissue from aborted fetuses. It shows nothing of the sort.” Wrong. In the video, Nucatola acknowledged Planned Parenthood’s profit motive, that its affiliates are concerned about “perceptions” rather than holding actual “reservations” about compensation for fetal tissue and that “if they can do a little better than break even … they’re happy to do that.”
The editorial interestingly did not even purport to address the price haggling in the second video, but it expended plenty of ink blasting Planned Parenthood’s opponents generally for opposing that supposedly noble organization and the video-makers specifically for disguising their agenda.
This reveals a historical irony that may be shocking to modern eyes. Louis Jennings, the New York Times editor-in-chief who was celebrated for exposing New York’s corrupt Tweed Ring, employed his journalistic prowess to expose the abortionists of his time.
In 1871 Jennings deployed a feature reporter named Augustus St. Clair, accompanied by a woman claiming to be pregnant, to visit New York City’s best known commercial abortionists. The result was a series entitled “The Evil of the Age.” In his first report, subtitled “Slaughter of the Innocents,” he did not mince words: “Thousands of human beings are murdered before they have seen the light of this world, and thousands upon thousands more of adults are irremediably ruined in constitution, health and happiness.”
St. Clair identified abortionists by name and described the conditions he observed in vivid detail, such as the “[h]uman flesh, supposed to have been the remains of infants … found in barrels of lime and acids, undergoing decomposition.” He wrote of the “large number of quacks” who “compound and prescribe the most dangerous drugs, with reckless disregard of human suffering and life.”
The facilities he encountered were typically elegant, in contrast to the “ghastly pale and remorseful-looking countenances of the sufferers” who occupied them. One abortionist had serviced “Senators, Congressmen and all sorts of politicians” who “bring some of the first women of the land here.” Within a few days of St. Clair’s first report, the body of a 20-year-old woman was discovered in a trunk inside a train station, prompting additional installments of the expose, and within a few days of that grisly discovery, St. Clair reported yet “Another Victim of the Abortionists”: a woman who delivered a stillborn baby and was not expected to survive herself.
The explicit premise of the expose: “[C]ould even a portion of the facts that have been detected in frightful profusion, by the agents of the Times, be revealed in print, in their hideous truths, the reader would shrink from the appalling picture.”
That was then. This is now. The New York Times of 2015 sees no evil in the story of the nation’s top abortion provider, except for the undercover work once recognized as investigative reporting. We will find out whether future videos do or do not provide further corroboration of the depth of Planned Parenthood’s transgressions. But we can safely predict that, whatever is found, it will be no thanks to the New York Times.
It is a commentary on the sorry state of modern journalism that it took some freelance activists to unearth this national scandal while what many consider the nation’s premier outlet for news tries to quash it. Even sorrier is the recognition of how, over the years, our civilization has been coarsened to the snuffing out, and now exploitation, of human life at its most vulnerable.
Frank Scaturro, a partner at FisherBroyles LLP, is a former Counsel for the Constitution on the Senate Judiciary Committee and past Republican and Conservative candidate for the House of Representatives in New York’s Congressional 4th District. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
