This week, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to take federal funds away from Planned Parenthood for a year. To understand why, one need look no further than the video series on Planned Parenthood that was released over the last couple of months by the Center for Medical Progress.
The videos contained substantial evidence that Planned Parenthood affiliates are breaking two federal laws — one forbidding the alteration of abortion procedures in order to preserve organs for use in research, and another that forbids the sale of aborted babies’ organs. Planned Parenthood has denied violating these laws. Despite hints to the contrary contained within the videos, the organization claims that it only accepts reimbursements for its costs in preserving the body parts it sends to biomedical companies that use them.
But this issue goes far beyond technical legal questions, and this is what Carly Fiorina brought up during Wednesday night’s debate. She spoke about the issue of taxpayers funding an organization that aborts babies and harvests their body parts for medical experimentation as having a deeper meaning. “Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain. This is about the character of this nation.”
Some have asserted that Fiorina got some details wrong, but she didn’t miss by much. The video did indeed show a fully-formed 19-week baby who had survived an abortion — footage used by CMP with permission from the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform. The baby’s chest quivers with his heartbeat, and he moves a hand and a leg. It’s just before the six-minute mark here, and it is an image that should shock America’s conscience.
That footage did not come from a Planned Parenthood affiliate, but Fiorina did not say it did. She was, of course, incorrect in seemingly implying that people were standing around that particular dying fetus, talking about keeping it alive in order to harvest its brain. More accurately, she should have said the video shows a premature abortion survivor dying, as a former technician describes on the audio-track the procedure by which she once harvested such a baby’s brain at a Planned Parenthood facility.
Don’t let Fiorina’s slightly imprecise characterization obscure the point she was making. The outrage she pointed to was the fact that human life is treated so cheaply, extinguished and then sold for its parts, and that taxpayers fund the organization that does this every day.
The House was right to vote as it did. The Senate should follow suit. The strongest counterargument advanced by Planned Parenthood’s enablers is that the group provides vital medical services for women that cannot be provided by anyone else. But hundreds of other clinics in every U.S. state provide women’s health care — many of them actually provide mammograms, whereas Planned Parenthood does not. And still more such facilities could exist if the federal resources currently sent to profitable abortion clinics that destroy human life were instead directed to less controversial and morally problematic institutions that serve women just as well.
If this were not all about politicians scrambling for endorsements and campaign contributions from Planned Parenthood’s supporters and the various PACs and political organs run by stakeholders in the abortion industry, this group’s government funding would have vanished long ago.
