It's getting harder to differentiate who is and who isn't. Ed Morrissey argues that we should quit focusing on whether Planned Parenthood's organ sales produced a profit:
Planned Parenthood wants to keep the debate on these points to deflect from the real debate — the nature of abortion itself, and the deliberate minimization in language that has allowed it. Abortion defenders claim that the procedure does not terminate life, and that it has no more moral meaning than excising a tumor or a cyst, a "clump of cells" in the most common construction. On Twitter, a young actor in Hollywood offered a more crude assessment this week. "A pile of goop should not have more rights than a human being," Lucas Neff tweeted, "period."
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The true danger to Planned Parenthood and the entire industry is the exposure of their hypocrisy. The two positions of "clumps of cells" and negotiating over human organs from abortions are mutually exclusive. One cannot extract human organs from "a pile of goop," or from tumors or undifferentiated "clumps of cells." Human organs come from human beings, and the only way to harvest them from unborn human beings is to kill them first. The videos cut through all of the misdirection, all of the antiseptic generalities used in defense of abortion, to expose its true nature — and that's what has Planned Parenthood panicked over the videos.
4 comments:
Good thing they have friends in high places -- judges and investigators alike swarmed to try to stop these videos from being seen.
Hey, it's just a clump of cells. Ignore the little hands and feet.
I think CMP went astray when they explicitly made this about sale of tissue. This framed the conversation around legal issues and gave an easy out ("it's for science") for those who want to dismiss the videos.
I gather that there's a legal issue about changing the method of abortion to make it easier to harvest tissues. I think the concept was to catch Planned Parenthood in a conspiracy to commit Federal crimes in order to enrich itself. The abortion issue has been so emotional for so long without changing the legality of abortion that they probably despaired that these videos could effect change by moving hearts, so they tried to effect change by proving a criminal conspiracy.
Of course the real problem isn't a technical violation of a Federal law, it's the huge immorality of the whole business. Perhaps it's like how the FBI finally got Al Capone on tax charges, after years of trying to get him for what he was really doing wrong.
Still, how nice to see that people really have been moved by these videos. It shows that there may be more hope than expected.
It's several things:
- The fact that it's illegal to sell parts of aborted fetuses for profit.
- The fact that even if it weren't illegal, people have a certain revulsion about that.
- The fact that it's unethical (toward the mother) to alter the timing or the methods used, if you're doing that in order to increase total revenue instead of for any valid medical reason.
- The vivid, visual nature of abortion providers talking candidly about selling hearts, lungs, legs, and heads to the organ-brokers, contrasted with the dickering about the prices, jokes about buying a Lambourghini with the proceeds, etc.
- The fact that this gives the video people a reason to show the said parts: the aftermath of a surgical abortion, made manifest in the little pieces of a body laid out in a specimen tray for sorting.
It's like a buffet of moral disgust: something for everyone.
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I also had not thought that anyone actually believed a seven-week-old fetus is a "clump of cells" - that is, undifferentiated. I thought this was just loose rhetoric.
But I'm hearing a surprising number of people act surprised or incredulous or downright unbelieving that a surgical abortion in the first trimester can produce developed organs and body parts. So possibly this is consciousness-raising as well, for people so ill-informed that they have no notion of fetal development at the time surgical abortions start to be done.
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