Another week, another attack on Planned Parenthood. It’s getting old.
Planned Parenthood provides basic medical services–reproductive health services–to women who cannot otherwise afford those services. We’re talking breast cancer screenings, pap smears and yes, contraception. Abortion amounts to 3% of the organization’s services.
Periodically, groups opposed to abortion, contraception and (most of all) women’s moral autonomy, try to “set up” the organization. The AP reported about the most recent effort, which has drawn predictable outrage from the predictable suspects:
In last week’s video, Nucatola discusses how the group sometimes provides tissue from aborted fetuses for medical research…A nine-minute excerpt the center posted online shows Nucatola saying her organization charges $30 to $100 for such procedures. But in the full version lasting more than two hours, she repeatedly says those prices only cover the procedures’ costs, are not for profit and are only performed with the patient’s consent.
One of the most complete accounts of what seems to be a sustained, expensive and relatively sophisticated effort to invent misdeeds by Planned Parenthood was offered by the Daily Beast, and is worth quoting at length:
The videos appear to be part of a lengthy and expensive project that Daleiden, who is 26 and a relatively fresh face in the pro-life movement, could not have funded on his own.
Indeed, since the release of the first video, new details have emerged about the other individuals associated with the CMP’s undercover investigation—associations that go beyond Daleiden’s history with the anti-abortion group Live Action, which has also produced heavily edited sting videos in Planned Parenthood facilities.
A 2013 registration form obtained by The Nation last week revealed the names of Daleiden’s fellow board members at the CMP: Albin Rhomberg and Troy Newman.
Rhomberg has a long and strident history of anti-abortion activism—one California Planned Parenthood worker says that he once followed her “for an entire city block, barely 3 feet away, filming and shouting at me about my evil work with Planned Parenthood”—but it is Newman’s association with the CMP that has raised the most eyebrows.
Newman is the president of Operation Rescue, a pro-life organization that became the center of national media attention when George Tiller, a Kansas physician who provided late-term abortions, was assassinated by anti-abortion activist Scott Roeder in 2009 during worship services at Tiller’s church….
Further connections between Operation Rescue and the CMP investigation have emerged in conjunction with this latest video. In Operation Rescue’s announcement of the second video, the logo for the CMP’s Human Capital Project includes the phrase “In consultation with Operation Rescue.”
Let’s stipulate that people who kill abortion doctors are not “pro life.”
Let’s also stipulate that people who edit footage to make it appear that their targets have said things they never said and done things they haven’t done–fanatics whose sole mission is to destroy an organization that saves women’s lives– is not “pro life.”
And while we’re at it, let’s also concede that fetal tissue, when freely donated to medical research by fully informed patients, has long provided the promise of developing treatments for some of the cruelest diseases that afflict human beings–and that providing such donations in a manner consistent with law and medical ethics is “pro life.”
Facts, of course, are irrelevant to politicians willing to seize on any ammunition–no matter how dishonest or contrived. As the New York Times editorialized,
A hidden-camera video released last week purported to show that Planned Parenthood illegally sells tissue from aborted fetuses. It shows nothing of the sort. But it is the latest in a series of unrelenting attacks on Planned Parenthood, which offers health care services to millions of people every year. The politicians howling to defund Planned Parenthood care nothing about the truth here, being perfectly willing to undermine women’s reproductive rights any way they can.
Do you notice these pro-life leaders are primarily men? Men who have Viagra and erectile dysfunction supplies available through their health care plans, men who do not have to experience pregnancies which are at times life-threatening or the result of rape or incest? Men who primarily run the businesses providing health care coverage plans denying birth control options to many women? Men who are the ones who impregnate the women who are denied birth control or abortion? Men who are taking away many forms of assistance to raise the children who are the result of denied birth control or forced pregnancies? Men who deny women their civil rights as protected by the XIV Amendment?
But; consider this, these men are also being elected by women who are misusing the hard fought for XIX Amendment and suffering the consequences.
The Daily Beast is not an objective news source. It’s the voice of the radical leftist crazies in the clown car who are pushing the Culture of Death.
If you want a good examination of the matter, FoxNews has a good story, as does the National Review, titled “The Moral Rot at the Core of Planned Parenthood Is on Full Display.”
Does anyone else notice that these attacks on Planned Parenthood always seem to coincide with times when the Republican Party is floundering? Like when one of their own turns on all the others? When their crazy base needs to be drawn back into line?
The Center for Medical progress is to be applauded for exposing clearly the great lie behind abortion.
If the fetus isn’t an unborn baby human, how come it has human organs? Usable, desirable and valuable human organs, no less.
Nothing else on Earth has human organs besides humans.
Whether we can end abortion, it’s clear that we need to end the butchery that is Planned Parenthood.
Good grief AGAIN. Why is it that “only” Fox spews has this edited video with misleading information about the process PP allows their patients?
One of my nieces is a nurse that works in the children’s cancer hospital in Chicago and she and her sister both donated their cord blood (from their birthing process) for research when they had their babies last March. They did this for the benefit of humans for research and I’m sure that their health care insurance covered the minimal costs to send this bodily fluid to science. Just because PP offers this service doesn’t make it immoral, it makes it quite sensible for further research of that tissue and blood for the betterment of mankind/womankind. This whole video scam is the just the latest to slime a process that PP participates in for their shock and awe campaign against women and science and to rile up their base by falsifying the video without providing the argument how it benefits mankind. It’s stupid and the whole fox spews audience fell for it.
If the tissues from the procedure go into the incinerator there is no chance of anything good coming from the entire process. IF Medical research comes up with a cure for something from the tissue that is diverted from the incinerator, that seems like a Pro-Life result. Those are the two choices AFTER the event. Incinerator or research. The mother has already made her decision about the pregnancy.
It looks like this is going to be the “Diverter” issue for GOP 2016
As always,Hopper is predictable, and wrong.
I know that Gopper is not likely to have his mind changed by facts, but try these: http://www.factcheck.org/2015/07/unspinning-the-planned-parenthood-video/
The matter is not as simple as Dr. Seuss Kennedy makes it out, or why would Planned Parenthood be currently circling the wagons? http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/planned-parenthood-damage-control-gop-demands-answers-120491.html
Which is not to say I’m against Planned Parenthood – I’m all for their activities. I also think it’s reasonable for them to charge reasonable costs to furnish tissue samples to researchers, however bad some groups may make such a practice look.
Life begins at Erection ?
“The mother has already made her decision about the pregnancy.”
But this isn’t true. The mother’s decision making is being guided and steered by people with a tremendous conflict of interest and deep financial interest in influencing a woman to obtain an abortion.
The Center for Medical Progress has ably exposed the deep evil in Planned Parenthood’s abortion business.
The deeper evil is that the people who support Planned Parenthood want more abortions, a lower birth rate and global depopulation, so they’ll support outright murder to further their ends. They don’t think of you as fully human in the same way they are, and they look at you as merely a source of labor or bodily organs.
Interesting story, Amanda.
PP is engaging in some heavy PR intended to repair the considerable damage to Planned Parenthood’s reputation inflicted by the organ-selling debacle.
I just found a hilarious double entendre in the politico article Amanda posted.
“This has been a continual multi-year effort to get rid of Planned Parenthood,” said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who co-signed the letter. ”
Here’s the funny part:
“We are not going to take it laying down. We are going to be fighting every inch of the way…”
Well, Jan, someone took it laying down, every inch of the way. That’s why we have this problem. She had to know she was doing this. You just accidentally say something like this in this topic.
There has been a significant drop in abortions with implementation of Obamacare which includes access to contraception.
Planned Parenthood also has prevented many times more abortions than it has performed due to its provision of contraceptive care to poor women. Unfortunately Panned Parenthood clinics are not available in many communities. If Planned Parenthood is eliminated, it’s likely abortions – especially unsafe abortions which were the catalyst for the Roe v. Wade decision – will increase.
Many abortions are sought by women who can’t afford more children. But it logically follows that if they can’t afford reproductive health care, they can’t afford more children. If we want more poor women and children to remain poor and dependent, de-funding Planned Parenthood will accomplish that goal.
ergo: some man gave it layin down, every inch of the way.
Yet, he has no culpability. Right?
Arguing science and facts to people of Gopper ‘s ilk, unfortunately, is a waste of time. To paraphrase the Republican Governor of Louisiana, the Republican Party has become the Party of Stupid. Very sad. All of us should hope that Republicans nominate their George McGovern in 2016 so we can get back to politics based in reality.
Let’s go back to the beginning. A circle of cohorts who come to the realization that their almost unlimited wealth was just not very satisfying. It was really about power all along and they had fallen for the greedy generation meme that money is the point.
What to do.
Power comes from the people in democracy and they had used people all their lives and realized and conspired to obtain their lusted for power by using people again but now to elect political prostitutes, and the end game of power would ultimately be theirs. Simple and slow but ultimately they’d get what they felt entitled to.
The first question to be asked then was what groups would be most maleable? They had some models as benchmarks. The NRA had demonstrated success in the arms business playing to rednecks and inventing the brand of superpatriot following the Rambo plot. The Evangelical Christian Church demonstrated such success that they could pull off the trained people show of getting folks to handle deadly reptiles. Racists had for years demonstrated such blind alligiance to the once and hoped for future of slavery. Make others do the work and along the way salve weak ego by downgrading different people.
A cast made in heaven ready for harvesting.
The Kochs and the Bushes and Adelson and Rex Tillerson and Rupert Murdoch and such hired Limbaugh and Atwater and Norquist and Beck and Ailes and Rove and Cheney and showed them what real wealth felt like. The tradition of drug dealers and pimps everywhere. The easily led following the easily bought to the oligarchs nirvana. Owning the greatest nation on earth.
So easy. Trumpeting problems with no solutions as the failures of reasonable people thus requiring the help of the non thinkers.
Abortion, climate change, economics, education, diplomacy, poverty, civic literacy, the down trodden, war, etc could be packaged as meat for the dog packs who would rise up in mighty outrage with not the hint of a solution and attack freedom as the source of the failure.
The best of times for the currupt lusting for power, the worst for the land of the free, home of the brave.
The race was on between the gullible and the knowledgeable for the future of democracy and freedom and progress. The future being the stakes.
Fortunately our forbearers knew the value of education and had invested in it as the bulwarks of democracy. Knowledge will win the war but has and will lose some battles along the way. Future generations are being taught well the high price of subservience and learning defenses against it. The intellectual pimps and drug dealers are finding fewer willing victims.
As victors one of our responsibilities is to write our history as a lesson for future generations. Freedom is expensive but slavery unaffordable.
“Culpability,” Earl?
I don’t get what you’re trying to say. How are men germane to PP selling organs?
“Pete”
Was that autogenerated text? Do you actually exist as a human?
Why do you all let Gopper derail the conversation? He’s always citing data sources which are right-wing and biased, then chastising you for doing the same thing. His facts are just opinions and don’t deserve the attention you shower on him. Ignore him.
Gopper, almost every day you demonstrate and reinforce what I say. You are my evidence.
According to a letter to the editor in today’s Star, fetal tissue donation isn’t even offered at Planned Parenthood centers in Indiana, so Pence is doing an unnecessary investigation. I guess if they don’t have a reason, they will make one up. Here’s the text of the letter:
A video. A call for investigations. A demand for defunding.
It’s a familiar refrain from detractors of Planned Parenthood, who, predictably, focus on a small (and legal) percentage of the organization’s work, make a call for Planned Parenthood to go away entirely.
In the latest instance, the subject of the video — fetal tissue donation — isn’t even offered at Planned Parenthood health centers in Indiana, but that didn’t stop Gov. Mike Pence from demanding the investigation of nothing.
The fact is, taking funding from Planned Parenthood is taking funding from the public health of our state. Consider Scott County, Ind. Funding constraints led to the closure of Scott County’s Planned Parenthood clinic — the county’s only HIV-testing facility — in 2013. Now, the county is in the grips of an HIV epidemic that will require state-funded health resources for decades.
Federal money isn’t used for abortions, but it is used for education programs that help incarcerated youth make healthier decisions. It’s used to provide preventive reproductive health care to women and men. It’s also used for the kind of sexually transmitted disease counseling and testing that helps keep epidemics from occurring.
So when you contact your legislators who support Planned Parenthood, thank them for supporting the health of their community.
Dr. Mary Ruth Snyder
Indianapolis
Dr. Snyder:
The problem with delineating sources of funding is that money is fungible.
PP needs to pay a heavy price, and we can’t allow bookkeeping gymnastics to keep them from feeling the sting.
“PP needs to pay a heavy price” for not following Gopper’s feelings though complying with our law. Sounds like what Orwell prediçted in “1984”. Big Brother Gopper.
Message to Gopper:
La, la, la, la, la…I can’t hear you!
Earl; I understood what you said, would you like to have the “birds and bees talk” with Gopper or do you think a woman should handle the job?
Fundamentalists make me ill. Again with the line drawn in a place of disagreement one will seek to oppose the autonomy of another while demanding it for themselves?
Life is a chain of complex events which we intervene, shape, expand and constrain in every way possible. To do so without regard for the context is unbalanced approaching evil. The day concern is shown for the carriers as much as the cellular conglomerations not yet born is the day I may consent to discuss the decisions my daughters and all women rightfully reserve for themselves. The basic building blocks of life are squandered by the self righteous daily. The more complex ones are as well.
I look forward to the day when one who thinks he may inflict the sting upon another to suit his madness is laid to rest where the reward will finally be revealed for the hypocrisy it is. That’s the plight of the theocratic totalitarian.
Here’s a suggestion: Skip over the posts by Gopper. That’s what I do and it’s wonderful.
While sparring with Gopper is easy and entertaining it also serves an extremely important function as well. It reminds us what’s at stake in 2016.
We tend to chalk up the darkness of 2008 as mere Bush blunder but that debacle was more the result of conservative policy than anything. It could return.
It is still unaffordable.
Al Bush said:
“The basic building blocks of life are squandered by the self righteous daily.”
Al missed the irony of talking about “the basic building blocks of life” in a discussion where he’s condoning genocide.
Al, the most “basic building block of life” is life, itself.
Skipped…
I notice that no one applies the ‘T’ word to Right to Life and Operation Rescue, who, while denying involvement in terrorist attacks on abortion clinics and workers have effectively limited every woman’s access to reproductive rights. Last I checked, abortion was legal, but after the decades long campaign of assassinations, targeting, harassment and intimidation, to which law enforcement has taken little or no action until someone is dead, and then the ‘lone wolf’ meme is applied rather than investigate these terrorists groups. And, yes, I do call them terrorists. If you look at what defines a terrorist or aiding terrorists groups, these people should be in Guantanamo. But we are all just so used to the Klan mindset in our midst that we tolerate the clinic violence and don’t demand law enforcement look behind the curtain.
“Last I checked, abortion was legal”
No, abortion is not legal. No legislative process ever made abortion legal. The Supreme Court merely intruded on each state’s rightful legislative process and illegally forbade states from making abortion illegal.
The Supreme Court’s ruling was illegal, and self-appointed Supreme Court supremacy is the curtain that everybody is finally starting to look behind.
Great! Then I’m coming for your guns–because you ain’t got no huevos!