Planned Parenthood is back in the news after a pro-life investigative group released videos purporting to show organization officials discussing the price to sell organs and other material from aborted fetuses for medical research. Conservative politicians are calling again for the federal government to defund Planned Parenthood; defenders say the videos don’t prove that Planned Parenthood broke any federal law.
What’s the future of Planned Parenthood? Joel Mathis and Ben Boychuk, the RedBlueAmerica columnists, debate.
Group limits abortions, keeps procedure safe
Mostly, I’d like to avoid the topic of abortion.
Why? Because I understand and empathize with moral arguments on both sides. Ultimately, I come down on the pro-choice side of things; I truly believe that a woman’s liberty interests are bound up in her control over her own reproductive health. But it’s a much closer moral call than you’d know from our collective 40-year freakout on the topic.
What this means is that I don’t think a fetus has full rights or protections of a full-born person, admittedly. But I also think a fetus is something more than nothing, something more than a mere clump of cells. Some societies have figured out how to honor that paradox while still permitting the practice of abortion — Google “Japan” and its “mizuko jizo” dolls — and that seems like a sensible approach to me. America’s polarized views on the topic don’t leave much room to see some merit on both sides.
So I’m not troubled that Planned Parenthood makes fetal tissue available to researchers. As I understand it, that donation — when the process is working like it should — is done only with the permission of the woman having the abortion. Such a process can treat the affair with reverence while saving lives down the road.
Now tapes have emerged that appear to depict Planned Parenthood leaders dickering over the cost of fetal body parts. It sure doesn’t look great. So what to do?
A modest suggestion: Outlaw donations entirely, or designate a third party to set standard rates of tissue donations so that awkward, ugly haggling sessions don’t take place. But de-fund Planned Parenthood? Bad idea. The organization provides affordable non-abortive health care to thousands of women; I know a few who’ve benefitted.
Ultimately, the folks who have brought these tapes to public view are trying to end abortion, not the unsightly practices that surround the procedure. The tapes are just an excuse to do what they want to do anyway. It would be bad if they succeeded: Planned Parenthood’s continued existence is our best bet of keeping abortion safe — and rare.
—Joel Mathis
Federal money still bankrolls abortions
Planned Parenthood shouldn’t get one more dollar of taxpayer support. Not even one more dime.
Planned Parenthood is in the abortion business. Part of the business model apparently involves selling intact organs from aborted babies. The videos released by the Center for Medical Progress show top Planned Parenthood executives discussing how best to extract fetuses to ensure their organs are suitable for sale.
It’s unclear whether Planned Parenthood’s clients realize they’ve consented to “donate” their unborn children’s remains. It’s ghastly business in any event.
The $1.2 billion national organization receives more than $500 million in government funds. Federal dollars are not supposed to subsidize Planned Parenthood’s abortions directly. So what? Money is fungible and none of other services Planned Parenthood provides — referrals for breast cancer screenings, pap smears and the like — are not also offered by other, considerably less bloodstained women’s health care providers.
Planned Parenthood’s most strident defenders insist the videos are a selectively edited “hoax,” and what the executives are shown discussing is perfectly legal anyway. In fact, the videos are not a hoax — the unedited versions are freely available online. And abortion’s partisans cannot defend the morality of negotiating prices for fetal organs, so they’re left to mere legalisms and euphemisms such as “fetal tissue.”
Sorry, but euphemism will not do. Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood’s senior abortionist shown in the first video, casually describes over a salad and a glass of red wine how she uses an ultrasound to make sure she extracts the baby with its vital — and most marketable — organs in one piece.
“We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m going to basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact,” Nucatola says.
Heart, lung, liver — not just “tissue.”
People who are genuinely on the fence need to pay heed to what Planned Parenthood’s executives do and say in private, and be skeptical of the spin their PR managers are peddling now. Dead babies shouldn’t be commodities to be traded like pork bellies. And taxpayers shouldn’t have to boost Planned Parenthood’s bottom line.
—Ben Boychuk
Ben Boychuk is associate editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. Joel Mathis is associate editor for Philadelphia Magazine.
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