Yeah, Rebecca Watson's language is raw, but my guess is her emotions are, too. Like other informed humans, she knows that, yes - Planned Parenthood does provide abortion services, which account for 3% of all the organization's abortion efforts.
She knows that 90% of those are in the first trimester.
She knows - perhaps most important of all - that abortions are legal in the USA.
She knows that Planned Parenthood doesn't just throw out the heartbreaking remnants, but donates them to scientific research into Alzheimer's & Parkinson's & other diseases.
She knows - perhaps most important of all - that it's been legal since 1993. And she knows that 97% of Planned Parenthood's services focus on a range of women's health issues, cutting across every age race financial demographic.
And it INFURIATES her when the Religious Right & politicians & true believers who have worked diligently to overturn Roe v. Wade since the moment it passed use raw emotion to utterly override the brain - yes, what they did was legal; yes, it's legal to donate the tragic remains to scientific research; yes, over 90% of their health care services promote women's health & helps reduce medical costs across the board. To hell with all those facts - the public is up in arms over misleading videos, so let's gut the program, set Planned Parenthood out on the street!! Facts be damned!
BACKGROUND: It's weird, having my personal belief be in such disagreement with what I was taught in my birth faith. I've come to believe that something worth our protection comes into being at the instant of conception. But the ministers of my youth & young adulthood taught that life begins with the first breath, not before. Which leaves me, even now, in the position of wondering how it can be murder to kill something if it doesn't have life? To me, it would be devastating, but how can you believe that AND that life doesn't begin until the first breath? Never got it, still don't.
Excerpts from Rebecca's rather blue (as in language) video:
HOW DARE THEY! How dare Planned Parenthood allow women to aid in the research and treatment of conditions like H.I.V. and Parkinson’s disease, when instead those women could just be throwing that tissue in the garbage!
So yeah, there’s the fact that Planned Parenthood obviously isn’t “selling baby parts.” And then there’s the fact that the group releasing this video are some of the same people who worked for the group Live Action, which is best known for…editing together misleading videos attacking Planned Parenthood.
So despite the fact that this is an obviously made up and ridiculous accusation, actual politicians are taking it seriously. If you live in the US, your tax dollars are now going toward Congressional Republicans calling for a formal investigation, and the House Energy and Commerce Committee has announced they’ll launch a probe. A probe for baby parts! Good luck, guys!
This all reminds me of a course I took in college on heresy. I remember learning about how multiple times throughout human history, various groups of people have been accused of the very specific act of gathering together and hosting orgies, and then taking the resulting babies from any past orgies and burning them into ashes, which are then formed into cakes, which are then eaten. Usually it’s supposed to be the Jews doing this but plenty of other marginalized groups have been accused as well. And it always baffled me to think that people could really, truly believe that their fellow humans were doing something so obviously stupid and made up.
Well, now it’s 2015 and an organization that is mostly responsible for making sure poor women have access to basic medical care including cancer screenings, checkups, and birth control, are accused of convincing women to abort their babies and then tearing them into parts and selling them on the black market.
And I realize, that if it helps you achieve your goals — whether they be persecuting people of a different faith or cutting funding for poor women’s health care — it becomes surprisingly easy to believe something unbelievable.
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