Three cheers for the Editorial Board at the Sacramento Bee for nailing what's actually happening with the hoopla over Planned Parenthood's "abuses"!! Way to go!
Shortly before the latest crusade to wreck Planned Parenthood in this
country, a Gallup Poll found that half of Americans – and a majority of
U.S. women – now view themselves as pro-choice.
Though the vast majority in the May poll rightly regarded abortion with mixed feelings, pro-lifers were in the minority, representing just 44 percent of adults; only about one American in five supported an absolute ban in all cases.
As abortion rates have dropped to a 30-year low,
entrenched opinions are gradually settling around a middle that’s more
compassionate and complex. But no evolution comes without backlash.
Maybe that’s why anti-abortion hard-liners and the Republican-controlled
Congress are coming after Planned Parenthood, a longtime lightning rod
on abortion, with everything but the kitchen sink.
The current hidden-camera campaign – the third video in a series (a 4th has since been released - deev) was
posted Tuesday – is upsetting. It dwells with sick, sad fascination on
fetal remains legally donated by abortion patients for scientific
research.
The unwitting Planned Parenthood executives onscreen
sound at times cavalier as they discuss procedures and terms. So far,
though, they don't appear to be doing anything illegal.
Though it is a felony to profit from the sale of human fetal tissue, donations are within bounds, and the law explicitly allows unspecified compensation to
cover the costs of preserving and processing fetal tissues for
research. That’s what Planned Parenthood executives are shown
discussing, over lunch in two of the videos, and in a lab in the third
over a dissected fetal cadaver.
Planned Parenthood does important work, but, boy, were its executives stupid. The 26-year-old spokesman for the campaign, David Daleiden, is an alumnus of Live Action, a radical anti-abortion youth group whose specialty is playing gotcha with Planned Parenthood on hidden camera. Its founder, Lila Rose, famously made her bones posing
as a 15-year-old girl who wanted an abortion but didn’t want the
counselor to report that her fictional boyfriend was an adult, and thus a
statutory rape suspect.
As a student, Daleiden was temporarily from the Pomona College campus for trying to stage a hidden-camera confrontation with a Planned Parenthood speaker. He has told interviewers that
he was radicalized as a teen by Rose, whom he met at a Junior State
meeting, and that he was the product of a “crisis pregnancy” when his
mom was a college student.
Now a Fox News celebrity – he was reportedly mobbed last week at a conference of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) – Daleiden has
demonstrated that if it serves his cause, he’ll put his parents’ privacy
on the table. His mother, Gina Daleiden, isn’t some anonymous figure;
she’s a former Davis school trustee and a deputy to Yolo County
Supervisor Jim Provenza, a Democrat.
The politicians in this mess
aren’t much nobler. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, leaving no
wingnut in his caucus behind, has proposed defunding Planned Parenthood even before an investigation. Meanwhile, U.S. Senate candidate and Attorney General Kamala Harris has bowed to pressure from Democrats to “review” Daleiden’s actions.
Like handling costs for fetal research tissue, sting videos generally fall into a gray area of the law,
so this is less about criminals than true believers and the politicians
who need them. This will just punish the women who rely on Planned
Parenthood for contraception and hurt the scientists who rely on fetal
tissue to research diseases such as muscular dystrophy and diabetes.
Oh, and disappoint those of us who hoped the culture wars might eventually end.
No comments:
Post a Comment