By Dave Andrusko
Each week, Washington Post columnist Chris Cillizza designates the “Who had the Worst Week in Washington” award to “an inhabitant of Planet Beltway who stands out for all the wrong reasons.” Last week he gave the “award” to Planned Parenthood.
At the risk of stating the super-abundantly obvious, PPFA could easy win for a second straight week.
It’s been a rough couple of weeks for the nation’s premier abortion “provider.” No doubt Planned Parenthood officials keep pinching themselves, hoping the furor unleashed by two undercover videos is just a bad dream.
But, more likely, the PPFA image, which is undeservedly almost pristine, will continue to suffer enormous damage. The Center for Medical Progress, which has already released two shocking videos of conversations with leading Planned Parenthood officials, has more in the queue.
As we end the week, let me offer two perspectives on the fallout and what may come of the two conversations (so far) in which members of PPFA’s officialdom casually talk over salad and red wine about how
“a lot of people want intact hearts these days they’re looking for specific nodes. AV nodes, yesterday I was like wow, I didn’t even know, good for them, yesterday was the first time she said people wanted lungs. And then, like I said, always as many intact livers as possible. …Some people want lower extremities, too, which, that’s simple. That’s easy. I don’t know what they’re doing with it, I guess if they want muscle.”
In this, Part One, I’ll reflect on today’s column from syndicated columnist and author Charles Krauthammer. “The price of fetal parts” is loaded with Krauthammer gems that sparkle with insight and glow with thinly disguised indignation.
For example, he writes about PPFA president Cecile Richards’ You Tube “apology” for the “tone” of one high-ranking PPFA official, which is actually a full-throated defense of the wonderfulness of an organization that kills over 330,000 unborn babies annually.
Her remarks lacked compassion, admitted Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards. As if Dr. Deborah Nucatola’s cold and casual discussion over salad and wine of how the fetal body can be crushed with forceps in a way that leaves valuable organs intact for sale is some kind of personal idiosyncrasy. On the contrary, it’s precisely the kind of psychic numbing that occurs when dealing daily with industrial scale destruction of the growing, thriving, recognizably human fetus. [My emphasis.]
Krauthammer connects the dots in a manner very similar to what bioethicist Wesley Smith did in a piece we reposted yesterday. Krauthammer explains how pro-lifers
have long warned that the problem is not only the obvious — what abortion does to the fetus — but also what it does to us. It’s the same kind of desensitization that has occurred in the Netherlands with another mass exercise in life termination: assisted suicide. It began as a way to prevent the suffering of the terminally ill. It has now become so widespread and wanton that one-fifth of all Dutch assisted-suicide patients are euthanized without their explicit consent.
Whatever happens at the state and federal level, what will be the impact on public perception (which is largely the subject of Part Two) when “the door to the backroom of the clinic where that being is destroyed” is thrown open?
“It’s an ugly scene,” Krauthammer writes.
The nightmare for abortion advocates is a spreading consciousness of how exactly a healthy fetus is turned into a mass of marketable organs, how, in the words of a senior Planned Parenthood official, one might use “a less crunchy technique” … “to get more whole specimens.”
The effect on the public is a two-step change in sensibilities. First, when ultrasound reveals how human the living fetus appears. Next, when people learn, as in these inadvertent admissions, what killing the fetus involves.
Put together all that’s happened since Dr. Nucatola’s remarks “opened” the door to the everyday PPFA atrocities and what might be in store? I have my own thoughts and so do you but right now that’s speculation.
What we can say for sure is this–and it is hugely important. “Remember,” Krauthammer writes
The advent of ultrasound has coincided with a remarkable phenomenon: Of all the major social issues, abortion is the only one that has not moved toward increasing liberalization
Why? Because regardless of one’s opinion on a host of other “social issues,” abortion is not sort of unique or kind of unique but unique–one of a kind.
If the public’s discomfort has kept the abortion issue alive for over 40 years, what will these new revelations mean?
It’s one thing to vaguely know that the life of something/someone ends in an abortion.
It is another thing entirely to hear a second PPFA official dicker over the price (“it has to be big enough that it is worthwhile”) of intact hearts and lungs and livers and skulls, and then joke
It’s been years since I talked about compensation, so let me just figure out what others are getting, if this is in the ballpark, it’s fine, if it’s still low then we can bump it up. I want a Lamborghini. [laughs]
Suddenly the insanity that is at the heart of distributing baby body parts is driven home with a force that no one can deny.