The Grotesque Business of Planned Parenthood

It's hard to have an honest debate about abortion in this country, when the issue is so often shrouded in evasion and deception.

That's why we all owe a debt to Deborah Nucatola. She is willing to tell it the way it is. She eschews careful talking points meant to obscure rather than illuminate and doesn't worry about discomfiting the squeamish. On abortion, she is the great clarifier.

Nucatola is the Planned Parenthood official — and abortion doctor — whose frank discussion of the destruction of unborn babies was captured on secret video and published by a group called the Center for Medical Progress, which seeks to ban abortions.

She was drawn out over lunch by two actors posing as people in the business of buying organs from abortion clinics, and speaks nonchalantly of the unspeakable. If watching the video doesn't turn your stomach, you are either morally insensate or angling to be designated Planned Parenthood's Person of the Year.

The episode raises a public relations challenge pretty much unique to that organization: How do you spin one of your officials casually talking about aborting babies and harvesting their organs for sale ("a lot of people want liver"), while sipping red wine and enjoying a nice meal?

Well, the first rule is not, under any circumstances, to refer to an aborted baby as a baby, or in any way to acknowledge his humanity. A PR firm doing work for Planned Parenthood — and surely earning every disreputable penny — called the body parts discussed in the video, "the products of conception."

This is a shamelessly anodyne euphemism, although perhaps a strictly accurate one. You don't get human life without conception, and the organs of aborted babies are indeed treated like products to be bartered and sold — "products of conception," indeed.

The other is to talk about science and medicine, which are assumed to be invested with a talismanic power that trumps all other considerations. "In health care," Planned Parenthood said in a statement, with a "let's explain it slowly, for the idiots" tone, "patients sometimes want to donate tissue to scientific research that can help lead to medical breakthroughs, such as treatments and cures for serious diseases."

So nothing to see here, folks, except for the workings of medicine. Please, move on.

This statement, too, is rank euphemism. Abortion is not health care — it is an overwhelmingly elective procedure undertaken to end a life. The baby isn't a patient. The baby is a victim and has no choice in what happens to its organs after a Planned Parenthood abortionist does his work.

Critics of Planned Parenthood have focused on the potential illegalities revealed in the video. This is a mistake.

The federal statute on selling fetal parts for profit was written by the liberal lion Henry Waxman, who had no interest in truly forbidding the trade. At one point, Nucatola says that if clinics selling parts "can do a little better than break even, and do so in a way that seems reasonable, they're happy to do that." But at other times, she makes it clear they don't want a profit.

Nor does she necessarily confess to performing illegal partial-birth abortions, although this is murky and she clearly has contempt for the partial-birth abortion ban. She talks of partially delivering babies so as to do the least damage to their organs, which can then be sold. But as long as she is killing the baby prior to the partial delivery, she is (unfortunately) in the free and clear legally.

The true import of the Nucatola video is its casual moral grotesqueness. Manipulating a baby in the womb to kill it in a fashion best suited to selling off its organs is a repellant act, pure and simple.

This isn't a mere matter of aesthetics. Yes, as Planned Parenthood's apologists argue, almost any surgical procedure is unsightly. But other surgical procedures don't involve deliberately ending a life and treating its body as a commodity. This isn't just unpleasant to imagine — like, say, open heart surgery — it is morally ugly.

Such is the business that Planned Parenthood is in. The group loves to portray itself as merely the friendly neighborhood provider of health services and sex education. "We do all this," the group says in its standard self-description, "because we care passionately about helping people lead healthier lives." How touching.

Abortion is somehow left out in this sanitized version. In the media, it is relentlessly repeated that abortion is only 3 percent of Planned Parenthood's business, as if it's an afterthought.

Nucatola provides the more accurate picture. She talks of how Planned Parenthood performs 40 percent of the abortions in the country and how clinics are stuck with the parts of dead babies ("tissue") that they have trouble discarding.

An organization that exists in large part to perform abortion — about a million every three years — shouldn't receive a dime in public funding. And the best way to limit the sale of the parts of aborted babies is to save the babies from being aborted in the first place, which proposed bans on late-term abortions in Congress would at least take a step toward doing.

We have long been told how unborn babies are "blobs of tissue" that deserve no moral respect or legal protection. Yet here is an official from the leading abortion provider in the country talking of their livers, lungs and hearts, and of preserving those organs for their value.

What Deborah Nucatola describes is the reality of abortion. If you can't handle it, you can't handle the truth.

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