Guaranteeing Planned Parenthood's demise

“They covered child sacrifices with loud noises of flutes and drums so the cries of the wailing would not reach the ears of the people,” wrote the Greek historian Plutarch of religious practices in ancient Carthage.

For most Democrats and “mainstream” journalists, not much has changed.

Posing as buyers of fetal tissue, the Center for Medical Progress, a pro-life group in California, secretly recorded:

• Dr. Deborah Nucatola, senior director of medical services for Planned Parenthood, admitting she uses partial birth abortions to supply intact body parts. (Partial birth abortions are illegal.)

• Dr. Mary Gatter, president of Planned Parenthood’s Medical Director’s Council, offering to use a “less crunchy technique” to get more intact body parts, haggling over payments. (She wants a Lamborghini, she said.)

• Dr. Savita Ginde, medical director of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, describing how it can make the most money from fetal organs. (The sale or purchase of human fetal tissue is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.)

“We don’t want to get called on selling fetal parts across states,” Dr. Ginde admitted.

• Melissa Farrell, research director for Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, saying she can deliver fully intact fetuses. (If babies were killed after being born alive, that would be murder. Texas has opened a criminal investigation.)

Planned Parenthood and its apologists responded with misdirection, deception and outright lies:

• The videos have been “heavily edited.”

So has every news report ever broadcast. The Center for Medical Progress provides to any journalist who asks the entire footage of each interview.

• The videos are “dishonest” because the center deceived Planned Parenthood execs, said the editors of The New York Times.

The “ambush” interview is a hoary technique of investigative journalism, which The New York Times has applauded in the past. Law enforcement agencies use deception in stings. The Center for Medical Progress has complied with every applicable law, said project lead David Daleiden.

• Abortions comprise just 3 percent of “health services” Planned Parenthood provides to women.

“Abortion procedures” constitute 94 percent of its services to pregnant women, the organization’s annual report indicates. Nearly 40 percent of its revenues — far more than from any other source save taxpayer subsidies — comes from performing abortions.

• Thirty percent of women get their health care from Planned Parenthood, said Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

More like 3 percent, said a Washington Post fact checker. And that’s only if you count abortion as “health care.” Contrary to its claims, Planned Parenthood provides no mammograms.

• If subsidies for Planned Parenthood are curtailed, minorities will suffer.

“We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population,” Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger wrote in 1939. Black women are five times more likely than white women to have an abortion. About 80 percent of Planned Parenthood’s abortion clinics are in minority neighborhoods.

I you can watch without gagging what USA Today columnist Kirsten Powers, a Democrat, described as “the strategic crushing of the unborn to better harvest their hearts, lungs and livers,” odds are you’re a sociopath.

Most Americans aren’t, which is why Planned Parenthood apologists try so hard to block release of more videos. Two-thirds of Americans oppose second-trimester abortions. I doubt Democrats could subsidize Planned Parenthood for performing them if we hadn’t been kept in the dark about what goes on in their clinics.

Britain abolished the slave trade because William Wilberforce so graphically and persistently described its horrors. “You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you did not know,” he told Parliament.

Most Democrats avert their gaze, try to divert ours. But they can never again say they did not know.

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JWR contributor Jack Kelly, a former Marine and Green Beret, was a deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration.