Bakin' Baby Syndrome

The fifth in an apparent series of twelve Planned Parenthood undercover videos shows Melissa Farrell, director of research for Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, discussing how to manipulate the abortion procedure in order to ensure the "fetus" is delivered "intact" and thus able to be cannibalized for body parts. As Ms Farrell puts it, if a client "has a specific need for a certain portion of the products of conception and we bake that into our contract, and our protocol, that we follow this. So we deviate from our standard in order to do that."

In other words, their priority is not a "woman's health needs" but a cleanly delivered "fetus" with the relevant "portion of the products of conception" intact - the leg, the liver, the heart, the lung, whatever it is the client has had "baked" into the contract. This is in itself a crime: You're not supposed to manipulate the abortion - and potentially cause more pain and discomfort to the woman - in order to get clean, sellable baby parts.

But, as Ms Farrell makes plain, at Planned Parenthood they see the woman less as a patient than as a supplier whose truck needs a bit of maneuvering to align at the loading dock.

Lovely. But it gets better. For the parts to be useful to the customer, you can't employ the customary pharmaceutical aids to abortion - the stuff that kills the "fetus" - because, if you do, all the parts you want to sell will be poisoned and valueless.

It would seem to me, therefore, that the risk of a live birth in which the baby has to be killed outside the womb is substantially greater. One wonders what the next seven videos will hold - and what it will take for American newspapers even to cover the story.

After I discussed the matter with Sean Hannity on Fox News last week, I got a barrage of abuse from abortion absolutists with a familiar talking point: abortions are "only three per cent" of what Planned Parenthood does. This statistic is very curiously formulated:

The group said that abortions account for three per cent of the 10.9m services its provides in nearly 700 clinics.

Even if you know what that actually means, the correct response is: So what? Do American liberals listen to what they're saying: What percentage of a business model does selling baby parts have to be for it to disturb you? Any murderer could make the same defense: Murderers actually spend very little time murdering. For 99.99 per cent of the time Major Hasan was providing psychiatric services to US military personnel, and standing on the table, opening fire and yelling "Allahu Akbar!" was only 0.01 per cent of his business model. So what?

That dentist in Minnesota everyone wants to string up: C'mon, give the guy a break. Ninety-seven percent of his time is devoted to cavities and root canals. The lion-killing portion of his schedule is minimal.

If you were told that the fellow at the convenience store devotes 97 per cent of his time to selling groceries and gasoline but once in a while he likes to go down to the seedy part of town, chop up a hooker and leave the pieces in a trunk at the airport, but don't worry, it's only three per cent of what he does, would you still want to buy a quart of milk from the guy? American liberals say: What's the problem? They're so used to looking the other way, they've immobilized their moral compass.

But then the self-absorbed hedonism of modern western life necessarily requires desensitization. Bloomberg reports an ISIS "sex slave" price list acquired in Iraq by UN official Zainab Bangura: A woman over 40 will set you back a mere 41 bucks, but if you prefer a girl aged nine or under - and who doesn't? - the price rises to $165. As Laura Rosen Cohen points out, this is the real "war on women". But nobody cares - because to care, seriously, either about an infanticide-industrial complex or nine-year-old sex-slaves in an American protectorate, would ask something of us. And to ask something - anything - more than a supportive hashtag is too much.

If Harriet Beecher Stowe were to pitch Uncle Tom's Cabin now, the publisher would say, "Well, it's interesting. But what about if we made Tom a beloved old lion whose hard-up gamekeeper is forced to offer him up for sport to a tour group of billionaire American dentists?"

~After the Senate vote, Harry Reid, who still looks as if whoever worked him over could have used a "less crunchy" procedure, Tweeted the above picture of himself with baby-parts zillionaire Cecile Richards, and a gloating message:

Today we fought to protect women's access to critical health services—and we won. #StandwithPP

What this evil toad "fought to protect" was Cecile Richards' access to critical women and their "products of conception". This is a uniquely American depravity - a billion-dollar abortion-industrial complex, unknown to the abortion regimes of France, Sweden, the Netherlands. Presumably all those Continental social democrats with their restrictions on "women's access to critical health services" are also part of the "war on women". The very fact that the Democrats' leader in the Senate is willing to advertise his facilitation of barbarism is a sign of his confidence in the people's indifference.

Comment by clicking here.

Mark Steyn is an international bestselling author, a Top 41 recording artist, and a leading Canadian human rights activist. His latest book is "The Undocumented Mark Steyn: Don't Say You Weren't Warned". (Buy it at a 32% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 50% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)