“To those already convinced that abortions should be safe, legal and rare, it looks like Planned Parenthood is responsibly doing exactly what a medical provider should.”
“Taking a page from the falsehoods and selectively-edited videos that brought about the defunding and bankruptcy of the left-wing advocacy group ACORN, the Center for Medical Progress strategy is to create a narrative, claim that its videos constitute damning evidence, and repeat that story enough times to give politicians the ‘proof’ they need to attack Planned Parenthood.”
The self-described “Center for Medical Progress” is nothing more than an advocacy group set up for the sole purpose of discrediting and destroying Planned Parenthood, a nonprofit that provides a broad array of essential health services to mostly poor women, often living in areas that lack adequate access to health care, but which has earned the hatred of Republicans because 2% of its services consist of abortions.
“With an extraordinary degree of planning, the Center for Medical Progress appears to have secured tax-exempt status in 2013 for a fake company it set up called Biomax Procurement Services. The company’s ‘representatives’ contacted Planned Parenthood staffers and led them into conversations that were secretly recorded. The result, according to the hoaxers’ website, was ‘a 30-month-long investigative journalism study by The Center for Medical Progress, documenting how Planned Parenthood sells the body parts of aborted babies.'”
Of course, this wasn’t investigative journalism at all. It was a carefully orchestrated “sting” operation designed to lure Planned Parenthood personnel into making statements useful as sound bites to “prove” a preordained — and false — narrative that they were selling fetus parts for a profit.
“That last part — the claim that Planned Parenthood ‘sells the body parts of aborted babies,’ the centerpiece of the whole multi-year effort — is flat-out untrue, and the lie is exposed by the Center’s own undercover videos. Anyone who doubts this should plow through the transcripts of the conversations on the video.”
And the hoaxers, if they didn’t know their narrative was untrue when they started, certainly did when they released their videos and misrepresented what they show. But in their own minds, these people are doing God’s work by shutting down the 2% of Planned Parenthood’s health services that constitute providing abortions, even if they have to resort to lying and shut down the other 98% to get it done.
The truth about the whole matter is that moving body tissue from clinics to research facilities isn’t free, it costs money, and Planned Parenthood is simply getting reimbursed for those expenses, which is perfectly legal and ethical, but this is a gauzy detail that’s easily misunderstood and misrepresented, and that confusion is what the political operatives behind the fake “investigation” have exploited to wage a PR war against Planned Parenthood in the rightwing media and a political war against America’s largest abortion provider in the Republican-controlled Congress.
The political war has failed. Republican senators didn’t have, and knew they couldn’t get, a filibuster-proof 60-vote majority to pass the defunding bill. Which makes you wonder why they even bothered to try. Maybe they figure that after their government shutdown and Obamacare repeal fiascos, they have no credibility left to lose, so why not?
It’s unclear, to me at least, whether the PR war has damaged Planned Parenthood’s credibility and legitimacy in the eyes of the general public. It may have to some extent. It’s much easier for a liar to libel someone than it is for the victim of the libel to undo the falsehood. Libels can be as persistent as nuclear waste. (See, e.g., “The Protocols of Zion.”) Demagogues and dirty tricksters know this, and in high-stakes politics where free speech principles preclude imposition of any debate rules, the temptation and incentive to use lies, hoaxes, and libels to win political battles is irresistible. Among the general public, there are enough uninformed and gullible to make it pay off.
But with polls showing that roughly 70% of Americans support legalized abortion, it’s unlikely the public opinion payoff from this elaborate, costly, and polished “string” operation will be large enough to have any material effect on the future course of America’s abortion debate.
By the way, don’t call these people “Christians,” unless you can show me where, in the Christian Bible, Jesus said it’s okay to bear false witness in His name and/or for His purposes.
As a closing thought, abortion opponents face the same dilemma that gun control advocates do: Would outlawing abortions or gun actually stop abortions and gun crimes? The answer to both questions almost certainly is no. If right-to-life and gun control groups achieved their legislative objections, in all likelihood, abortions would simply go back underground as they were before Roe v. Wade, and criminals and crazy people would still get guns and carry out their depradations on society.
This article is based on a CNN opinion piece which you can read here.