Republicans are out to destroy Planned Parenthood even though abortions are only 2% of the services it provides, and millions of mostly rural, mostly poor women depend on the organization for health screenings and other vital health services. As part of their concerted attack against Planned Parenthood they’ve highlighted much-publicized videos purporting to show (a) an aborted 19-week-old fetus, and (b) a squirming just-aborted fetus.
Both of those images were faked by the video maker.
David Daleiden of the Center for Medical Progress, the group at the center of the video controversy, “wanted to show exactly what a 19-week-old aborted fetus, being held in the hands of a medical technician, looked like,” CNN says (read the story here). So he searched the internet until he found a picture that fit the bill. He took it from the Facebook page of a woman named Alexis Fretz without her knowledge or permission. And it’s not an aborted fetus at all; it’s a photo of her stillborn son, named Walter, on a Facebook page she created as a memorial to him. Daleiden says the fact he stole the photo and lied about it being an aborted fetus “makes no difference.”
The other, more incendiary, image was cited by GOP candidate Carly Fiorina during a televised Republican debate. Daleiden told CNN that image came from a group called Center for Bioethical Reform and that he paid for it. He doesn’t know where they got it from, and there’s no evidence it originated in a Planned Parenthood facility.
Defenders of Daleiden might argue that his videos depict the reality of abortion, and the fact the videos are staged and use fake images doesn’t lessen the ugliness of those realities. They even might point out that Hollywood depicts the Holocaust in films like Schindlers List using actors, sets, and scripts. But everyone understands that Schindlers List is a movie; Daleiden represented his videos were documentaries using real images. Would the academic community tolerate a historian who published staged photos of Holocaust atrocities and represented them as actual history? Should the public tolerate such deceptions?
Our minds rebel against such practices, even when they’re well-meaning, because they’re dishonest.
This isn’t the only ethical shortfall in the GOP’s attacks against Planned Parenthood. Federal law already prohibits using federal money to pay for abortions. Planned Parenthood receives a little over $500 million a year from Medicaid to provide non-abortion health services to indigent women. It’s this funding Republicans are attacking, even though it doesn’t pay for abortions. Unable to get at the private funding of Planned Parenthood’s abortion clinics, they hope to shut those clinics down by destroying the entire organization. In a way, that’s like kicking a dog because you’re mad at its owner.
How can anyone with a sense of right and wrong, even if they oppose abortion on religious or conscientious grounds, think this is okay?