I wrote about the Planned Parenthood video for Politico today, and credit Deborah Nucatola with at least speaking honestly about the issue:
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.
I think it’s a mistake for conservatives to get caught up in the legalities here. As Brendan Foht pointed out yesterday on the home page, it’s legal to sell fetal body parts. The relevant statute was written by Henry Waxman, a great friend of abortion, who made sure it doesn’t really ban anything. The law says, “It shall be unlawful for any person to knowingly acquire, receive, or otherwise transfer any human fetal tissue for valuable consideration if the transfer affects interstate commerce,” but then stipulates, “The term ‘valuable consideration’ does not include reasonable payments associated with the transportation, implantation, processing, preservation, quality control, or storage of human fetal tissue.” Needless to say, “reasonable payments” provides wide latitude.
We should be making the rather obvious case that what Planned Parenthood does is morally repellant, insist on defunding it, and seek to steadily restrict abortion, with the next step the proposed bans on abortion after 20 weeks currently pending in Congress.