A week after America saw a stunning undercover video of a Planned Parenthood (PP) executive discussing the methods and price tag of harvesting fetal parts, a second video rocked social media.
Showing more discussion of the same topic, the video featured a different PP doctor negotiating higher prices for fetal parts, saying she wanted “a Lamborghini” and that she could use “less crunchy” techniques to keep fetal parts intact.
Hundreds of thousands have responded in moral outrage, calling for the government to defund PP. While the Obama administration said it will not agree to defund PP, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said the Department of Justice would “review all the information.”
The sale or purchase of human fetal tissue is a felony and federal law prohibits altering the timing and method of abortions for the purpose of fetal tissue collection.
The public response has been both staggering and polarized, with major media coverage falling sharply on opposing sides. Some have called the undercover video operation deceptive and “heavily edited.”
“The New York Times editorial board, whose members are almost all pro-choice, decided that those who are providing the baby parts are the real victims,” wrote RNS columnist Jonathan Merritt. “In a story titled ‘The Campaign of Deception Against Planned Parenthood,’ they characterized the videos as nothing more than ‘the latest in a series of unrelenting attacks on Planned Parenthood.’
“The Times did not merely get the Planned Parenthood story wrong; they missed it completely,” Merritt wrote.
He’s not alone in that opinion.
Leaving the word ‘baby’ out
A July 21 News Busters article criticized the three national broadcast television news programs for devoting only 9 minutes and 11 seconds to coverage of the Planned Parenthood videos the week of their release, with ABC giving just 46 seconds to the story. News Busters contrasted that with 31 minutes and 11 seconds spent on Planned Parenthood by ABC, CBS and NBC in 2012 the week Susan G. Komen temporarily stopped funding America’s largest abortion provider.
News Busters added that all three networks “censored the word ‘baby’” from their coverage of the videos “and instead used the term ‘fetal tissue.’ Similarly, from the beginning of their coverage ABC, NBC and CBS labeled the makers of the videos as ‘anti-abortion activists’ rather than use the ‘pro-life’ label.”
Roger Alford, communications director for Kentucky Baptists and former Associated Press correspondent, said the mainstream media has taken “a wide variety of approaches to this coverage.”
‘Society has gone off the rails’
Alford noted the contrast between a pro-life USA Today op-ed by Kirsten Powers calling the videos “stomach-turning” and “damning” and the New York Times editorial criticizing the Center for Medical Progress’s (CMP) undercover video campaign as “a dishonest attempt to make legal, voluntary and potentially lifesaving tissue donations appear nefarious and illegal.”
Such vastly different responses illustrate the issue that Tom Beauchamp, Georgetown University professor of philosophy and senior research scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics in Washington, D.C., says lies at the heart of the debate: Can PP be shut down in a showdown over the moral status of embryonic and fetal life when one camp believes it is a life worthy of protecting and the other doesn’t?
“[I]f you don’t see this embryo or tissue — whether from an abortion or a miscarriage — as having a moral status, you don’t see the issue of giving consent for its use in research. It’s not a person to you,” Beauchamp said. “There is no neutral concept of personhood. Everyone picks their starting point.”
But Powers wrote that “society has gone off the rails” when no one will question abortion doctors or hold them accountable.
Merritt agreed. “A society cannot fix what it will not acknowledge is broken,” he wrote.
But David Daleiden — the 26-year-old mastermind behind the 30-month-long undercover operation — is giving his best shot at getting people to think and react differently to PP.
“We have thousands of hours of video and audio,” said Daleiden, of the pro-life group CMP. “This is not all we have. This is just the beginning.” (BP, RNS, TAB)
To watch the videos released by Daleiden, visit www.centerformedicalprogress.org.
Share with others: