Looking at youtube for the interview which shocked the Congress wherein a Planned Parenthood doctor and director of fetal tissue acquisition discusses the details about how to gather tissues from abortions for sale to medical research institutions, one sees immediately what a bonanza this photo-shopped, edit clip has been for anti abortion advocates and for all Republicans in Congress who want to establish their anti abortion, pro life, pro fetus bone fides.
What is particularly galling to non medical folks who watch this video is the doctor who is talking about how best to approach the fetus to ensure no vital organs are damaged, so they can be useful to the researchers buying them is that the doctor is talking about all this between bitefuls of Asian food, picked up and popped into her mouth as she talks about body parts. Whenever you want to make a villain look really heinous in a movie, you show him talking about the gruesome crime while eating and enjoying a meal, because it shows how little regard he has, how completely separated he is from connection to mayhem. "So, Guido, you chop off his head? Or What?" [Stuff spaghetti in mouth] "Yeah, those heads bleed a lot. You gotta let the blood drain from the neck. You know what I'm saying here?" [Glug some wine.]
Of course, doctors talk about things like this over dinner all the time. Around our table, where we have three doctors and a nurse, we often forget about the musician and the architect sitting there, who don't have our world view and we gross them out, until they object and we have to tone it down. Over time, actually, the architect and the musician have tuned out the talk and they continue eating without objection. I can only imagine a secretly recorded clip of our table conversation at home.
But listening to the doctor talk about how you can move the fetus around so the forceps used to grasp it does not injure the liver, which someone wants to buy is pretty startling to the average non medical listener. It's a little jarring even for a physician who is not an obstetrician.
And as the Judas goat interviewer prods the doctor about how bad it would look if it looked like Planned Parenthood were selling body parts and she agrees, casually, without adding, "Because we really are not interested in the money. We need those tissues if we are every going to wipe out type 1 diabetes, but we have to cover costs. It's a lot of work to harvest and preserve this stuff." It looks bad. In fact, if the New York Times is correct, she did say all that, but the operative who recorded her cut that out and she looks completely mercenary.
Actually, having heard really mercenary doctors talk, she sounds pretty mild to me.
My own son used to talk about "harvesting" organs for the transplant service at the university hospital where he went to medical school, in New York City. They would page him out of class and he would get in the transplant van to Teterboro Airport and climb into a private Leer Jet and fly off to wherever--as far as Florida, get to the operating room where a young "donor" had just died of head wounds from a motorcycle accident or from an asthmatic attack, and they would remove his kidneys and pack them in ice and place all this in an Igloo ice chest or something like it and then go off to the airplane and fly back to the OR at the university hospital where another team put transplant it into a patient. If there was some delay at one end, they would go out to a restaurant on the transplant service's dime. He was delighted with that. Free food for a medical student cannot be beat.
Did they sit around somberly talking about how badly they felt for the "donor" for the poor kid's parents who had signed to donate the organs having just been told their son was brain dead? You can bet the transplant harvest team did not have that conversation. They did not want to think about that part. It was bad enough seeing the donor splayed out on the OR table. They had to concentrate on the work entailed in removing the kidneys without damaging the blood vessels and preserving them so they would live again in another patient. But a video of these harvest people at a restaurant would have had Congressmen clamoring for the microphones all around Capitol Hill.
"Oh, the horror! Oh, the callousness!"
And now you can just see the gleam in the eye of every Republican in Congress, who wants to show what an upstanding, moral and righteous citizen he or she is by crying out in shock about this horrific, murderous, inhuman callousness.
"Oh, the shame! Oh, the horror!"
We told you all along these abortionists were evil--now we see what really motivates them: It's all about the money. They want to kill these helpless infants because they are selling their body parts. They are making their boat payments on the hearts and lungs of these babies!
Of course, nothing like that is happening. And, if Planned Parenthood were smart, it would stop doing abortions and just do contraception, which the Republicans will never acknowledge is the best thing to prevent abortion--an ounce of prevention. But Planned Parenthood will not back down. So PP will suffer and maybe be defunded, which would likely be the best thing for it. Don't take government dollars if you want to steer clear of the jackasses in Congress. It would work better for Planned Parenthood.
The most powerful tool the right to lifers have ever had is the fetal sonogram. If you want to humanize a fetus, show the sonogram. People see clouds in the sky and they see horses, but they know those are not real horses. It's not so easy with a sonogram. The sonogram looks a lot more like a human being than the thing it is imaging actually looks like--your perceptual apparatus fills in the blanks. The real thing looks more like an earthworm, but you can't see that on the sonogram.
It's all about illusion and perception and the pro life (isn't that a great name--who is "against life"?) forces are masters at manipulating that.
Personally, I'm not voting for "abortion" over 21 weeks. Too close to actualization. But I've got no major problem with 9 weeks. But that's an opinion which took several years of study to form. When you present it to the uncomprehending public and ask for a first blush opinion, what do you expect?
Not so good, however, for the women who cannot afford care anywhere but Planned Parenthood, especially if Medicaid and Medicare and all government programs are out of the picture.
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