Kirsten Powers: I've got news for Democrats. It's a baby!
Kirsten Powers
Don Shrubshell, Columbia Daily Tribune, via AP
Rally in front of Planned Parenthood in Columbia, Mo., on July 28, 2015.
Democrats like to talk about the importance of being on the “right side of history.” This phrase was invoked frequently during the same-sex marriage debate. Yet when faced with a series of videos detailing grotesque human rights abuses against unborn children by Planned Parenthood Federation of America doctors, Democratic Party forces have eschewed all concern for historical or moral rightness.
Pope Francis has correctly described the unborn as “the most defenselessand innocent among us.” But in the sordid tale of strategic crushing of the unborn to better harvest their hearts, lungs and livers, many Democrats have incredibly cast an organization with a roughly $1.3 billion annual budget in the role of the innocent and defenseless. Hillary Clinton emerged as Planned Parenthood’s highest profile protector Monday, decrying the “assault” against her allegedly helpless campaign donors.
The Democratic Party shilling for barbarism — whether by politicians, liberal media outlets, union officials or unrestricted abortion advocates — is not likely to be viewed favorably by future generations. These Democrats will be remembered for demonizing the activists who lifted the veil on a previously sanitized process and for seeking restraining orders to silence truth tellers. They will be remembered for publishing dehumanizing decrees — as The New Republic did — that people stop criticizing Planned Parenthood because as a medical matter, “The term baby … doesn’t apply until birth” (that thing on your sonogram is nothing more than a “product[] of conception.”) And they will be remembered for demanding investigations into citizen journalists for meticulously exposing atrocities in our midst.
I don’t use the word atrocity lightly.
Watching the videos exposing Planned Parenthood’s practice of dickering over the body parts of unborn humans, one is immediately struck by the age of the “fetuses,” to use the medical term for what parents-to-be and their gynecologists still call a “baby,” lectures from The New Republicnotwithstanding.
According to video transcript, Dr. Deborah Nucatola, PPFA’s senior director of medical services, mentions prioritizing the abortion of a “17-weeker” the day before because he or she was “more likely to yield what we needed.” Second trimester abortions, she explained, are the “cases that yield the tissue that you want.” Nucatola noted that one-quarter of Planned Parenthood of Los Angeles abortions occur in the second trimester (3,000 out of 12,000, she said).
Did you get that? Nucatola appears to be saying that three thousand second trimester abortions occur every year in just one Planned Parenthood region. In another video, Dr. Savita Ginde, identified as Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains’ Vice President and Medical Director, explains: “We’re doing procedures at seventeen weeks, so we have fairly large identifiable [body] parts.” She then discusses the need to train abortion doctors so they don’t crush the desirable organs of these four-and-a-half-month old fetuses.
Guess who supports second trimester abortions, barring extreme extenuating circumstances? Almost nobody.
When Gallup asked in 2012 whether abortion should be legal in the second trimester, only 27 percent of respondents said yes. This percentage has been nearly unchanged since Gallup began asking this question in 1996. As Slate’s Will Saletan noted in a 2014 piece analyzing abortion polling, “Even the most pro-choice people aren’t sold on abortion rights beyond the first trimester.”
This was the general position even prior to the release of videos demonstrating the harsh reality of such abortions. Following the meeting with Dr. Ginde, the undercover video makers are taken to a Planned Parenthood pathology lab where a medical assistant called “Jess” picks at an aborted fetus. “I just want to see another leg, with a foot,” she says. Ginde chimes in: “Here’s the heart.” At one point Dr. Ginde inexplicably murmurs: “It’s a baby.”
Even the abortionist can see it’s a baby. So what’s wrong with the Democratic Party?
Kirsten Powers writes weekly for USA TODAY and is author of the upcoming The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech.
In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors. To read more columns like this, go to the Opinion front page.
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