When I was a child, I believed that those in the field of biomedical research were probably some of the most noble people on Earth. Then I wound up working with them on an off for a couple of decades, which completely shattered that fantasy. Granted that my unfounded belief had been a child’s naïveté, and there are certainly dedicated, honorable researchers among the pathologically myopic, self-important ones.
It is with mixed disgust and a sense of bitter irony that I consider the manner in which the establishment press surged to the defense of Planned Parenthood and its embattled Senior Director of Medical Services, Dr. Deborah Nucatola. Recently, a video was released that featured Nucatola caught on hidden camera, nonchalantly detailing how Planned Parenthood sells body parts harvested from aborted babies to research laboratories.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
The video was filmed in July of 2014 by members of the Center for Medical Progress, an advocacy group that reports on medical ethics.
For many years, fetal tissue has been integral to certain areas of biomedical research due to the unique properties of fetal cells. Since abortion was legalized, the questions of how research facilities come by fetal tissue and what qualifies as such have become extremely controversial. Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University, once described fetal tissue research as “the ticking time bomb of medical ethics.”
Indeed.
The knee-jerk response of the leftist media cabal included some of the most intellectually weak screeds and propaganda I’ve heard to date. Seldom bothering to address facts clearly evidenced in the video (no matter how “creatively edited” one may think it is), these so-called journalists summarily disparaged its producers with little more than incoherent jabber.
On July 16, the Los Angeles Times’ Robin Abcarian produced an effluvia of rancid wind wherein she claimed that “[T]here appears to be no end to the creative deviousness of people looking to harm Planned Parenthood, America’s most important reproductive health-care provider.”
I’m not quite sure how Abcarian gauges the relative importance of “reproductive health-care providers,” but her simpatico with Planned Parenthood suggests that anything they do is fine with her, and anyone who would seek to undermine them, even with ample justification, should be consigned to the deepest, darkest pit of Hell – assuming she believes there is a Hell, which is doubtful.
The online Heavy.com charged that “[T]he video’s makers claim it proves Planned Parenthood is illegally selling fetal tissue,” as though the contention is an outright calumny.
I hate to call Heavy.com on this, but the video’s makers didn’t have to claim anything. The transcript coupled with the relevant laws cited by the Center for Medical Progress make Nucatola’s statements tantamount to a signed confession.
What may be surprising to some is that none of this is new: A March 2000 installment of ABC’s News’ “20/20″ exposed abortion providers (including Planned Parenthood) who were marketing tissue from aborted babies that had been donated by the mothers for research purposes.
Shortly thereafter, National Right to Life’s Education Director Randall K. O’Bannon wrote:
“Neither Planned Parenthood nor its abortion clients actually ‘sell’ the dissected fetal parts to the collection firms. This was made illegal by the NIH Revitalization Act passed by Congress in 1993. …
“The Act exempts, however, ‘reasonable payments associated with the transportation, implantation, processing, preservation quality control, or storage of human fetal tissue.’ Planned Parenthood, and the fetal parts suppliers who contract with it, have seized on that language as a way of collecting money.”
These things considered, I believe that the Nucatola video foreshadows far worse revelations to come vis-à-vis the shady industry that sprang into being since abortion was legalized.
This weekend, we also learned via Daily Caller that Dr. Nucatola isn’t merely a bigwig at Planned Parenthood and a pro-choice activist, but she’s a rabid anti-right smear merchant as well. Nucatola also holds at least one other paid position at a pro-abortion nonprofit founded by a former Obama White House staffer, and upon whose board senior Obama administration officials currently serve.
If the Daily Caller piece is accurate, not only is Nucatola unethical, she’s a virulently hateful individual who revels in her necrosophic creed. More importantly, it illustrates the incestuous collusion of leftists in high places (particularly since Obama came to power) toward the wholesale subjugation of a society whose majority does not share their values.
What these lying death dealers seem to be missing with their feeble attempts at moral justification and ad hominem attacks is that they are participating in a cash market for baby parts!
What happened to the miniscule number of women whom liberals and feminists told us back in the early 1970s needed a “safe and legal” alternative to hemorrhaging death from back-alley and coat hanger abortions? They made it sound as though annually, we were talking about the number of women one could cram into a 1965 Volkswagen microbus. No one said anything about a cottage industry in dissected babies that could amount to millions or billions of dollars.
As more facts come to light, I expect that duly appalled Americans will cite baby parts commerce as a reason to restrict access to abortion once again. At which point, the left will resume screeching the same gutless invective and tired feminist axioms they’ve screeched throughout this decades-long debate.
In legal parlance, I would say the fact that we’re arguing over a market for baby body parts at all makes for a prima facie case that America has devolved to such an extent culturally that we are little better than cannibals.
