Perhaps Congress needs to probe Planned Parenthood because they didn’t finish the job the first time around. When Live Action exposed their clinics in a long series of undercover videos for failing to comply with laws intended to stop predators from sexually exploiting minors, Congress initially held back funds from Planned Parenthood. Eventually they lost interest, though, and the funds got restored after a series of fiscal-cliff negotiations.
Now, Ted Cruz says, Congress should finish the job and cut Planned Parenthood loose for good:
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is calling for a full investigation into Planned Parenthood after a high-level official was caught in an undercover video discussing the harvesting of aborted fetal tissue.
“Congress should immediately begin an investigation of Planned Parenthood’s activities regarding the sale and transfer of aborted body parts, including who is obtaining them and what they are being used for,” Cruz wrote in a statement late Tuesday. …
Cruz also renewed calls for lawmakers to “fully defund” Planned Parenthood, a long-time rallying cry among anti-abortion Republicans.
“There is no place for taxpayer funding of organizations that profit from taking away innocent life, much less profiting off the bodies of the lives they have stolen,” he wrote in a statement.
Congress should be ashamed that this is still an issue. Planned Parenthood runs the nation’s largest abortion mill, a chain that uses an industrial approach to destroying babies in the womb. That business is legal, but that doesn’t mean that it should receive federal subsidies for its operations. Those monies come from family-planning support programs, and Planned Parenthood claims that those funds don’t underwrite abortions, but it’s clear that its allies funnel that money precisely for that purpose. There are plenty of other ways to distribute family-planning aid besides the nation’s largest destroyers of the main component of families — children.
Yesterday, Bobby Jindal ordered an investigation into Planned Parenthood’s organ-sales activities in Louisiana, becoming the first governor to do so. Greg Abbott followed closely behind in neighboring Texas. A press release late yesterday from Governor Abbott’s office announced two investigations:
Governor Greg Abbott today issued the following statement after footage of a Planned Parenthood executive detailing abortion procedures surfaced:
“The video of a high-level Planned Parenthood executive discussing the details of internal abortion procedures – including harvesting of baby body parts – is unnerving and appalling. In light of the video, I have directed the Texas Health and Human Services Commission to conduct an immediate investigation of this alleged practice in addition to a separate investigation ordered by the Texas Office of the Attorney General.”
David Harsanyi asks readers to put aside the legal issues, and even the religious issues, involved in this video of Dr. Deborah Nucatola casually discussing the prices and sales demand for the organs of unborn children. Have we all become so inured to depravity that we no longer recognize it when we see it?
Let’s forget the legality of the issue for a moment. And let’s forget religion and politics, if that’s possible. Let’s forget the disconcerting economic incentives inherent in these types of transactions and ask: what kind of person nonchalantly describe “crushing” the life from another living being—a being that might have already been named and loved; a loss that might have a tremendous negative impact on a person or family or community—over a glass of wine and some giggles?
Well, an executive at euphemistic Planned Parenthood, that’s who. We can tell ourselves that a life can simply be written off whenever we deem it inconvenient. We can celebrate the right to end life. But the depravity of Deborah Nucatola’s conversation betrays where it all leads—and also where it started. …
What Dr. Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood’s senior director for medical services, really tells us is that these aren’t just clumps of cells devoid of moral significance or purpose—especially when they don’t meet Dr. Deborah Nucatola’s scalpel. “We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that,” she explains, “so I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.” She is discussing organs of a baby, evidentially, more useful to her dead than alive.
How many Americans are okay with this practice? We should find out. Liberals never have a problem making expansive arguments on emotional grounds—the single woman without health care tells all we need to know about Obamacare; the lone shooter tells us all we need to know about guns laws, etc. There is simply no reason that Nucatola should not be on television ads everywhere, sipping her wine and intimately describing how abortionists squash the life out of unborn babies for money. How many Americans would accept this policy as normal?
To be honest, I’m sort of nervous to find out.
He’s not the only one.
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