Louisiana Gov. and presidential candidate Bobby Jindal earned some additional goodwill from pro-lifers by immediately ordering an in-depth investigation into whether his state’s Planned Parenthood was also complicit in the likely criminal, definitely evil practices highlighted in last week’s explosive undercover video.
He followed up over the weekend with some hard truths on Steve Deace’s radio show, helpfully saved for posterity by the leftist bloggers at Right Wing Watch, who mistook Jindal’s observations for examples of right-wing fanaticism:
“They try to defend themselves by saying this is health care and patient-centered,” he said. “This is not health care. Abortions are not health care, and this is not about the patient. The patient in this case is that unborn baby. They’ve got no concern for the unborn baby, and you can see that in the video.”
Jindal also dismissed the famous Bill Clinton phrase calling for abortion to be “safe, legal and rare,” saying, “Well, it’s never safe for the baby, first of all.”
RWW’s Miranda Blue knocks the governor for implying that “when a woman receives an abortion she is not a ‘patient.’” If her gripe is that anyone undergoing a procedure that physically affects their health in some way is a patient, fair enough, but that misses Jindal’s points. First, though sought for the mother’s benefit, abortion acts on the child far more directly and significantly. Second, consider that the pro-abortion Alan Guttmacher Institute’s own admission that most women seeking abortions cite economic, career, or relationship motivations. If the “benefit” you’re seeking is not medical in nature, is “patient” really the right word?
[easy-tweet tweet=”If the “benefit” you seek isn’t medical in nature, is “patient” really the right word?” user=”LiveActionNews” hashtags=”#abortion”]
Also note that, as usual, abortion not being safe for the baby is left unaddressed. But no matter. Salon assistant editor Jenny Kutner decided to run with the scoop, fretting over Jindal’s “very bizarre conception” of abortion on the same grounds as RWW and adding additional complaints for good measure:
Republican presidential hopeful and Lousiana [sic.] Gov. Bobby Jindal quickly outed himself last week as someone who buys into the claims of a heavily edited anti-Planned Parenthood video that began circulating last week, which accuses the organization of illegally selling donated fetal tissue (known to some conservatives as “baby parts”).
Couple things, Jenny: in your linked article, you do not specify a single edit in the video, heavy, deceptive, or otherwise. You just take it as an article of faith that whenever a pro-life organization releases footage casting Big Choice in a negative light, it must be merely “the latest addition to an ongoing game of what we’ll call Deceitful Anti-Choice Mad Libs,” no substantiation necessary.
Sadly, this is your side’s standard operating procedure—see, for instance, last year when detractors of Live Action’s SEXED undercover videos seemed to not have even watched them before confidently declaring them frauds.
And by sneering that “fetal tissue” is “known to some conservatives as” baby parts, Kutner is simply projecting her own side’s semantic dishonesty onto pro-lifers. In the video, Deborah Nucatola talks about “getting heart, lungs, [and] liver”—human organs, i.e., body parts by any sane, literate understanding of the words “body” or “parts.” (“Baby” is also linguistically and medically valid.)
But according to the biological definition, “tissue” is “a group of structurally and functionally similar cells and their intercellular material” that become “aggregated into organs.” A heart contains muscle tissue, but is not itself “a tissue.” To suggest “baby parts” is somehow inaccurate for describing organs taken from dead babies is sheer biological illiteracy.
The GOP presidential candidate went on to say there is “no reason” for taxpayers to continue to fund or support Planned Parenthood — because surely all those other services the organization provides, such as cancer screenings and contraception, aren’t worth keeping around.
So without Planned Parenthood around, other health services would just disappear? The $500+ million a year they get from the federal government couldn’t be redirected to other state and local health programs or private organizations to screen for breast cancer—which, unlike PP, might actually provide mammograms? Without taxpayer dollars, poor Cecile Richards would be powerless to redirect a larger portion of the $300 million it gets in private revenue toward actual women’s health?
From its main work to its seedier side businesses to its societal importance, Planned Parenthood is sustained and insulated by lies at every level. The more candidates like Bobby Jindal point them out, the more lies will be mobilized in response—which will only provide more opportunities for pro-life candidates to expose the full extent of the dishonesty.
