As leader of the free world, President Obama lives with awesome responsibility. At any moment, he may have to handle issues that affect all of humanity – crucial, vital questions like who’s going to win the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship.
Every year, the President gets on ESPN and fills in brackets with his March Madness predictions. Apparently this is known as “Barack-etology” (the term appears on the official White House website). That nomenclature might sound impressive, but the results haven’t been: while Kentucky was prophesied to take the crown this year, Duke had other ideas.
Of course, this isn’t the only time Obama has made the wrong prediction. It also happened when, as an Illinois state senator, he spoke against legislation requiring medical care for babies who survive abortions. The bill demanded that in addition to the abortionist, a second physician be brought in to ensure care was properly rendered. State Sen. Obama didn’t see the need for this, contending that abortionists would feel “that obligation” to help surviving children anyway.
Not everyone shared Obama’s sense of optimism. Many suspected that a doctor who was hired to kill someone wouldn’t be the best choice when it came to saving that individual’s life. And as we’ve seen, those suspicions were well founded.
In 2013, Dr. Kermit Gosnell was convicted of murdering newborns in his Philadelphia abortion clinic. Live Action has shown that his behavior wasn’t unique.
Using hidden cameras, pregnant volunteers recorded visits to a number of late-term abortion facilities. Claiming to want abortions, the volunteers asked would happen if their children were inadvertently delivered alive.
A clinic staffer in New York City said the infant would be put in a jar and drowned. Washington, DC’s Dr. Cesare Santangelo has a similar approach. He said that when a baby survives the procedure, he doesn’t provide any care, admitting that “it’s happened before.”
But as brutal as these methods are, we now have evidence that what goes on at Planned Parenthood is even worse.
Beginning in July, the Center for Medical Progress began to release videos of their own. Shot undercover, they show high level Planned Parenthood executives meeting with people they thought were human tissue purchasers. During these meetings, the executives tried to profit from the sale of fetal organs and offered to illegally change how abortions are performed so as to make those organs easier to collect.
In CMP’s latest video, former tissue procurement technician Holly O’Donnell recounted an incident in which she was shown an aborted baby whose heart was still beating –a fact O’Donnell’s supervisor described as, “kinda cool, kinda neat.” She was then told to slice the child’s face open so brain matter could be harvested.
Her story is consistent with what was recorded in earlier videos. In the fourth one, Dr. Savita Ginde, vice president of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, admitted that infants are occasionally delivered intact. She and her staff also exhibited the same level of callousness as O’Donnell’s supervisor: at nine minutes and three seconds into the footage, Ginde looks down at an aborted fetus and declares, “It’s a baby.” Later, an assistant cheerfully notes that there’s “another boy” lying on the table in front of her; his corpse is being poked over.
And it also fits with what Planned Parenthood spokesperson Alisa LaPolt Snow said in 2013 when she was asked what should be done with a baby who survives an abortion: “That decision should be between the patient and the healthcare provider.”
Despite all of this, President Obama is continuing to stand behind Planned Parenthood. When Senate pro-lifers tried to have the abortion giant’s half billion in federal funding redirected towards community health centers, the President promised a veto. It’s obvious that the videos haven’t swayed many people at the White House, probably because (as spokesperson Josh Earnest has confirmed) they haven’t bothered to watch them.
In about about a year and a half, the Oval Office is going to have a new occupant. Pro-lifers should make it clear they expect whoever that is to bring Planned Parenthood to justice. In the meantime, they can sign Live Action’s petition calling for an end to its funding.
It was reported that President Obama was feeling a little down when his NCAA picks didn’t work out as anticipated. I really hope he’s over it by now, because there are some other things he should probably focus on.
