Rejecting Reality: How Planned Parenthood And Its Defenders Hide The Truth

In early July, The Center for Medical Progress began to release videos procured after three years of undercover work. They released short teaser videos, long videos from which the short versions were edited, and transcripts. The videos not only showed the calculating, callous way in which key players in Planned Parenthood viewed their clients and the unborn children, they also provided reasons to believe that certain Planned Parenthood clinics were breaking the law in the process of harvesting fetal tissue. 

That's when Planned Parenthood and their defenders began a methodical campaign of  distortion, denial and deception to help people avoid looking at the reality of abortion and the industries that profit from it. One example requires a certain amount of speculation*; the facts supporting the rest of my points are clear enough on their own.
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(UPDATE 9/26/15: When a reader offered a rigorous challenge to the veracity of many of my claims (you can read our dialogue in the comments section), I realized I needed to restate some of my points with better clarity and precision. I want to be as committed to truth as I wish Planned Parenthood and the press would be; I hope this update accomplishes that purpose.)
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• Two days before the third video was supposed to drop, several Planned Parenthood affiliates sent a letter to the press asking them to bury the video. The press obediently obliged - which was pretty easy, considering how little they had been covering the story already. By the end of July, ABC had given 46 seconds total to the first four videos - while giving Cecil the Lion over 12 minutes of coverage. August was no better:

The three broadcast networks, ABC, NBC and CBS, haven’t reported on a single video exposing Planned Parenthood’s trafficking of aborted babies during their news shows in 31 days – or one full month [of August]. The last time a network mentioned a particular video came July 31, when CBS This Morning correspondent Julianna Goldman acknowledged the fourth video of a “Planned Parenthood doctor in Colorado discussing providing fetal tissue for a fee.” NBC last reported on a specific video July 30, while ABC – the worst of all three networks – last noted a video July 16 (keep in mind the first video came out July 14). The networks have not covered the last four videos released by the Center for Medical Progress...

Considering it took "56 days, multiple letters from members of the House of Representatives and a public outcry [for] all three broadcast networks [to] report on Gosnell," this is not entirely unexpected. Planned Parenthood has been giving awards to journalists for years; the orchestrated silence on the scandal is par for the course. 

• Planned Parenthood claimed a group called 3301 hacked them twice. The first time, a spokesman named E told the Daily Dot, which then broke the story, since Planned Parenthood was apparently not aware of the hack. Planned Parenthood described 3301 as "the world's most sophisticated hackers," though 3301 was foiled in their attempt to deface Planned Parenthood's site and redirect users to their Twitter account (they could do this because the back end of Planned Parenthood's website was "so terribly configured.") On July 27, 3301 said they would decrypt and release emails from Planned Parenthood soon. That has yet to occur.

The second time, E was very clear that 3301 did not do it; in fact, E believed Planned Parenthood did it to themselves. In other words, Planned Parenthood faked a hack to its website to distract people from the story and paint themselves as victims. The press covered Planned Parenthood's version of events ("a new low for anti-abortion extremists"), but when it became clear they had hacked themselves, the silence in the press was deafening. Planned Parenthood demonstrated its willingness to dishonestly cover up the story, and the press reported only one side of the discussion. It should be no surprise that this trend continued.

• Planned Parenthood began to remind everyone that only 3% if its business is abortion, as if a large number of non-controversial medical procedures justifies a small amount of controversial ones. Meanwhile, they did not report that anywhere from 30% to 50% of their income comes from those abortions, or that their 3% figure involves 10% of their clients, or that that the way in which they manipulate their data is so confusing that the 3% statistic is “the most meaningless abortion statistic ever,” according to the Washington Post.

Frankly, the number of abortions is irrelevant to the larger discussion. But if Planned Parenthood wants to bring it up, let the record show that their claim that abortion is only 3% of their business is misleading at best and deliberately false at worst. 

• Planned Parenthood and the media quickly reminded us of the medical breakthroughs (specifically vaccines) gained from research performed on dead babies fifty years ago, as if benefiting from babies killed then justifies our killing more babies now. Like the misleading 3% statistic, it's irrelevant to the issues exposed in the video, but Planned Parenthood and the press like to talk about it, so I suppose it's worth addressing. 

First, this unethical utilitarian calculus is morally problematic to say the least. Second, experimentation on aborted babies for medical research was unnecessary then and is unnecessary now. We can cure people without killing others on their behalf. Currently, non-fetal stem cell research is leading to a remarkable amount of medical breakthroughs while fetal stem cell research is fading because it’s going nowhere. The claim that we need fetal tissue to ensure medical breakthroughs is irrelevant to the discussion. It's also false. 

• Politicians started probes into Planned Parenthood clinics in their state  - even though Planned Parenthood does not do tissue procurement in any of the states reporting the results of their investigations. In other words, they were investigating an activity that occurs under the Planned Parenthood umbrella but does not occur in those states. Of course the clinics are going to be exonerated. If you don't do something, it's hard to do it illegally. The press nonetheless claimed this as proof that the Center For Medical Progress's claims were bogus. 

That conclusion is entirely unwarranted. The accusations in the videos will not be confirmed or denied until they are done in the states in question (such as Texas, where the probe is ongoing). So far, the claim that state probes have proven Planned Parenthood's innocence is entirely false.

• Angry voices claimed that cutting money from Planned Parenthood was like cutting money from women’s health. That is demonstrably false. 'Defunding' diverts governmental money to other organizations that help women, such as federally funded community health centers. These are far more numerous and serve a much broader clientele. Check out this map of other clinics that could offer services if Planned Parenthood somehow went out of business. The claim that women are losing money earmarked for their health care is false. 

• Planned Parenthood hired Fusion GPS,  a company whose partisan history would normally raise questions concerning their objectivity, to study the videos released by the Center For Medical Progress. To no one's surprise, Fusion GPS sided with the company that hired it and concluded that even the long form videos were unreliable as evidence. This was an odd conclusion, since there was no "widespread evidence of substantive video manipulation" and the edits were likely over “irrelevant content.” Nonetheless, the media happily reported the conclusion with no investigation of their own. 

How do I know they did not do their own investigation? Because I checked all the edits Fusion GPS highlighted in the long videos. You should too. There is nothing scandalous there. The accusations are almost childish in their pettiness. If people in the media investigated and didn't see this, they need to turn in their credentials. The "deceptively edited"video mantra is blatantly false, and anyone bothering to double check the claims of Fusion GPS can see this. (Update10/14/15: the Alliance Defending Freedom hired Coalfire, a far more credible company, to examine the videos. Their report is far more detailed than Fusion GPS's, and it soundly affirms the credibility of the videos.}

• After the second Republican debate, Carly Fiorina was mocked for “making up” scenes in the Center For Medical Progress's video. She mentioned "a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says, ‘We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.’" Actually, she was correct. This footage can be seen in Human Capital - Episode 3, at 5:57 in the short version. Script at the bottom of the screen credits the Center For Bio-Ethical Reform for a video clip showing an aborted baby kicking and dying on a tray. Molly O'Donnell, a former Stem Express employee, then discusses how an aborted baby in that condition was valued for procuring a brain. The inserted footage illustrated a point being made in an interview, which is common practice in documentaries. 

As far as I can tell, when the press says she made it up, they mean she said the baby was 'kicking' when it was only moving, she didn’t quote Ms. O’Donnell precisely word for word, and she referenced accredited footage that was not original to the Center For Medical Progress yet was in the video. That’s a deceptive way of defining “made up.” The claim that Carly Fiorina referenced imaginary footage and/or dialogue from the videos is  false.

I don’t know how many times I have asked the critics of the videos if they have actually viewed them. I have yet to hear an affirmative answer. They usually send me links to news stories or blog posts which are terribly misleading or completely false. When people grow to love a choice, they will eventually quit caring about any truth that challenges that choice. Much like our senators, they want to look away, and any excuse will do.

Meanwhile babies die, pulled apart and parceled out as commodities while those who dismember and sell them sip their wine, giggle at the gonads ripped off a baby boy, cut faces in half with scissors, celebrate the fact that written guidelines don't haunt them, and hope they don't get caught.

That is the truth.
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*I originally posted the following discussion about Facebook at the beginning of my list, but after some dialogue with others, I realized the speculative nature of this point makes it a poor choice for leading into my argument. I believe there is merit to my concern; time will tell if my suspicions are correct.

One of the first articles about the videos was removed from Facebook because it was “abusive” though there was no profanity or graphic imagery in it (a Facebook algorithm likely stopped the story from surfacing for a while). Eventually, Facebook responded to the protests and the story began to trend. However, the articles critical of the Center For Medical Progress rose suspiciously to the top in spite of having far fewer readers than articles promoting or defending the videos.

Perhaps it’s all coincidence, but Facebook has been known to manipulate its news feed to impact both information and emotions. One of their news curators has admitted that "they choose what's trending."  Wired has noted that Facebook organizes how news articles rank on our screens while manipulating the news feed itself. Forbes is one of many sites that has reported on Facebook's experiment in emotional manipulation.  Facebook and Google have even been used effectively to influence voter turnout and choices. Considering Facebook's track record, I am suspicious.