The Problem With Planned Parenthood's "Unstoppable" Campaign

Planned Parenthood has a new “Unstoppable” campaign.  In the section for reproductive rights, we read the following: 

“Everyone deserves the freedom to make their own decisions about their bodies... for women to live full, healthy lives and plan their futures...People deserve quality prenatal care, and the ability to give birth in a safe and welcoming environment without fear of preventable causes of maternal death... We should be working towards a world where our bodies are our own, and women are able to access full reproductive care.”

At first glance, those look like pretty good quotes. Is it possible that I am going to find myself - against all odds - in agreement with a Planned Parenthood campaign? Let's take a closer look at these points. 

A Defense of Missouri's Proposed Abortion Restrictions

Considering all the noise about Missouri's attempt to outlaw abortion after the 15th week of pregnancy, I figured it is worth taking the opportunity to look at more closely at how the facts of fetal development argue for more restrictive abortion limits in the interest in protecting unborn human persons.

First, what is that thing inside the womb that it impacted by abortion? Is it a clump of cells or a baby? I will let pro-choice advocates give their explanation of what an abortion does:

• ''In 1970, an editorial in California Medicine noted: “Since the old ethic has not yet been fully displaced it has been necessary to separate the idea of abortion from the idea of killing, which continues to be socially abhorrent. The result has been a curious avoidance of the scientific fact, which everyone really knows, that human life begins at conception and is continuous whether intra-or extra-uterine until death. The very considerable semantic gymnastics which are required to rationalize abortion as anything but taking a human life would be ludicrous if they were not often put forth under socially impeccable auspices.” 
• Former Planned Parenthood President Dr. Alan Guttmacher was perplexed that anyone would question these basic scientific facts. “This all seems so simple and evident that it is difficult to picture a time when it wasn’t part of the common knowledge,” he wrote in his book Life in the Making. (A. Guttmacher, Life in the Making: The Story of Human Procreation, New York: Viking Press, 1933, p. 3.)
• A Planned Parenthood brochure in 1963 noted, “Abortion kills the life of a baby after it has begun.  It is dangerous to your life and health.”
• Faye Wattleton, the longest reigning president Planned Parenthood, told Ms. Magazine: “I think we have deluded ourselves into believing that people don’t know that abortion is killing. So any pretense that abortion is not killing is a signal of our ambivalence, a signal that we cannot say yes, it kills a fetus.”
• Bernard Nathanson, co-founder of NARAL, in an article for the New England Journal of Medicine in 1974: “There is no longer serious doubt in my mind that human life exists within the womb from the very onset of pregnancy…”

Note that the issue is not whether or not abortion ends a developing human life. The question is about who gets to make the call about what happens to that growing human life, and why. The Supreme Court has weighed in on that very issue. According to lifenews.com:

"Viability... is an important mark in the abortion debate. In Roe v. Wade and the 1992 decision Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the U.S. Supreme Court argued that states do have an interest in protecting an unborn baby’s life once they are viable. Viability at the time was considered to be about 24-26  weeks [22-24 is more commonly cited now]..."  

Paul Barnes, special assistant to the attorney general of Missouri, argues that Missouri's stance is in line with the Supreme Court standard:

"The viability line is constantly moving. When viability is the issue, then the state’s interest trumps the woman’s interest. It’s always moving in favor of the state’s authority, it’s never moving the other direction. The more developed the fetus is, the state’s interest is stronger in protecting unborn life.”

Since I don't think legal necessarily equals moral, I believe there is an important question worth asking: is viability the right line to draw when it comes to the protection of unborn human life? Perhaps a better phrasing: Must human beings be viable in order to be human persons and thus deserving of the moral status that would rightly be accorded to them?

First, there is good reason to think the 'viability' line is a philosophically tenuous position:

Here is the Court's entire argument in Roe v. Wade for using the viability criterion: 'With respect to the State's important and legitimate interest in potential life, the "compelling" point is at viability. This is so because the fetus then presumably has the capability of meaningful life outside the mother's womb.' 

That's seriously the entire argument... It is, of course, circular reasoning. Viability is important, the Court says, because that's when a child can live outside the womb (the definition of viability). Viability is important, that is, because it is viability.

"[T]he Court's defense seems to mistake a definition for a syllogism," noted the eminent Yale law professor John Hart Ely (who personally supported legalized abortion). Indeed, "scholars from a wide variety of backgrounds have recognized," writes University of Georgia law professor Randy Beck, that "Roe literally provided no argument in favor of treating viability as the controlling line, much less an argument grounded in constitutional principles..."

If we do take this to be an "argument," it is a fallacious one, as Francis J. Beckwith writes: 'For the Court to make its argument valid, it would have to add to its factual premise [the fact of fetal non-viability] the normative premise: whenever a human being cannot live on its own because it uniquely depends on another human being for its physical existence, it is permissible for the second human being to kill the first to rid the second of the burden.'

The Court assumed that premise in both Roe and Casey. The Court has never argued for it.

So the first point is that the Supreme Court is not infallible, and may, in fact, build their rulings on a discouraging lack of reason at times.

Second, there is good reason to think it is a morally problematic position given the nature of the unborn. Perhaps the following walk through the weeks of fetal development during pregnancy will make this second point more clear. I encourage you to watch the videos as you read (they are not 'gotcha' videos about abortion).

Is It Statistically Safer To Have An Abortion Rather Than Give Birth?

Planned Parenthood Black Community recently posted on Twitter: “If you are a black woman in America, it’s statistically safer to have an abortion than to carry a pregnancy to term or give birth #scarystats.“

According to commonly cited stats, all pregnant women are statistically safer having an abortion than giving birth, though the degree of safety falls on a sliding scale. The rate of maternal death in the United States is lowest for white women and highest for black women, with pregnant women of other races or ethnicities landing somewhere in the middle. 

I want to address this question: is it statistically safer for a pregnant woman in the United States to have an abortion than to carry a baby to term or give birth? 

It’s not statistically safer for the unborn baby, of course, who always dies in an abortion. One cannot address the broader moral issue of abortion without addressing the status of the unborn. But, for the sake of this post, I am only going to look at the initial claim involving the mothers. 

My interest in this is not to make an anti-abortion argument, though I am happy to do that and have done so elsewhere. My interest is in the facts swirling around a claim that has life-changing implications for pregnant women.

When Planned Parenthood Fights For the Right To Live - and DREAM

“DACA has helped so many young DREAMers to go to Planned Parenthood abortion centers. We are resolved to fight back against this cruel and heartless decision — and I hope you are, too.

Here at Planned Parenthood, we firmly believe that every person has the right to live, work, and raise a family freely and without the threat of deportation or separation.

We believe in every person’s right to control their own destiny and their own body.

We stand with our allies who are leading this fight and will never stop fighting for this vision. Protecting immigrant families from inhumane attacks, assault, and deportations is critical to making that vision a reality.

- Cecile Richards, President, Planned Parenthood Federation Of America

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Oh, my.

Planned Parenthood clearly does not believe every person has the right to live, work and raise a family. They are responsible for ending the life of unborn babies at the remarkable rate of 887 a day on average (that’s about 320,000 in 2015 in case you were wondering).  Oh, and “79% of their surgical abortion facilities are located within walking distance of African American or Hispanic/Latino neighborhoods.” So those DREAMers they are helping? They are helping them abort the next generation. Deportation is bad for business, a business that makes at least a third of its income (and perhaps as high as 50%) through inhumane attacks and assaults against unborn human beings (click on the link to see my defense of this definition of a fetus).

Oh, Cecile, you have such moral clarity for the born, and I’m with you on that. I, too, think DACA needs to be reinstituted by the legislative branch. It is a morally good law implemented poorly. Let’s use the just means this time to achieve the same just ends.

But please, please apply your thinking to those who have not had the privilege of being born. They are truly the marginalized, the discarded, the ones being deported not just from this country but from this life. They are the ones being separated from their mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters. Let them live so that they can truly control their own destinies.

I actually agree with your vision (with some clarifications about when deportation is appropriate): "We firmly believe that every person has the right to live, work, and raise a family freely and without the threat of deportation or separation. We believe in every person’s right to control their own destiny and their own body." Cool. Just…don't stop there. Walk it back. Every person's life begins not at birth, but at conception. The biology is incontrovertible. All they did after that moment was grow. 

Let them live.

Let the dream, too.

Planned Parenthood And The Lives That Don't Matter

In response to the latest police shootings, Planned Parenthood posted the following  response in an attempt to show solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement: "You deserve to parent your child without fear that he or she will be hurt or killed. Freedom from violence is reproductive justice."

I agree with Planned Parenthood's statement. I would have phrased it differently (can we include what kids deserve?), but I embrace the general sentiment. Of course black lives matter; of course we want a world where parents don't have to worry about children experiencing violence or being killed.

This is why I am also angry at the hypocrisy of this claim and heart-broken at the reality it supports. Do they really want to have a discussion about the intersection of violence and reproduction? Planned Parenthood is one of the leading providers of abortion in the United States, an act which by its very nature takes the life of a unborn human child. Thousands of unborn children suffer violence every day when someone receives an abortion in a Planned Parenthood clinic. If freedom from violence is reproductive justice, then there is no reproductive justice at any Planned Parenthood clinic by their own standard.

I know Planned Parenthood is attempting to support the cause of the Black Lives Matter movement, and as I noted earlier I agree with their sentiment. But their statement fails dismally because it only reveals their hypocrisy. Planned Parenthood's track record shows that, in spite of their rhetoric, not all black lives matter to them.

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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Planned Parenthood, Fusion GPS, and the Smokeless Gun

The big story this week is that Planned Parenthood hired Fusion GPS to take a look at the Center For Medical Progress's unedited videos to see if they were truly unedited. To the surprise of no one, the group Planned Parenthood hired to exonerate them exonerated them. The story has legs - my Facebook feed is full of gleefully overhyped headlines.  However, there is much more to the story than meets the eye.

First, its' worth noting that this is the same Planned Parenthood that a mere six weeks ago apparently faked a hack on their own website and blamed it on extremists. I felt very comfortable not accepting the news reports at face value - which is why I studied Fusion GPS's report of the videos for myself (more on this later). 

A Response To “Planned Parenthood is Not Selling Baby Parts, You F****** Idiots.”

When Skepchick Rebecca Watson wrote her now viral post on the Planned Parenthood scandal, no one had to guess which side she was defending or what she thought of the pro-life crowd. The article is worth considering – not because she's right, but because what is presented as fact is so woefully wrong in so many ways.

As I respond to her arguments, I will be quoting the shortened blog version of the video that she posted on her website. A lot of what I have to say will challenge her claim that nothing illegal is happening. The rest will hopefully point out why it shouldn't be legal in the first place.

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Planned Parenthood is in the news a lot these days thanks to a maliciously edited video making it look like they SELL BABY PARTS.

First, the Center for Medical Progress released the uncut video along with the edited one. All anybody has to do – including all the journalists and bloggers who keep repeating this silly charge - is watch the whole video or read the transcript CMP provides on its website. If CMP were trying to deceive, they would have kept the uncut video a secret.

Second, if you think the edited videos makes it ‘look like’ Planned Parenthood is selling baby parts, just watch the videos and see for yourself. You will hear the following:

• "We don’t want to get called on…selling fetal parts across states.”
• “If you have someone in a really ‘anti’ state doing this for you, they’re probably going to get caught.” Get caught at what? Obeying the law?
• “I think a per item thing works a little better, just because we can see how much we can get out of it.”
• “I think for affiliates, at the end of the day, they’re a non-profit, they just don’t want to—they want to break even. And if they can do a little better than break even, and do so in a way that seems reasonable, they’re happy to do that.” Every business would like to do a little better than break even. That's called profit. It's probably worth noting that In 2014, Planned Parenthood's revenue exceeded their expenses by $90 million.
• “The Federal Abortion Ban is a law, and laws are up to interpretation.”
• “Here’s the heart. My fingers will smoosh it if I try to pick it up. The heart is right there… A lot of times I‘ll get a full torso, spine, kidneys. You could send the whole thing or pick that apart… It’s a baby.” There's the baby parts. 
• “If someone delivers before we get to see them for a procedure, then they [the babies] are intact…” Which is good for those clients who want intact babies. 

If you think I am trying to trick you or I am ripping quotes out of context, please go watch the videos or read the transcripts.

The 'Ick Factor' And The Planned Parenthood Videos

While discussing the recent Planned Parenthood expose, I have been told that my opinions about abortion are influenced by the ‘ick factor.’ Apparently, my opposition to abortion can be minimized or dismissed because I think abortion is gross. If I recommend that people view a picture or video so they can be fully informed, the response is fairly consistent: “There are a lot of medical procedures I don’t want to watch. Just because seeing them might make me squeamish doesn’t mean they are a bad idea. After all, I don’t want to see what happens in a heart surgery, but heart surgeries are a good thing.”

That's true. Something is not wrong because it makes me squeamish any more than it is right because it doesn't make someone else feel the same. So is this a legitimate argument? Am I and other pro-life advocates simply wanting to create a moral framework to support our weak stomachs? Obviously, I don't think that's the case.