By Dave Andrusko
Tim Graham, from Newsbusters, is particularly adept at exposing how the “mainstream media” acts like a protective shield for Planned Parenthood. Indeed, no Star Wars-esque force field ever shielded the “Death Star” any more than the likes of the three networks, the New York Times, and the Washington Post does PPFA.
Yesterday, under the headline, “WashPost: ‘Reality Belies Perception’ In Akron Planned Parenthood ‘Abortion Clinic That Isn’t,’” Mr. Graham perceptively demolished the latest puff piece by the Post’s Monica Hess. Ms. Hess has evidently taken the place of Sarah Kliff as the watchman for the Abortion Industry’s best interests.
If you were trying to divert attention from the ten Planned Parenthood videos that have exposed the morally bereft largest abortion provider in the known galaxy, you could no better than Hess’s “At a Planned Parenthood, reality belies perception: Ohio clinic that doesn’t perform abortions sees 7,100 patients each year, most of them young and poor” (also titled “At a Planned Parenthood, reality belies perception”).
What’s the point of the 2,963-word-long encomium?
That not every Planned Parenthood clinic performs abortion? We all knew that. What isn’t mentioned is that national headquarters requires every affiliate to have at least one center that performs abortion.
But Planned Parenthood is in dire need of a major makeover. Hess and the Post and the Times and the networks are eager to apply the makeup, redo the hair, and create a more fetching image.
Graham will have none of that:
The reality and the perception about Planned Parenthood is obvious: by its own annual report, it performed almost 328,000 abortion in a year, or about 898 abortions a day. To spend an entire story chronicling one of the PP affiliate clinics that does not perform abortions – but refers unhappy pregnant women to a clinic 26 miles away – is not “typical.” It doesn’t “belie” the pro-life argument against Planned Parenthood’s activities.
Abortions are more deadly than cigarettes, but one can’t imagine that when the tobacco companies were under attack in the Clinton years, that The Washington Post would have done a story on RJR Nabisco by going to chronicle an Oreo factory and writing “Reality belies perception: They’re not merchants of death; they make cookies.”
I wish I would have thought of that spot-on characterization.
You need to read Graham’s full article, so let me just make two comments, spurred by Graham’s thoughtful column.
First, it doesn’t matter (to the Post) how many undercover videos the Center for Medical Progress releases. The narrative has forever been cast in concrete.
The videos are “heavily edited” and merely “purport” to show this and that. Conclusion? Not even a passing comment in a tiny story is needed, even when the revelations are startling by anyone standards
Second, if the personnel in one Akron, Ohio, Planned Parenthood are warm and fuzzy, the implication is we should turn a blind eye to what we can plainly see and hear on the CMP videos.
That includes the now famous comment where one PPFA official “jokes” about using a “less crunchy technique” so as to be able to extract the desired baby body part intact.
Or where a Dr. Ginde and a medical assistant are shown teasing out intact fetal organs. “Here’s some organs for you,” Dr. Ginde says, “they’re all attached. Here’s a stomach, kidney, heart, adrenal….”
As they pick and probe we hear comments about having located “a leg,” “a foot,” a “heart” even “eyeballs.” Calling it ghoulish does not begin to do justice to what we see.
And then there is this random observation from Dr. Ginde: “It’s a baby.”
Early in that same video, Dr. Ginde says, “I know I’ve seen livers, I’ve seen stomachs, I’ve seen plenty of neural [brain] tissue. Usually you can see the whole brain usually come out.”
My point? As hard as Hess tries, nothing anyone does at the Akron Planned Parenthood sanitizes the casual brutality and inhuman indifference to the lives of unborn children regularly on display in the CMP videos.
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