OPINION:
The late Richard Pryor obviously wrote the defense used by the wonderful folks at Planned Parenthood, whose senior executives got caught on camera, twice, haggling over the price of the body parts — lungs, livers, brains — lifted from the bodies of unborn babies.
Caught in bed with another woman, the comic famously told his angry wife: “Who you gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes?” That’s the only defense Planned Parenthood executives have managed since Congress, and the rest of us, watched the video proof that Planned Parenthood executives have been negotiating for the sale of body parts, which is against the law.
The cold-blooded behavior of the Planned Parenthood executives, talking freely because they did not know they were on camera, is both astonishing and breathtaking. Mary Gattas, the medical director of Planned Parenthood of Los Angeles, haggles over prices of fetal “specimens” with the two actors posing as prospective body-part buyers.
“Let me just figure out what others are getting,” she tells them, “and if this is in the ballpark, then it’s fine. If it’s too low, then we can bump it up. I want a Lamborghini.”
She can get an “affordable” Lamborghini for $200,000, but the limited edition Aventador model more suitable for a Planned Parenthood executive, sells at $497,650. Lamborghinis, as even casual shoppers discover, can cost an arm and a leg.
Congress is considering eliminating the enormous federal subsidies that pay the bills at Planned Parenthood — nearly $530 million last year, 41 percent of its annual budget. Democrats in Congress haven’t said much since the first of the two videos surfaced. Planned Parenthood is a favorite “charity” of liberals and abortion advocates.
Though selling baby parts is illegal, the law is not tightly written, enabling the merchants of baby flesh to charge for the “costs” of harvesting. Planned Parenthood, which boasted of $1.3 billion in revenue and $1.4 billion in assets last year, argues that it is unfairly accused of something illegal because no law has been broken.
The House Commerce Committee invited Planned Parenthood’s senior director of medical services, who had been the “star” of the first video produced by the Center for Medical Progress, a right-to-life advocacy group that set up the sting, to brief the committee on what actually happened. Planned Parenthood, no surprise, declined. The organization prefers to pretend to play the victim and count on the media to make whatever case it can that Planned Parenthood is not a moral black hole. The videos, the organization argues, are “fraudulent” products of a long-simmering campaign of harassment that should be discounted, dismissed or ignored by Congress and everyone else with “lyin’ eyes.”
The New York Times hasn’t reported much about what Planned Parenthood is actually doing — its delicate editors have had to look away — and has focused on the founder of the Center for Medical Progress, examining his “motives” and dismissing him as a disciple of the man who earned the hostility of liberals for producing the video evidence that destroyed ACORN several years ago.
Apologists on the left suggest that David Daleidan, the founder of the Center for Medical Progress, may not advocate the bombing of abortion clinics, but he is cut from the same cloth as those who do. It’s a familiar tactic: Facts don’t matter if they’re brought to light by someone you don’t like. Demonize the messenger and the message will be lost. But Congress should stop the flow of federal largesse, and determine whether Planned Parenthood has been breaking the law. If so, the organization and its leaders should answer for it, like any other lawbreakers. If not, the law should be fixed.
Defunding Planned Parenthood will not be easy, and perhaps not possible at this time. Legislation produced by Congress would not likely get past President Obama’s veto. But an organization rotten to its moral core would stand exposed, for all to see. No small thing.
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