OPINION:
People who walk in the middle of the road risk getting run over, and Hillary Clinton is not making that mistake twice. Joining Barack Obama’s eight-year campaign to steer the nation to the left side of the road, Hillary has declared abortion a fundamental component of keeping women healthy. As a corollary, the lives of infants don’t matter.
When Hillary ran for president in 2008, she said abortion should be “safe, legal and rare, and by rare, I mean rare.” Not this time. “You know,” she told a television interviewer the other day, “I’ve been on record for many years about where I stand on abortion, how it should be safe and legal and I have the same position that I’ve had for a very long time.” Nothing there about rare. Her first major speech after joining Donald Trump as a presumptive party nominee was given to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, and she kicked “rare” to the curb.
“Planned parenthood” sounds responsible and reasonable, describing how a thoughtful married couple might be mapping out when to have children, and how many. With 40 percent of babies currently born out of wedlock in America, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, such responsible discussions like that are becoming rare if abortions are not. Hillary made no mention of the obligations that come with parenthood, and instead lamented that irresponsible parents are having children when they could be aborting children born of irresponsibility. “In just the first three months of 2016,” she said, “states across the country introduced more than 400 restrictions on abortion.”
She offered angst-ridden concerns about an imminent Supreme Court ruling on “the Texas law that imposes burdensome and medically unnecessary requirements on abortion providers.” This law requires doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals in the event a patient suffers serious complications, as sometimes happens, and the law requires abortion clinics to upgrade their facilities to standards of care required of hospitals. Kermit Gosnell, the infamous doctor of a Philadelphia abortion mill that was filthy enough to frighten away rats and roaches, would have owed Hillary a fist-bump for standing up for substandard abortion clinics.
Neither did Hillary mention the Planned Parenthood business of selling baby body parts, except to praise Amna Dermish, the Texas Planned Parenthood doctor caught on camera discussing the business as she daintily picked at a salad during a lunchtime interview. Millions of Americans were scandalized by the sight.
Congress empaneled the House Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives, and one panelist, Rep. Diane Black of Tennessee, a Republican and a registered nurse, suggests now that Planned Parenthood may have violated federal patient privacy rules in pursuit of their grisly but profitable business. The panel has asked the Department of Health and Human Services to investigate reports that clinics have been giving advance notice of pending abortions to let buyers know when and what to expect in the way of available hearts, kidneys, lungs and other tiny parts of babies. The practice would violate Health Insurance Portability Accountability Act rules, Rep. Black says.
Republicans in the House attempted reforms last year with the passage of the Women’s Public Health and Safety Act, protecting the right of states to terminate Medicaid contracts with Planned Parenthood without fear of reprisal from the federal government. President Obama threatened to withhold Medicaid funds from the 10 states that proceeded to defund Planned Parenthood. Hillary, always eager to play follow the leader with the president, is determined to keep abortion legal. Safe and rare, not so much.
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