Planned Parenthood charges fees for providing tissue from aborted fetuses for medical research. Anti-abortion activists at the Center for Medical Progress posed as buyers from a medical research firm and secretly videotaped haggling over charges and conditions.
Planned Parenthood executives said highly calloused things. The director of Planned Parenthood's medical council, for instance, said "I want a Lamborghini" while talking prices for this tissue. While said in obvious jest, that remark fails the first test of humor as a defense for saying something callous. It isn't funny.
Now Planned Parenthood is in a fight to save the half-billion tax dollars a year it gets for non-abortion services. It's true that the center sent out edited versions of the talks that made the executives look very bad. But the center also posted the unedited files and transcripts on its website. They're all there at http://www.centerformedicalprogress.org/cmp/investigative-footage/.
I didn't watch the videos but read the transcripts. Some very important points and qualifiers were in there from Planned Parenthood, but they still left the Center for Medical Progress with plenty to work with.
The fact that Planned Parenthood -- and other, private entities that offer abortions -- charge for this tissue isn't the big, shocking new scandal critics claim it to be. Research on fetal tissue went on for decades before the National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act of 1993. That law set the ground rules we use today. You cannot "sell" such tissue from aborted fetuses, but you can charge "reasonable payments associated with the transportation, implantation, processing, preservation, quality control, or storage of human fetal tissue," to quote the law.
So you can't sell something for a profit but you can cover your costs. OK. Anybody out there know of a business, a government entity or a non-profit group that never had any employee or a branch office pad expenses? If so, you have a rare and fascinating story to tell.
Planned Parenthood is an umbrella group with 67 affiliates. It could, in theory, have set reimbursement rates for those affiliates to follow. Let's pause for a moment and consider the kind of public reaction when the Center for Medical Progress got hold of that list and published it, calling in a "menu" for baby parts.
Planned Parenthood's senior director of medical services plainly answers the very topic of setting prices so there'd be consistency. As the transcript quotes her; "So, we tried to do this, and at the national office we have a litigation and law department that just really doesn't want us to be the middle people for this issue right now." I humbly suggest that it might be time to reconsider that stance, considering recent events.
Let's be fair, folks. The only way to make sure Planned Parenthood never makes a penny off these charges is to ensure that it takes a loss. Is that what we want?
The videotapes also include no-holds-barred discussions on how an abortion can be performed to avoid damaging the most desirable samples. Yes, it's stomach-churning stuff -- but how could it not be? Surgery of any kind is not a topic for the squeamish. Of course, abortion opponents have the added argument that most other surgeries intend to be life saving.
Speaking of saving lives, this material is going to medical researchers. That's the only destination Planned Parenthood can legally provide this sort of tissue to. Major immunizations, including polio vaccine, came from research done on fetal tissue. That tissue didn't just appear in the petri dish at the lab one day back in the 1930s. It was an under-reported fact of the recent anti-vaccination controversy that some of those who object to immunizations have serious moral qualms about how those drugs were developed.
All in all, I'm in favor of reality checks. We agreed, as a nation, to allow these kind of transactions on tissue in 1993. If some of us want to reconsider that decision, fine. Those who want a reconsideration have the right to make that argument. They also have the right to make the rest of us look at a practice we've sanctioned for 22 years but didn't closely look at before. But don't pretend it's all some big, shocking new discovery and scandal.
As for Planned Parenthood and its supporters, they should show some respect. Suppose that Lamborghini comment was made by a hospital administrator talking about tissue from miscarriages. No pregnancies that end, even intentionally, should be the butt of jokes.
Doug Thompson is a political reporter and columnist for the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected].
Commentary on 08/08/2015