UPDATE, 25 January 2016: Texas joins an ever-expanding list of states who have cleared Planned Parenthood when a Houston grand jury not only cleared the group of any criminal wrong-doing, but also handed down indictments against two of the individuals behind those highly edited and misleading videos.
A highly edited video leading to a faux scandal… Fox News hysteria – the title says it all: Planned Parenthood is not selling baby parts, you f-ing idiots
Social media has been ablaze the last couple of weeks over highly edited and misleading viral videos which emerged earlier this month. The original video was recorded in 2014 with intent to smear the reputation of the healthcare organization. It shows a Planned Parenthood senior medical director having lunch with undercover anti-choice activists posing as potential biologists interested in buying fetus body parts for research. In the clip, Dr. Deborah Nucatola apathetically discuses various procedures used to remove body parts during an abortion without damaging the organs.
Cecile Richards, President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, released a statement a couple of weeks ago exposing the video for what is was – a completely misleading stunt by an organization working to ban abortions.
Fox News and other conservative outlets have been having a meltdown, most recently with Fox host Eric Bolling saying the videos were worse than those of ISIS beheadings.
Rebecca Watson, the founder of the Stepchick Network – “a collection of smart and often sarcastic blogs focused on science and critical thinking,” released a video this week hitting back at the continued interest in these bogus Planned Parenthood videos by conservative extremists and pundits.
You can watch the clip below, followed by a “Sorta transcript” provided by Stepchick Network.
Planned Parenthood is in the news a lot these days thanks to a maliciously edited video making it look like they SELL BABY PARTS.
It’s weird for those of us with two brain cells to rub together, that this is even a thing. Because first of all, obviously Planned Parenthood doesn’t sell BABY PARTS. Jesus f*cking christ, get a hold of yourselves. Baby parts!
3% of all Planned Parenthood’s activities are abortions, and more than 90% of those are in the first trimester when it’s about size of a kidney bean, so they do see some pieces of fetal tissue. Which are just going to be thrown away in the garbage, but which the patient can instead choose to donate to important medical research.
HOW DARE THEY! How dare Planned Parenthood allow women to aid in the research and treatment of conditions like H.I.V. and Parkinson’s disease, when instead those women could just be throwing that tissue in the garbage!
So yeah, there’s the fact that Planned Parenthood obviously isn’t “selling baby parts.” And then there’s the fact that the group releasing this video are some of the same people who worked for the group Live Action, which is best known for…editing together misleading videos attacking Planned Parenthood.
So despite the fact that this is an obviously made up and ridiculous accusation, actual politicians are taking it seriously. If you live in the US, your tax dollars are now going toward Congressional Republicans calling for a formal investigation, and the House Energy and Commerce Committee has announced they’ll launch a probe. A probe for baby parts! Good luck, guys!
This all reminds me of a course I took in college on heresy. I remember learning about how multiple times throughout human history, various groups of people have been accused of the very specific act of gathering together and hosting orgies, and then taking the resulting babies from any past orgies and burning them into ashes, which are then formed into cakes, which are then eaten. Usually it’s supposed to be the Jews doing this but plenty of other marginalized groups have been accused as well. And it always baffled me to think that people could really, truly believe that their fellow humans were doing something so obviously stupid and made up.
Well, now it’s 2015 and an organization that is mostly responsible for making sure poor women have access to basic medical care including cancer screenings, checkups, and birth control, are accused of convincing women to abort their babies and then tearing them into parts and selling them on the black market.
And I realize, that if it helps you achieve your goals — whether they be persecuting people of a different faith or cutting funding for poor women’s health care — it becomes surprisingly easy to believe something unbelievable.
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