By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, September 23, 2015
“Anyone who has watched this videotape, I dare Hillary
Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these tapes. Watch a fully formed fetus on the
table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says, ‘We have to keep
it alive to harvest its brain.’ This is about the character of our nation, and
if we will not stand up and force President Obama to veto this bill, shame on
us.” — Carly Fiorina, GOP presidential debate, September 16, 2015.
The videotape in question was put out by the Center for
Medical Progress, an anti-abortion group that went undercover to record Planned
Parenthood officials discussing the buying and selling of organs and tissue
from aborted fetuses — some just shy of 20 weeks — to medical research
companies.
Fiorina’s description of what takes place in the videos
has come under withering attack. Sarah Kliff of Vox labels Fiorina’s version of
the scene as “pure fiction.” PolitiFact says it is “mostly false.”
And they have a point. The exact scene, exactly as
Fiorina describes it, is not on the videos. But anybody who has watched the
videos would find Fiorina’s off-the-cuff account pretty accurate.
Most of the center’s videos involve hidden-camera
conversations with current Planned Parenthood managers, as well as interviews
with veterans of the abortion industry, discussing the selling of fetal body
parts for research purposes. The video Fiorina probably had in mind included
eyewitness descriptions accompanied by borrowed footage of a fetus dying in a
metal bowl, its leg kicking, to illustrate the witness’s recollection of seeing
precisely that in another case. That sort of juxtaposition might not fly on the
nightly news, but it’s the sort of dramatic device used in documentaries all
the time. It’s akin to a documentary maker interviewing a witness to Cecil the
Lion getting shot, and using footage of another lion getting shot as an
illustration. Fiorina’s critics want to claim that because she didn’t take into
account these distinctions, she’s just making stuff up.
To this end they’ve become Jesuitical nitpickers,
muddying the water to conceal the fact that late-term abortions offend the
conscience when discussed or displayed with anything like journalistic
accuracy. That’s probably why we get so little of it. Many of the media outlets
that even bother to cover the videos have referred to the transferring of
“fetal tissue,” not “organs” — the correct term for livers, hearts and brains.
(“Tissue” is less suggestive of a human being than, say, “heart.”)
We’re also often informed that the videos weren’t merely
“edited” but “highly edited.” Left out of such caveats is that the news reports
passing along these descriptions come via highly edited newspapers, radio, and
TV programs.
The larger problem is that people are talking past
each other. Fiorina’s remarks — and these videos — are really aimed at the
abortion industry and its Achilles’ heel, late-term abortions. None of these
videos would strike a chord if the only images were of blastocysts.
Most Americans are morally appalled by late-term
abortions. Planned Parenthood and its allies know this, which is why they refer
to “uterine contents,” “clumps of cells,” “tissue” and even “goop,” when a more
apt descriptor would be “fetus” or even “baby.”
In other words, the people horrified by these videos
aren’t out of the mainstream — they are the mainstream. The people trying to
dismiss the videos are the extremists, and the media give them cover.
For instance, Hillary Clinton, who once described the
videos as “disturbing” — before Planned Parenthood yanked her leash — recited
the usual talking points Sunday on Face the Nation about how the videos were
“misleadingly edited.” It seems she’s more troubled by diabolical video editing
than anything on the videos themselves.
Indeed, when host John Dickerson asked if she’d support
any federal restrictions at “any stage of pregnancy” — conceivably right until
the moment before birth — Clinton said she wouldn’t, because such abortions
only take place for “medical necessity.”
That is a far greater distortion of the truth than
anything Fiorina said. I won’t lose sleep waiting for the nitpickers to care.
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