Planned Parenthood Bites Back With FACTS About Conservative Media’s Latest Smear Attempt
Now that conservatives have lost any and all hope of dismantling Obamacare or preventing nationwide marriage equality, they’ve gone back to their tried-and-true old faithful wedge issue — abortion. It’s pretty much all they have left.
It comes as no surprise that conservatives and conservative media are trying their best to again make Planned Parenthood look like the devil — “They kill babies!” Actually, they perform medically safe and often necessary abortions to female patients who seek them. A service that makes up only three percent of what Planned Parenthood offers the communities they work within.
Now, conservative media is spreading the fallacy that “Planned Parenthood sells dead baby body parts.” They apparently have an “undercover video” that was filmed by the “Center for Medical Progress” that shows the senior medical director of medical services excited to sell off baby parts. This is an old fable from an old video that is now being recycled, because it’s all conservatives have left to rile up their base. Besides, its election season, so we should expect no less.
Well, now Planned Parenthood is biting back with actual FACTS about the issue at hand.
In a statement released by Planned Parenthood on July 15, they call out the lies:
“These outrageous claims are flat-out untrue, but that doesn’t matter to politicians with a longstanding political agenda to ban abortion and defund Planned Parenthood. Women and families who make the decision to donate fetal tissue for lifesaving scientific research should be honored, not attacked and demeaned. Our medical practices and guidelines in this area are clear, and we do this important work just like other high-quality health care providers — with full, appropriate consent from patients, under the highest ethical and legal standards, and with no financial benefit for the patient or Planned Parenthood.”
They also list 5 FACTS to coincide with the statement and the ongoing accusations:
1. Nowhere does anyone from Planned Parenthood discuss “selling” fetal tissue.
Even the heavily edited video from extreme anti-abortion activists doesn’t show this or make this accusation. It simply doesn’t happen.
On the video, the Planned Parenthood staff member talks about standard reimbursement fees for costs associated with tissue donation programs, which every health care provider has and which the federal law provides for.
2. Planned Parenthood helps patients who wish to donate fetal tissue, just like other health care providers do.
Some Planned Parenthood affiliates have programs for women and families who want to donate tissue to leading research institutions that will use it to help find treatment and cures for diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
These programs are just like any other high-quality health care provider’s — they follow all ethics and laws, patients consent fully, and nobody benefits financially.
3. The people who launched this campaign have a track record of making totally false claims.
The person leading this campaign used to be a senior staff member at Live Action, which for seven years has made false claims that have been widely discredited by journalists and independent organizations; Forbes Magazine noted that their claims about Planned Parenthood “fall apart upon close inspection.”
4. The fact that far-right, anti-abortion politicians are latching onto this doesn’t make it any more credible or real.
GOP politicians remain in a race to prove who can be the worst on women’s health, and this story is no exception.
Whether it’s Carly Fiorina’s social media page or Bobby Jindal’s sham “investigation,” none of the partisan attempts to make this a real story change the fact that it’s a highly edited video from anti-abortion activists who have made false charges for years, now making claims with no basis in reality and no evidence to back them up.
5. The full, 2.5-hour video shows selective editing that twists and distorts what was said on the tape.
Late in the day, the Live Action-offshoot group released a longer video. It shows that the Planned Parenthood staffer was talking in the context of stem cell research, and was talking about standard reimbursement rates for costs associated with tissue donation — all of which was edited to change the meaning.
The 2.5-hour video also shows that the Planned Parenthood staffer’s discussion of brain stem tissue that can help researchers study brain tumors and spinal chord injuries was distorted by editing to make it appear that she was talking about trafficking body parts, which she clearly wasn’t.”
rooster, that is one of your most deceptive and vicious posts. You must understand why by now. Be honest. At least to yourself.
By Carina Storrs, Special to CNN
Updated 6:01 PM ET, Fri July 17, 2015
A human fetal lung at 14 weeks of gestation.
Story highlights
* Fetal tissue has been used in biomedical research since the 1930s, for the development of the first polio vaccine
* Cells from fetal tissue are still in use today in vaccine manufacturing, as well as for stem cell and transplantation research
* The U.S. Health and Human Services guidelines dictate how researchers can obtain and use fetal tissue
(CNN)Fetal tissue has been used since the 1930s .. http://www.ascb.org/newsfiles/fetaltissue.pdf .. for vaccine development, and more recently to help advance stem cell research and treatments for degenerative diseases such as Parkinson's disease. Researchers typically take tissue samples from a fetus that has been aborted (under conditions permitted by law .. http://americanpregnancy.org/unplanned-pregnancy/abortion-procedures/ ) and grow cells from the tissue in Petri dishes.
Many of the uses of fetal tissue — and much of the debate — are not new. "It's just that the public is finding out about it," said Insoo Hyun, associate professor of bioethics at Case Western Reserve University.
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
AI
