If the revelation that Planned Parenthood is mining aborted babies has taught us anything, it is the degree to which abortion supporters will go to obfuscate what they are really doing. This much has been evident to anyone who has paid any attention to the abortion debate in the past century.
Anyone, however, who watches the full two-hour, forty-five-minute conversation between two actors from the Center for Medical Progress and Deborah Nucatola, the senior director of medical services for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, can witness firsthand the divide between the how abortion supporters talk in private and how they address one another in-house, the difference between talking points used to win political support from sympathetic modern newspaper editors and the Plain English H.L. Mencken called for in his day.
When the video broke on Tuesday, Planned Parenthood was quick to issue a press release, highlighting the “ethical” standards it abides by. See, the pro-lifers were making mountains out of molehills, “heart, lung, [and] liver” out of mere tissue. Why, Planned Parenthood is no different than any other “high-quality health care provider.”
“At several of our health centers, we help patients who want to donate tissue for scientific research, and we do this just like every other high-quality health care provider does—with full, appropriate consent from patients and under the highest ethical and legal standards,” the abortionists’ statement said.
Please Call It Tissue—It’s Easier That Way
Indeed, the word “tissue” is used 72 times in the transcript of the lunch meeting, and Nucatola is responsible for 50 of those utterances, while the pro-life actors posing as prospective buyers from the (fake) “Fetal Tissue Procurement Company” only say it 20 times. The actors chose the name wisely. How else could they book a nearly three-hour lunch meeting complete with red wine and salad entrée with the top doctor from the country’s largest abortionist? She sure disappointed.
Nucatola was happy to say “tissue” when the buyers were discussing the procurement of “specimens.” When it came down to brass tacks, pricing the body parts between $30 and $100 so local Planned Parenthood affiliates could “do a little bit better than break even,” she was quick to call organs organs, pieces of a human body pieces of a human body. Plain English instead of talking points, instead of the later defense Planned Parenthood offered to justify the indefensible.
“We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not going to crush that part, I’m going to basically crush below, I’m going to crush above, and I’m going to see if I can get it all intact,” Nucatola said.
We’ll Be Careful If Money Is Involved
Anyone who has seen the uncomfortable pictures of abortion, especially those of the late-term variety—the carelessly sliced limbs, crushed skulls, and gaping jaws—would be shocked that any Planned Parenthood doctor conducted himself with the precision of a heart surgeon, one that could face felony charges if he purposefully killed another human being. Have no fear, Nucatola reassured her prospective buyers. Planned Parenthood uses nothing but the most advanced pregnancy technology available today.
“I’d say a lot of people want liver,” she says, pausing to take a bite of her salad. “And for that reason, most providers will do this case under ultrasound guidance, so they’ll know where they’re putting their forceps. The kind of rate-limiting step of the procedure is the calvarium, the head is basically the biggest part. Most of the other stuff can come out intact.”
Here again, we encounter the obfuscation of what abortionists say in public and what they dare admit in private. In public, the ultrasound is “cruel,” according to Planned Parenthood, and the technology should play no role in determining whether a majority of Supreme Court lawyers should overturn the precedent established by a majority of Supreme Court lawyers who legalized abortion 40 years ago without the advances in pre-natal care that have enabled us to kill viable babies wholesale.
But when an abortionist meets some of her ideological cohorts and money is on the line, the ultrasound transmogrifies into a magical instrument helping to harvest—intact—body parts that would normally be ripped to shreds and discarded without a second thought.
Planned Parenthood may condemn the importance of ultrasound machines to women’s health and downplay the revenue stream of “donated” human body parts in public, but Nucatola makes clear that both are good for business in the video.
The Media Aids in Language Obfuscation
“A lot of the training programs are funded by the same donors. So, from there they came back to us and they’re like: ‘How come with this affiliate it cost his much to train a resident, how come this affiliate’—I said, well this affiliate has five ultrasound machines in two rooms, and this affiliate does one ultrasound in one room, and so they’re losing patient revenue,” she says, before sipping her red wine.
Even pro-choice individuals were sickened by the casual way in which the good doctor portrayed women’s choice. “How could this happen?” they asked themselves. “Why didn’t we know about this before?”
The answer is simple. The media plays an active part in this. The closest the vast majority of journalists ever come to a Bible is when they open their Associated Press style guides. There you will find that the proper, non-biased way to talk about abortion—“the act of terminating a pregnancy”—is on the playing field established by pro-abortion—“pro-choice”—groups such as Planned Parenthood—a “women’s health organization”—NARAL (nee the National Abortion Rights Action League).
Organs are “tissue,” ultrasound machines are “cruel,” and human babies resulting from the procreative acts of two human beings copulating are “fetuses” or, if they’re desperate, “the result of conception.” Humans are not human, murder is choice, up is down, Orwell is fascist. Euphemism is Plain English.
