So Bill O'Reilly wonders aloud whether America has become barbaric because we allow women to have legal abortions and agree to donate fetal tissue for medical research to assist those suffering from chronic disease.
Of course, he's relying on the now-debunked videos put out there by anti-abortion extremists funded with Billionaire Bucks to make his case.
In the process of his bloviation, he claims America will lose all moral authority if Planned Parenthood is not defunded. Bull.
Our moral authority is lost when we deprive the needy of health care.
Our moral authority is lost when we deprive poor people of access to food.
Our moral authority is lost when we give more of a damn about a non-viable fetus than we do about the living human being who has been forced into a world where they're consigned to a human scrap heap.
Our moral authority is lost when right wing yakkers like O'Reilly rely on deceptively edited videos to argue for further deprivation of health care services for women.
That's where our moral authority erodes, Bill O'Reilly. It has not one damned thing to do with whether Congress tosses some money at Planned Parenthood so poor women can get screenings.
I honestly loathe this man right now.
Here's the full transcript if you can't bear to watch. Before you read it, let me offer some corrections.
First, these are not "babies." No one is carving up "babies." They are non-viable fetuses.
Secondly, the "Center for Medical Progress" is a fraud created to destroy Planned Parenthood. It isn't some kind of "pro-life" noble organization. It's built on a lie, and for one purpose only -- to force birth on women who have the legal choice to have an abortion.
Today pro-life Americans in more than 50 cities protested against Planned Parenthood after gruesome undercover videos showed the organization selling the organs of dead babies.
SEN. TED CRUZ (R-TX): “Today the U.S. Department of Justice should open a criminal investigation into whether Planned Parenthood nationally is a criminal enterprise breaking the law.”
At least eight states are now investigating Planned Parenthood, which receives about $500 million a year from the American taxpayer.That is obviously wrong. Planned Parenthood should be privately funded, and if it is breaking the law, some executives should go to prison.
Also, today the pro-life group Center for Medical Progress released yet another undercover sting video.
This one shows Dr. Savita Ginde, the medical director of Planned Parenthood in Colorado, talking about selling the body parts of a fetus aborted after eleven weeks, six days.
UNDERCOVER ACTOR / BUYER: “That 11.6 was pretty good. There was three or four samples we could have taken out of the 11.6.”
DR. SAVITA GINDE: “Excellent.”
UNDERCOVER ACTOR / BUYER: “If we were doing like $50 or $75 a specimen that’d be like $200 or $300 and we’d be comfortable with that. But stuff like this, we don’t want to be like just a flat fee of $200 and then it’s like …”
DR. SAVITA GINDE:“No and the … I think a per-item thing works a little better just because we can see how much we can get out of it.”
The words "how much we can get out of it" are damning for Planned Parenthood.Very quietly an industry that harvests and sells body parts from aborted babies has developed in the USA.
Planned Parenthood is part of that industry.
It does business with a company called StemExpress based in Placerville, California.
StemExpress buys bodies from Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers, then dissects them, selling organs to medical research operations.
A woman named Holly O'Donnell was hired by StemExpress to draw blood from dead babies.
Here's how Ms. O'Donnell describes being trained by a StemExpress employee:
HOLLY O’DONNELL, FORMER STEMEXPRESS EMPLOYEE: “She has tweezers and says, ‘Okay, this is the head, this is the arm, this is the leg.’ And she hands them over to me and says, ‘Can you show me some of the parts I just showed you?’ I grabbed the tweezers because I didn’t want to lose this job. I didn’t know. I was just stoked to get it. So I did what she said and the moment I took the tweezers, I put them in the dish and I remember grabbing a leg and I said, ‘This is a leg,’ and the moment I picked it up I could just feel death and pain.”
Planned Parenthood says it is not doing anything wrong and markets the bodies of aborted babies to help science.But there is no question that big money is involved.
Inc. magazine reports StemExpress is very profitable -- its revenue more than $2 million a year.
We don't know how much money Planned Parenthood makes in the process, but we should know. After all, a half-billion dollars of our money is given to that organization.
There comes a point where Americans have to decide what kind of country they can tolerate.
Whether you're pro-choice or pro-life, the undercover videos showing Planned Parenthood bargaining over the price of dead babies before they are even extracted from the womb is grisly beyond belief.
Yet there is no remorse from Planned Parenthood, and the White House is standing by them.
JOSH EARNEST, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: “They have made very clear that they subscribe to the highest -- they subscribe and implement the highest ethical standards in carrying out their operations.”
In light of the undercover videos, that statement is false and absurd -- an insult to the taxpayer.Talking Points is appalled about the lack of leadership in America and also about the apathy on the part of many individual Americans who could not care less what happens to the unborn.
Congress must get involved and at least suspend tax payments to Planned Parenthood until a federal investigation is completed.
If Congress does not do that, we can rightly be criticized by countries like Iran and Russia as being a barbaric nation.
We lose all moral authority.
And that's the memo.