PLANNED PARENTHOOD SCURRYING LIKE BUGS UNDER A LIFTED ROCK

-- Mollie Hemingway at the Federalist - "The 4 Most Embarrassing Things Cecile Richards Said In Defense Of Planned Parenthood" (video and may links)

-- Ramesh Ponnuru - Planned Parenthood defenders are upset that the critics keep saying that the organization was haggling over “baby parts.” That’s not accurate terminology, they complain.  Fine: Let’s call them “parts of children” instead.

-- Ramesh Ponnuru again - On the ignorance of the populace concerning Planned Parenthood [my bolding]- Pollster Kellyanne Conway corroborated my second point below in a poll she conducted in 2013 for the National Right to Life Committee. A full 88 percent of respondents said they were familiar with Planned Parenthood, but only 45 percent said that they thought its affiliates perform abortions. When respondents were asked how many abortions they thought Planned Parenthood affiliates perform each year, 55 percent guessed that it was fewer than 100,000, and 71 percent guessed fewer than the actual number (more than 327,000).

- - Kathryn Jean Lopez interview with an Ex-Planned Parenthood worker

-- Ross Douthat in the NY Times - . . . And the problem these videos create for Planned Parenthood isn’t just a generalized queasiness at surgery and blood.

It’s a very specific disgust, informed by reason and experience — the reasoning that notes that it’s precisely a fetus’s humanity that makes its organs valuable, and the experience of recognizing one’s own children, on the ultrasound monitor and after, as something more than just “products of conception” or tissue for the knife.

That’s why Planned Parenthood’s apologists have fallen back on complaints about “deceptive editing” (though full videos were released in both cases), or else simply asked people to look away. And it’s why many of my colleagues in the press seem uncomfortable reporting on the actual content of the videos.

Because dwelling on that content gets you uncomfortably close to Selzer’s tipping point — that moment when you start pondering the possibility that an institution at the heart of respectable liberal society is dedicated to a practice that deserves to be called barbarism. . . .

That’s why Planned Parenthood’s apologists have fallen back on complaints about “deceptive editing” (though full videos were released in both cases), or else simply asked people to look away. And it’s why many of my colleagues in the press seem uncomfortable reporting on the actual content of the videos.

Because dwelling on that content gets you uncomfortably close to Selzer’s tipping point — that moment when you start pondering the possibility that an institution at the heart of respectable liberal society is dedicated to a practice that deserves to be called barbarism.

That’s a hard thing to accept. It’s part of why so many people hover in the conflicted borderlands of the pro-choice side. They don’t like abortion, they think its critics have a point … but to actively join our side would require passing too comprehensive a judgment on their coalition, their country, their friends, their very selves. . .    these are dead human beings being discussed on video today: Human beings that the nice, idealistic medical personnel at Planned Parenthood have spent their careers crushing, evacuating, and carving up for parts.

The pro-life sting was sweeping; there are reportedly 10 videos to go. You can turn away. But there will be plenty of chances to look, to see, to know.   // From the link:  “People don’t want to walk the hard walk or to look like they are not progressive,” she said. “But what is progressive about taking a baby and chopping it up to make vaccines or do research?”