These videos were nothing more than a stunt that allowed for political conservatives allied with anti-abortion activists to push the same dangerous misogynistic agenda that they have been pushing for decades: ban abortions, shut down health care centers and cut women off from critical reproductive care. Newsflash: Planned Parenthood doesn’t just provide abortions, they also supply birth control, emergency contraception, sex education, rape counseling and fight for immigration reform. However, to expand on this would result in a completely separate article.
As a woman and an advocate for women’s health, it was disturbing watching Cecile Richards, Planned Parenthood’s President, attempt to publically apologize on YouTube for something that it is simply unnecessary to apologize for.
One of the biggest flaws within the pro-choice movement is that we sidestep the real reason that most women do get an abortion: they had consensual sex that, despite the possible use of a birth control method, resulted in an unwanted pregnancy. For some reason not wanting to be a mother or carry to term and put the child up for adoption isn’t a good enough reason to get an abortion, we have to mumble things about incest and rape and life-threatening medical situations. How about just not wanting to have a child because of an accident?
The videos that were released were edited far past the point of accurately portraying what was being discussed in them, which there was nothing wrong with in the first place. These fragments play on emotions and make the blunt references to various methods of abortion out to be something villainous and despicable.
Is it so difficult to understand that medical professionals don’t always discuss their work in a way that is aesthetically pleasing to the general public? It is just as much their job to look at the human body as a machine that needs to be fixed as it is a mechanic’s to look at a car. If they were general surgeons discussing the slicing and dicing involved in transplant surgeries as opposed to abortion providers there wouldn’t be such a problem.
I am going to say something that nobody that considers themselves “pro-life” wants to hear: an aborted fetus is medical waste. Simple as that. The mothers are not ignorant to what is going to happen with their aborted baby either. If it wasn’t being taken and used for research, which could potentially benefit countless patients in the future, it would be thrown away. People that hold issue with that fact are of course going to hold issue with anything involving abortions and might as well stop reading.
Additionally, nobody is talking about the reasons behind these late-term abortions, which is when most fetal tissue used for medical research is procured, or the learning and positive results of that research because that isn’t the image they are trying to paint. In a stroke of irony, the primary use of this research is to find and create treatments for other sick infants and children… but abortion providers are demonic beings that steal living babies from their mothers without consent and chop them up for no good reason to make a profit, right?
If you are personally against abortion, that’s fine. Nobody is telling you to get one. Just do me a favor and try to have that same level of respect for your counterparts, because they are leading a whole life under a set of circumstances that you know nothing about. For them, obtaining a safe and legal abortion might just be the right decision.