By DEXTER DUGGAN
When Planned Parenthood obtains mothers’ consent to provide parts or all of their aborted babies’ bodies for research, the inquiring observer’s question should be, just what words did PP use when seeking that consent?
Was it well-informed consent, or exactly the opposite? Just what is being obtained from mothers so PP can attain its harvest?
That resembles the situation voters find themselves in today as presidential candidates make their pitches for support. How much pertinent information is being disclosed to voters? What’s being withheld? Do the candidates even know sometimes where they actually stand? Or are they making things up as they go?
Don’t expect Planned Parenthood to start talking plainly from its cornered position.
Over at the abortuary, it’s unlikely PP describes its pregnant clients as “mothers” or mentions their babies’ bodies. Honest language would introduce organ-purchase issues to be avoided at all, um, costs.
In an interview with the Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal website posted August 10, former PP clinic director Abby Johnson explained how her Texas abortuary got what it sought. Using disembodied words.
The clinic didn’t even want to mention “fetal tissue,” Johnson said — because that brings up the fetus. Better just to refer to “tissue.”
When pro-Planned Parenthood media assert that PP was careful to obtain consent, we must ask if the nation’s largest abortion provider specified its interest in obtaining hearts, lungs, heads, brains, legs, or whatever part of the infant was on the day’s grocery list.
Of course it didn’t, because that would give mothers vital information that wouldn’t achieve PP’s goals.
If a bank attracted new customers while failing to mention it’d be imposing a monthly $300 service fee on their accounts, that bank would be in deep trouble fast. Try telling the media’s consumer investigators that the bank was in the clear because it made sure to get customers’ full signatures on its dishonest applications.
In The Daily Signal interview, Johnson said: “We would tell the client that we are participating in a study and she has an opportunity today to donate the tissue that’s removed from her uterus to a research laboratory where they will be working on life-saving treatments for various diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, or other types of medical studies. We would tell her this is an opportunity for her to possibly save the life of someone else by donating this tissue.
“By creating this altruistic scenario, women would almost always consent and say, ‘Yes, absolutely’,” Johnson said, adding that if PP had referred to body parts, there would have been an undesirable result: “That would create a sense of humanity in their unborn child.”
As for the supposedly “life-saving treatments,” Johnson told The Daily Signal: “We had absolutely no idea what the tissue was going to be used for. We weren’t told that information.”
Implanting human baby parts into lab rats is one repulsive research avenue that seems hardly ever mentioned, even though this first was done decades ago. That lacks a certain altruistic resonance. Perhaps the Center for Medical Progress has that as a topic somewhere in its remaining videos to be released.
PP consistently fights against legal measures seeking informed consent that would have mothers watch an ultrasound of their unborn babies before deciding about abortion — making them more fully informed.
However, PP’s own abortionists use ultrasound for a well-informed view of where not to crush the babies so as to preserve their parts — the valuable, separable human parts of a baby whose own worth in one piece is scorned.
We know PP President Cecile Richards in one intact piece is worth more than a half-million dollars every year because that’s what she’s paid annually. She never would have sold for that much if her existence ended prenatally at the abortion clinic. Could this be the income inequality her Democrat Party blowhards have in mind?
As for astounding Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, how does he all fit together? Does he have a coherent philosophy, or just separable, unlikely parts? Is Trump more a mirror for people’s frustrations or a resoundingly confident tycoon who likes what he sees in himself as a promise of better times to come for all, under his guidance?
Undeniably Trump has sucked oxygen from other GOP candidates as voters try to figure if he’s just a hot-air balloon or an untethered dynamo.
A longstanding criticism of the presidential primary season has been that its horse-race aspects — who’s up and who’s down in the polls today — divert vital attention from serious policy questions.
However, the imponderables of a surprising candidacy like Trump’s thrust even more attention on the polls. He dared criticize John McCain? Surely Trump’s politically dead, the pundits declared. No, he’s stronger. His performance at the first GOP debate on August 6 must have finished him off, yes? Not at all.
This year it appeared that conservatives had a wealth of qualified presidential candidates to choose from, then Trump disruptively jumped into the race, he whose personal wealth exceeds any of theirs, but whose wealth of conservative dedication was debated vigorously.
Was Trump like a lot of other voters who finally decided his patience was worn out, but, as a tycoon, he had the added advantage of being able to do something big about it?
A strongly independent conservative media personality like Glenn Beck and a Beltway establishment conservative commentator like George Will both deplored Trump as an undesirable personality wrapped in an unreliable record.
But other leading media conservatives including Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham are interested in what he represents instead of just writing him off.
Additional ingredients threw themselves lately into the stew pot, too, like Ohio’s “moderate” GOP Gov. John Kasich, who proclaimed at the August 6 debate that he recently attended a homosexual “wedding.” That apparently put Kasich to the left of even such an ambitious “moderate” as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
Trump touches a nerve, not only with his denunciations of the system but also his professed determination to shake it by the neck and “make America great again.”
Jonathan Tobin posted at the Commentary magazine website on August 5: “Many of them [conservatives] know that Trump is no conservative and has been all over the place on abortion, spending, and every other issue throughout his decades in the spotlight, but also think his combative attitude is more important than ideology, consistency, or even a grasp of how government works.”
Trump explains he has “evolved,” just like Ronald Reagan did from being a liberal Democrat.
The National Pressure
Cooker
Not only Trump but also many other GOP presidential hopefuls must be aware of the seething frustration among the majority of Americans fed up with Democrat Barack Obama’s lawless, glowering misrule, even though Obama’s adoring media enablers suppress wide acknowledgment of this public sentiment.
Attentive GOP candidates including Trump must know they’d have to carry through on their promises if one of them wins the presidency with pledges to get tough on massive illegal immigration, the blood-drenched PP, unending, limitless federal spending and related ills.
If one of these hopefuls ends up in the White House in January 2017 then betrays voters all over again — just as the GOP establishment’s congressional leaders did this year — it’s a good question whether the lid could be kept clamped on the national pressure cooker any longer.
The Senate Conservatives Action organization reported on August 17 that a poll of Republican voters in Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s home state of Kentucky shows that “60 percent believe that McConnell should force the president to defund Planned Parenthood using a ‘must-pass’ appropriations bill, compared to only 19 percent who believe he should try to persuade the president to sign separate legislation to defund the organization.”
Needless to say, pro-abortion radical extremist Obama never would sign a stand-alone bill to end taxpayer funding of his favorite death cult.
Before the Senate went on its summer recess, establishment Republican McConnell craftily denied an attempt to defund PP through a must-pass Senate bill, then let a stand-alone bill to defund succumb for lack of a 60-vote anti-filibuster majority.
If McConnell forces the Senate to pass a continuing resolution for taxpayer funding of PP in September, Senate Conservatives Action warned, “he will pay a heavy price.”
Unlike liberal Democrats who almost bragged of refusing to watch the horrifying facts in the Center for Medical Progress’ sting videos of PP barbarity, Trump said he, like other GOP candidates, was disgusted with the revelations.
But Trump had less than an unyielding line on funding PP recently, going from saying government should be shut down if necessary to defund it, to saying just the good parts of PP could be funded, to saying no funding if it does abortions.
Any of these stands is better, of course, than what the Democrat Party of Death would promote, but voters may think some Republicans including Trump still are feeling their way.
Although the PP videos have tragically reminded viewers of the barbarism of permissive abortion, a happy moment was revealed in a recent look at a live baby in the first trimester, which could remind Trump and everyone else of the value of fighting for these lives.
Who could fail to be impressed with the ultrasound of an 11-week-old baby boy jumping up and down in the womb, as shown in a video at LifeSiteNews.com on August 12 headlined, “Stunning viral video of 11-week baby jumping shows the humanity of preborn children.”
Security And Self-Sufficiency
Another area where voters differ with the elite is uncontrolled immigration, and here, too, the multibillionaire’s boldness connected with the public.
The electrifying response that Trump received showed deep public opposition to the dangerous open-borders mania continually being thrust on the U.S., whether from pro-amnesty media and think tanks, the Chamber of Commerce, Wall Street, or the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
While professing admiration for Mexicans, Trump made plain that the U.S. must make its own citizens its priority — their security and their self-sufficiency.
At the August 6 debate Trump said a border wall “has to be built quickly,” but he doesn’t mind if there’s “a big, beautiful door in that wall.”
On August 16 he released a plain-spoken, six-page plan for “immigration reform that will make America great again.” It included the admonition, “Real immigration reform puts the needs of working people first — not wealthy, globetrotting donors. We are the only country in the world whose immigration system puts the needs of other nations ahead of our own.”
Like any political proposal, its points can be debated. But conservatives could feel comforted that Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), a firm defender of the border, reportedly provided counsel to Trump to devise the plan. On the other hand, open-borders proponents like Sen. Jeff Flake (R., Ariz.), and the Cato Institute attacked Trump’s plan.
Years have dragged by while the open-borders elite including Catholic bishops’ bureaucrats have denied the U.S. firm border protection until they get their own way of “comprehensive immigration reform” — even after it became plain that terrorists are sneaking into this nation.
On August 17 the conservative Washington Free Beacon website headlined, “Investigation: Collusion Between Terrorists and Mexican Cartels Is a Threat to U.S.”
The Free Beacon reported: “Muslim terrorists are using Mexican drug cartels to infiltrate the U.S. southern border to plan attacks on the United States from within, according to Sun City Cell, a documentary produced in collaboration between Judicial Watch and TheBlaze TV.”
The story quoted a former FBI special agent and retired Navy SEAL, Jonathan Gilliam: “For them to send out orders from overseas is one thing, but to see them come into the United States and actually start helping plan and give orders, that just shows another level of commitment and it shows a drastic shift in their mindset and where their dedication is.”
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