February 23, 2011

Please send me your comments!

Editor’s note. Last week, the House of Representatives voted to cut off federal funds to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) and 102 named PPFA affiliates. There were many eloquent speeches, including by the author of the Amendment, Rep. Mike Pence. (See www.nationalrighttolifenews.org/news/2011/02/%e2%80%9cdeny-any-and-all-funding-to-planned-parenthood%e2%80%9d.) Another example, reprinted below, comes from Rep. Chris Smith, co-chair of the House Pro-Life Caucus.

Mr. Chairman, it's time Americans, especially policymakers, health officials, the media, and law enforcement, took a second and critical look at Planned Parenthood.

Not only does Planned Parenthood vigorously lobby and litigate against parental notification and parental consent laws, thus enabling secret abortions for very, very young girls to be procured in their clinics, but now we've learned from recent undercover taped investigations at several of its clinics that Planned Parenthood employees were found to be more than eager to assist people posing as sex traffickers to procure abortions for underaged girls.

As a prime sponsor of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, I found it appalling to watch Planned Parenthood personnel again and again and again offer to provide and facilitate abortions for hypothetical sex trafficking victims as young as 13. In light of a recent comprehensive study suggesting that 100,000 American girls, mostly runaways, are forced into prostitution each year, average age 13, the videotapes of Live Action, the NGO headed by a courageous young woman, Lila Rose, that did the undercover work, is an engraved invitation for serious investigation by the Attorney General of the United States and law enforcement everywhere.

It further begs the question: Why are taxpayers giving hundreds of millions of dollars each and every year to Planned Parenthood?

Despite the best and slickest market branding money can buy, the stubborn fact remains that Planned Parenthood clinics are among the most dangerous places on Earth for a child. Planned Parenthood's own personnel are now taking a second look--many of them--and, thanks to ultrasound, are clearly seeing what is being done to millions of children in the womb, like the 332,278 babies exterminated in Planned Parenthood's abortion clinics in 2009.

One of those abortion providers who took a second look and walked away is Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood abortion clinic director. In her book ``Unplanned,'' Abby Johnson exposes the duplicity and cruelty of what really goes on behind closed doors at a Planned Parenthood clinic. In it she writes how she witnessed and assisted in an abortion of a 13-week-old baby by holding the ultrasound probe, and as she pointed out in the book, it was the first ultrasound-guided abortion at that facility.

She writes in the book: ``The details startled me. At 13 weeks you could clearly see the profile of the head, both arms, legs, and even tiny fingers and toes.

With my eyes glued to the image of this perfectly formed baby, I watched as a new image emerged on the video screen. The cannula, a straw-shaped instrument attached to the end of the suction tube, had been inserted into the uterus and was nearing the baby's side. It looked like an invader on the screen: out of place, wrong. It just looked wrong.''

She goes on to write: ``My heart sped up; time slowed. I didn't want to look, but I didn't want to stop looking either. At first, the baby didn't seem aware of the cannula. It gently probed the baby's side, and for a quick second I felt relief. But I couldn't shake an inner disquiet that was quickly mounting to horror as I watched the screen.'' Remember, this is an abortion clinic director saying this.

"The next movement was a sudden jerk of a tiny foot of the baby as he started kicking, as if trying to move away from the probing invader.''

"As the cannula pressed in, the baby began struggling to turn and twist away. It seemed clear to me that the fetus could feel the cannula, and it did not like the feeling. And then the doctor's voice broke through, startling me: `Beam me up, Scotty,' the abortionist said lightheartedly to the nurse. He was telling her to turn on the suction, in an abortion the suction isn't turned on until the doctor feels he has the cannula in exactly the right place.

This abortion clinic director went on to write:  "I had a sudden urge to yell, Stop; to shake the woman and say, Look at what's happening to your baby.

Wake up; hurry. Stop them. But even as I was thinking those words, I thought of my own hand and saw my own hand holding the probe. I was one of them performing this act'' of abortion.

"My eyes shot back to the screen. The cannula was already being rotated by the doctor and now I could see the tiny body violently twisting with it. For the briefest moment it looked as if the baby was being wrung like a dishcloth, twirled and squeezed. And then the little body crumpled and began disappearing into the cannula before my eyes. The last thing I saw was the tiny perfectly formed backbone sucked into the tube. And then everything was gone. The image of that tiny dead baby mangled and sucked away kept replaying in my mind. What was in this woman's womb just a moment ago was alive. It wasn't tissue. It wasn't cells. This was a human baby, fighting for life. A battle was lost in the blink of an eye.

"What I have told people for years''--8 years as a clinic director at a Planned Parenthood clinic--"what I have told people for years,'' Abby Johnson continues, ``What I believed and taught and defended is a lie.''

I ask Members to read this book, ``Unplanned,'' and realize the scandal of the killing of these unborn children and calling it choice.

Mr. Chairman, there is nothing whatsoever benign or caring or generous or just or compassionate or nurturing about abortion. Earlier one of our colleagues called abortion healthy for the child. Abortion dismembers children piece by piece. Planned Parenthood's own fact sheet talks about D&E abortions done during the second trimester period. Have you ever seen what a D&E is? The doctor goes in with forceps and this device and literally hacks that baby to death. Planned Parenthood itself says it takes 10 to 20 minutes to literally dismember that child.

Then there's the shots in the heart. There's a doctor right here in this area, that on perfectly healthy babies gives them cardiac sticks with either feticide poison or a burst of air which kills the unborn child. So it is not healthy for children and we know for a fact it is not healthy for women, either.

Mr. Chairman, the Pence amendment simply seeks to end U.S. taxpayer complicity with this massive violence against children. Who we back, who we subsidize does matter. Not just what but who.

Planned Parenthood does more than 332,000 abortions each and every year. They are the largest provider; about a fourth of all the abortions in the United States. It is child abuse. It is time to take a second look at Planned Parenthood, Child Abuse, Incorporated.
Support the Pence amendment.

Part Two
Part Three