Planned Parenthood Videos Sway Cultural Tides

COMMENTARY: Politics follows culture, and the cultural fronts are shifting on the powerful abortion provider.

(photo: Shutterstock images)

The “Defund Planned Parenthood” bill failed Tuesday. Senate Republicans don’t currently have the votes they need. This was expected, but it’s still disappointing. There will be some grumbling about Republicans and their ineptitude. But pro-life Americans should not be too downcast. This could prove to be a pivotal point in the fight to protect the unborn.

Americans are thinking about abortion again. The cultural tides have been slowly turning for several years, but now the Center for Medical Progress, with its daring sting operation, has jump-started a new conversation. Almost everyone in America now knows that the abortion industry is grisly and dehumanizing and that Planned Parenthood is a refuge for the sort of person who would use a “working lunch” to negotiate the price of a baby’s liver.

The genius of the operation went far beyond the legal issues that it raised. All five of the horrifying videos (released over the past few weeks) force us to confront the obvious reality that abortion involves the intentional killing of babies. More importantly, they show us how, for Planned Parenthood employees, the slaughter of children is simply routine. “Another boy!” workers exclaim, looking over some recently dissected human remains. “It’s all just a matter of line items,” says Planned Parenthood representative Melissa Farrell in the most recent video, assuring prospective buyers that intact fetuses can be made available for purchase. Quite simply, it is sickening. This is the “reproductive health care” of the secular left?

Though the ethical debates have been vociferous, no one now disputes the reality of what is happening. An effort to dismiss dead fetuses as “products of conception” was swiftly and roundly mocked.

It’s interesting to note how radically this debate has changed over the past few decades. In some ways, Americans have only now reached the apex of a process that has long been under way. We’re more familiar than we used to be with the stages of prenatal life. Just Google “pregnancy” and note the number of “week-by-week” sites that will tell you exactly what organs your baby has developed and which fruit he resembles in size. Gone are the days when young women could be persuaded that the thing growing inside of them was “basically like a chicken yolk.” Everybody knows now that even a first-trimester abortion “stops a beating heart.”

That presents a challenge for the abortion industry. Now abortion proponents must confront another nightmarish reality: The psychopath and convicted murderer Kermit Gosnell may not be as atypical of his profession as some would like to believe.

It’s an ugly picture. One might suppose, in the wake of these horrifying revelations, that our Congress could at least stop the flow of taxpayer money to such a monstrous organization. We should not despair, however. Politics follows culture, and the cultural fronts are shifting. Even though the Senate vote broke almost exactly along party lines, abortion supporters are clearly feeling the heat. Even among pro-choice hardliners, some were clearly rattled by the gruesome clips. Democratic politicians began waffling on Planned Parenthood, with Hillary Clinton admitting that the videos were “disturbing” and Bernie Sanders admitting that Americans are less than fully comfortable with abortion.  

To pro-life ears those remarks are comically understated, but make no mistake: These developments are significant. Ranking Democrats almost never criticize the abortion industry. Cracks are developing in their “pro-choice, pro-woman” façade, which may portend more promising congressional votes in the years to come.

As usual, the politics is downstream from the culture, and but even the culture is less depraved than our politics would suggest. The United States is far more pro-life than our mainstream media would have us believe, and the Democratic Party is substantially to the left of the public on this issue. The party’s position mirrors that of the secular left, which is fanatically committed to the abortion regime.

To them, abortion is a necessary weapon against the tyranny of nature; without it we are intolerably enslaved to the realities of our own physical bodies. The right to kill our unborn children must therefore be absolute.

Happily, most Americans have not truly been converted to this position. They have sympathy with the impoverished, unwed mother, and they feel that science and politics ought, between them, to have solved the problem of unwanted pregnancy. But they aren’t really comfortable with the grislier realities of abortion. Many are happily pro-choice so long as abortion is a sad thing that happens elsewhere, presumably under extreme circumstances. They are reassured by the (much-touted and highly misleading) claim that abortion is “only 3%” of what Planned Parenthood does. They warm to the suggestion that abortion can mostly be avoided through the ready provision of contraceptives.

Most of those probably have not changed their spots overnight. Nevertheless, they are becoming uncomfortably pro-choice, and that is progress. People noticed that blogger Rebecca Watson’s “rebuttal” to the chilling videos amounted to little more than a foul-mouthed, “Nuh UH!” They notice, too, that Planned Parenthood’s excuses for receiving public funding are becoming lamer by the day. As one pro-choice writer noted in a candid reflection, people’s hearts may be changing more than their minds. But that, obviously, is no small thing.

Politicians (as all experienced observers know) cannot be trusted to do the right thing. Many are cowards; the exceptions may not last long in the business. Republican politicians have been maddeningly reticent to take a stand for the unborn, not because the party’s position is at all extreme (it’s a bit right of center, and far more moderate than that of the Democrats), but because they know that the progressive elite (who have enormous media influence) will do everything in their power to punish the vociferously pro-life.

Republican politicians are routinely asked their positions on abortion for victims of rape and incest. By contrast, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama can give interviews with full confidence that they will not be asked for their views on late-term abortion or on the despicable practice of aborting children because they are not of the parents’ preferred sex.

This is why Republicans have been unable to make electoral hay from the extremity of the Democrats’ abortion commitments. They avoid the issue for fear of becoming the next Richard Mourdock, while abortion extremists like Barack Obama get elected to the presidency. The pro-life movement is frequently treated as an embarrassment by ranking Republicans; meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, fanatical abortion promoters like Barbara Boxer are capering about inventing “wars on women.”

Occasional outliers notwithstanding, politicians are not going to grow a collective spine. But we needn’t rely on the courage of upright politicians if we can make the appropriate changes to our culture. As opportunists, politicians are fairly reliable, and Republicans will be happy to hammer Democrats for their sleazy Planned Parenthood connections if they think they can work this angle to their electoral advantage. Might we be able to turn the tables to the point where Democrats defect from their party’s orthodoxy, for fear of losing congressional seats? Where the public demands to know whether Democratic candidates support the killing of eight-month-old fetuses?

The extremity of the left’s abortion convictions has long been an Achilles heel for the Democrats. That could be good for the Republicans, but also (far more importantly!) for the unborn.

There are things we can do to help further this cultural transformation. The first is to continue telling the truth about Planned Parenthood and America’s abortion regime.

David Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) found the perfect approach for doing this: They let Planned Parenthood officials speak for themselves and relied on the power of the Internet to disseminate their words.

Predictably, Daleiden and his associates have been tarred as cranks and extremists, but these attacks have had limited success because they are irrelevant. Daleiden doesn’t need personal credibility with the public because he has something better: authentic, damning footage. People of goodwill can help to ensure that everyone knows what these videos really show.

The second thing concerned Americans can do is to continue talking, praying, marching and keeping hope alive. One downside to the CMP videos is that they can be demoralizing to pro-lifers as well. Even for those who have long opposed abortion, it’s deeply distressing to see the heinous things that are happening in our own cities, with funding from our own government. Now is not the time to give up, however.

The pro-life movement has carried this torch for decades and, against overwhelming odds, has successfully resisted progressive efforts to normalize abortion within American life. At last our efforts are starting to bear fruit. Carry on.

The third thing faithful Americans can do is continue helping our compatriots to understand what a culture of life really entails. Even if they accept that abortion is unjust, many citizens have difficulty imagining how we can live without it. Unexpected pregnancies do pose an enormous challenge in a culture that generally discourages openness to life.

Accordingly, we must continue to promote life, through dialogue and example, and also through a general willingness to reach out to people in need. Living in a culture that has been ravaged by the sexual revolution, many Americans are hungry for a better way of life. We must take the initiative to show them that there is such a way.

Looking only at the short term, this seems to be a dark moment in U.S. culture. Looking out to the horizons, however, we see some traces of light. Let us hope and pray that a new dawn is at hand.

Rachel Lu teaches philosophy at the

University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota.