Last week, Texas Right to Life hosted our first ever Pro-Life Online Townhall. We received many great questions from Pro-Life advocates over the course of the hour, but unfortunately were unable to answer them all. Below we answer several of the questions that were submitted.
How do we inform people about Planned Parenthood when media will not cover the CMP videos, the White House refuses to watch them, and widespread ignorance about Planned Parenthood’s real abortion agenda persists?
Spreading awareness of Planned Parenthood’s activities relies on grassroots sharing of the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) videos by Pro-Life advocates like you. We should not be afraid to watch, talk about, and share the information that has come to light about Planned Parenthood in these disturbing investigations. The media have a longstanding history of refusing to cover anything that would call into question their own abortion activism; hence, we have seen little to no coverage on the major networks. Likewise, the White House persists in supporting Planned Parenthood and lavishing the group with your taxpayer dollars in spite of ongoing investigations into the group and video footage of their horrific internal operations. The best way to counter these mum attitudes is for you to learn the facts and speak them often and boldly. Watch the CMP videos, read the transcripts, and follow Texas Right to Life as we bring you up-to-date reports on the latest investigations and revelations from our leadership.
How should we approach Planned Parenthood petition volunteers downtown? If I try to engage them in conversation they leave.
Remarkably, Planned Parenthood continues to receive an outpouring of support from a blindly loyal following. Many of their volunteers refuse to watch the CMP footage themselves. First of all, be kind – always. Ask if they have watched the CMP videos themselves, and explain that you have, and that you can’t support an organization that has been documented on-camera dissecting innocent human beings (this is a reality Planned Parenthood has not attempted to deny, so neither should their allies).
Texas Right to Life supports a Dismemberment Abortion Ban. How will this change anything, if Planned Parenthood can just deliver whole babies instead of dismembering them in utero when dismemberment abortion is made illegal?
Currently, Planned Parenthood obtains many of the specimens they collect from the cadavers of dead babies via dismemberment abortion. Dismemberment abortion, or the dilation and evacuation (D&E) abortion procedure, entails reaching into the uterus with a jagged instrument and pulling a live preborn child apart piece-by-piece until he or she is totally evacuated from the womb. In the very first CMP video, Planned Parenthood abortionist Deborah Nucatola explains that she uses this instrument, with ultrasound guidance, to crush parts of the baby that are not needed for organ procurement and to leave other parts intact so that they can be sent to researchers. This manipulation of the abortion procedure violates federal law.
Banning dismemberment abortion will end this practice, which is excruciatingly painful to preborn children, and will severely hinder Planned Parenthood’s ugly business model of selling body parts. Partial-birth abortions are already illegal, and Planned Parenthood cannot deliver whole babies whose death was not induced by a feticide in utero. In some cases, for example, abortionists inject the fetal heart with digoxin, which causes a massive, painful heart attack in the preborn child. The child is then delivered dead, and does not have to be dismembered in utero. But digoxin and similar feticidal agents render the tissues of dead babies unusable by researchers, so this would not be an option for abortionists hoping to produce usable “specimens” for bioresearch. The children that Planned Parenthood is currently delivering intact and selling to researchers, according to several biomedical research executives and Planned Parenthood staff, were very likely born alive.
The ultimate goal of the Dismemberment Abortion Ban is to protect innocent tiny Texans from a torturous and inhumane death. This legislation builds on the logic the Supreme Court of the United States has already upheld in the 2007 Gonzales v. Carhart case. In that opinion, the Supreme Court upheld the Pro-Life law (Partial Birth Abortion Ban) that seemed to violate Roe v. Wade because that particular abortion method was “gruesome and inhumane.” The passage of the Dismemberment Abortion Ban would save Lives today and work to undermine the faulty arguments used to uphold the unjust Roe v. Wade decision. (See next question for more details on this point)
Why don’t we just make the commission of all abortions illegal in Texas?
Texas Right to Life Legislative Director, John Seago, answered this question, saying:
I share the frustration of a lot of Pro-Life advocates who want to see the unequivocal evil of elective abortion stopped in Texas today. Unfortunately, the reality is that our state lives in the shadow of the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, which at this time will be used as the standard in court to determine if our Pro-Life laws can be enforced. Texas Right to Life is working with Pro-Life groups and leaders across the country to incrementally pass legislation that saves Lives immediately and builds the legal case to undermine Roe v. Wade. We've identified a path forward to challenge the core arguments the Supreme Court used in Roe and are working to pass Life-saving and Roe-targeting Pro-Life laws in Texas until the legal question of elective abortion is returned to the states. At this time, federal law prohibits individual states from completely eradicating the practice of abortion, however, there are innovative and Life-saving pieces of legislation we can pass immediately to continue this march to restore justice for tiny Texans.
