John McCormack of the Weekly Standard has written a great article detailing Planned Parenthood’s inconsistencies in their reaction to Live Action’s video release yesterday:
Planned Parenthood’s response to this sting video has been rather incoherent. On one hand, a spokesman for the organization accuses Lila Rose’s group of using “surreptitious videotaping and manipulative editing.” That defense hasn’t worked too well for the men caught on NBC’s To Catch a Predator, and it doesn’t seem to be working out for Planned Parenthood either. Today Planned Parenthood fired Woodruff for the statements she made on the tape. That’s a clear concession that the tape is authentic and accurate, right? (And you don’t need to take anyone’s word for it. You can watch the full unedited version of the tape here).
Planned Parenthood is pointing out that this is only one clinic out of a dozen targeted by Rose, and the organization notified the authorities. What’s remarkable is that Rose has been targeting Planned Parenthood for years with undercover videos, and some of its employees continue to encourage evading the law. As Charlotte Allen wrote in 2007, there have been numerous instances in which Planned Parenthood has been accused of turning a blind eye toward rape–both statutory and forcible–in order to preserve unfettered access to abortion on demand. Lila Rose calls the latest scenario an “obvious and bold one … We tried to make it easy for Planned Parenthood to do the right thing.”
As McCormack observes, why are employees like Woodruff employed in the first place? Past undercover operations have exposed Planned Parenthood workers as sympathetic to racists and womanziers. So either Planned Parenthood is an incompetent organization with a terrible screening process and oblivious management…or it is an organization where a culture of corruption, dishonesty, and evasion runs deep. Either answer is more than enough of a reason to strip Planned Parenthood of their taxpayer funding.
Planned Parenthood apologist Alex Pareene of Salon also has a bizarre reaction to Live Action’s video:
These conservative undercover “hoaxes” are best understood as an attempt to make their fantasies real. In order to make animate the world that they feverishly imagine, they must themselves become the unsavory characters with bad motivations that they enjoy thinking populate these hotbeds of degenerate liberal activity.
The truth is not a fantasy. Why did Planned Parenthood fire Woodruff? Because she fulfilled the expectations that Live Action had. Unless Planned Parenthood was firing the victim…what would Pareene think of that?
