Stephen Dunn/Hartford Courant
Talk about “Throwback Thursday” — it was the day Sen. Blumenthal, in a pitiful attempt to reclaim a moral high ground on the baby parts market, unearthed a two-decades-old New York Times opinion piece arguing in favor of research on aborted baby bodies and painting the true pro-life position as one that plainly commodifies human beings. The piece is a masterwork of pretentious moral posturing, as though the simplistic idea of saving lives by …y’know…not killing people in the first place bears a little too much of the common touch.
I’m not one to dismiss ideas just because they’re old, but it’s an incredibly difficult stance to maintain given all that has happened in the last three weeks, let alone the last twenty years. The parade of horrors Americans have been waking up to with each video release includes tiny arms and legs in a dish and a twin in a freezer. The Times author posits that there could be a complete separation of the abortion itself from the temptation of secondary financial or personal gain. The videos shatter that notion to smithereens.
Contrary to how it is pitched to the altruistic and naïve, research on bodies of aborted babies has been conducted for much less than noble purposes: cosmetics and flavor enhancers. Still, the best of intentions are hardly justification for murder and exploitation; development of better infant formula is doubtless a good thing, but an account of the methods that — as chemist Stacy Trasancos describes — were used to obtain information in a real experiment in the 1970s reveals a torture so evil it would be outrageous by Guantanamo Bay standards. One blogger cut to the chase with great clarity, saying, “they were killing babies in order to learn how to feed babies better.” Insane.
It’s not that Blumenthal is a stupid man. While his talking points are often tepid at best, there is a logic to not biting the hand that feeds, whether that’s Cecile Richards or The Hartford Courant, which has decided Dick has been such a good boy that he deserves a tummy rub and an extra treat. What I don’t get is people defending Planned Parenthood’s barbaric practices for free.
Blumenthal doubled down first and hardest, initiating a domino effect. We’ve also been treated to Chris Murphy’s melodramatic fit about “playing with people’s lives,” as though that isn’t exactly what Planned Parenthood does, as gently as a cat toys with mice. Somebody please get him a paper bag. To bolster his claims he touts another New York Times op-ed that, while at least recent, makes the mind-boggling assertion that defunding America’s single largest abortion entity would somehow cause abortions to skyrocket, as well as showing a Title X clinic worker insisting that a young girl have higher standards — like “no sex without a condom” — but not too high, like “no sex without a wedding ring.” This the reader is supposed to believe is a flattering portrait of a paragon of good sense. Mercifully, Murphy seems more willing to share his attention with other pressing issues, such as National Lobster Day.
Governor Malloy and Nancy Wyman dutifully lined up to justify dismemberment of innocent human beings, as well. This is what it’s like to be pro-life in Connecticut and have no upper-level representation whatsoever.
Rosa DeLauro, who spoke at a Planned Parenthood lobbying event days before the first video dropped, issued a press release defending them but didn’t make a peep about it on social media. Is she trying to play both sides? Our other U.S. House delegates have been eerily silent on this scandal. They may be taking the Jurassic Park approach:
Let’s hope this means they are re-thinking those endorsements and those multi-thousand-dollar campaign contributions. Let’s hope that abortion is a more treacherous subject for them to talk about than ever. Let’s hope they are having doubts.
The Planned Parenthood videos have drawn a line in the sand. Neutrality is out of the question. It is time to choose.
