The surreptitiously filmed video of a Planned Parenthood official talking about butchering babies like Ed Gein talking about how to make lampshades out of a human face presented anti-abortion advocates with smoking gun evidence of the callousness and disregard of fetal life the pro-abortion movement has cultivated. One cannot think about fetuses, even advanced fetuses, as living, human beings and blithely encourage their destruction. The recorded comments of Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood’s senior director of medical research, released in the shortened version of a three hour video, should inform a national debate regarding abortion, a debate that the pro-abortion forces desperately want to avoid. The video itself makes it clear why.

Thus the news media is determined to bury the story, just as it barely covered the abortion House of Horrors of Dr. Kermit Gosnell. The ugly reality of abortion is not supportive of abortion, just as the reality of slavery was rejected and avoided by slavery proponents until Uncle Tom’s Cabin shocked the culture out of its denial. Abortion advocates focus on the beneficial results of abortion– freedom for women, workforce flexibility, family planning, personal power—and it is the equivalent of slavery advocates pointing to the Old South’s agricultural affluence and pleasant lifestyle to justify keeping hguman beings in chains. The news media shouldn’t be picking winners in this cultural debate. It has a duty to report facts, especially facts that might shock the public out of ignorance and apathy on such a vital issue involving law and ethics.

As activists are wont to do in their passion, the Live Action-affiliated group that released the video over-reached in its interpretation of it, thus giving the news media, Planned Parenthood and the pro-abortion lobby an easy path to deflection. The video doesn’t prove, or even strongly suggest, that Planned Parenthood is selling baby parts for research. By making that accusation, the group opened the door to attacks on the legitimacy of the video. Every media report says that it is “heavily edited,” a phrase intended to suggest that it is deceptively edited. The video is heavily edited because the raw video, which is available to view as well, is three hours long and watching it is like watching paint dry while being hit in the face by an occasional rock.

Unless the media defenders of Planned Parenthood think that the unedited video contains moments when Nucatola says, “Oh, by the way, I didn’t mean what I just said, even though I sounded like I did,” the woman displayed a callous, core attitude that killing a human embryo is as ethically significant as stepping on a cockroach. That’s what is so disturbing about the video, why it is important, and why abortion foes should make certain it is viewed by as many U.S. citizens as possible. Political figures, candidates for office and elected officials should also be forced to confront the video, with “well, that’s heavily edited” being immediately called what it is: a dodge.

On the topic of dodges, we have Planned Parenthood’s apology for Nucatola. Cecile Richards, the group’s president, stated in a video:

“Our top priority is the compassionate care that we provide. In the video, one of our staff members speaks in a way that does not reflect that compassion. This is unacceptable, and I personally apologize for the staff member’s tone and statements. As always, if there is any aspect of our work that can be strengthened, we want to know about it, and we take swift action to address it.”

On the Ethics Alarms Apology Scale, this is a solid #9,“apologizing for a tangential matter other than the act or words that warranted an apology.” Compassion toward whom? The issue in the video is the disgusting lack of compassion for the unborn who are being reduced to body parts for medical research, not lack of compassion for the mothers of those little bundles of body parts.

As with the Slate’s attempted defense of the indefensible, Washington Post columnist Petula Dvorak was propelled by the perceived threat to Planned Parenthood and abortions galore into a near hysterical condemnation of the video, one that, also like the Slate column, nicely illustrated the ethical and logical deficits in the pro-abortion position.

She begins by defining the latest addition to the Ethics Alarms Rationalizations List with her very first sentence: “Planned Parenthood has become one of the most attacked groups in America.” The simple rejoinder to that is, “So what?” Either the group deserves a particular criticism, or it doesn’t. The fact that some criticism is unfair or excessive does not invalidate legitimate criticism, or suggest that it is unfair or cruel to offer it.

Nonetheless, we see this rationalization often. It is favorite dodge of Hillary Clinton’s supporters: “There they go, attacking Hillary Clinton again!” they say, as if the frequency of criticism can only be attributable to the unfair zeal of her critics, and her conduct has nothing to do with it. I call this rationalization “Mercy For Miscreants.”

Its theory is that it is only fair to assign a criticism quota to groups and individuals: at a certain point, no more criticism is allowed, because nobody should have to be criticized that much. It is so darn mean to keep heaping abuse on someone, even if they deserve it. This new rationalization  is #38 A,  classified as a sub-rationalization under rationalization number 38. The Miscreant’s Mulligan or “Give him/her/them/me a break!”  “Mercy For Miscreants,” or “Why don’t they pick on someone else?” is arguably more sinister and illogical that its parent, because it is based on the Bizarro World theory that the more someone is criticized, the less they should be criticized. On occasion, this rationalization also appeals to #21. Ethics Accounting, on the batty theory that if someone, or a group like Planned Parenthood, has been unfairly criticized in the past, that should count in their favor and relieve them of being legitimately criticized later.

Petula is just getting started, however. Here next two paragraphs are about how unfairly Planned Parenthood has been attacked in the past, and what wonderful things it does, neither of which are even faintly germane to the current controversy, which involves a high-ranking executive saying things like…

“We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver. . . . So I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact…”

…about unborn children. That’s what she is crushing. And she is crushing the life out of them, beyond question.

Says Petula:

“Yes, it’s tough to listen to and watch for just about anyone, no matter your political stand on abortion. The details are gruesome, as are many medical procedures and how doctors and nurses tell stories about the operating room. It took me years to get used to the conversations my husband’s family — medical people — had at the dinner table.”

This is not only an application of Rationalization #1, “Everybody does it,” to frank medical talk, it’s a dishonest one. Talking about removing a cyst or a cutting out a tumor isn’t “gruesome” in the same way this comment is, and what makes the Nucatol statement nauseating are not the same features that make a discussion of (to use Amanda Marcotte’s dishonest example) knee surgery upsetting. What is wrong about Nucatola’s narrative isn’t that it’s gory, but that she is talking about killing a helpless, living human life, and doing so as if she sees no distinction between that and swatting a fly….because she doesn’t.

Dvorak reminds us that Planned Parenthood has apologized, but for what? For “tone.” For actually revealing exactly how those dedicated to abortion regard the helpless lives they snuff out, and “crush”…as nothing at all. Aping the apology, Dvorak says that the Nucatola’s statement “lacked compassion,” but she intentionally doesn’t specify the object of the missing compassion. It can’t possibly be those things having their heads crushed, since to grant them compassion (“Compassion literally means ‘to suffer together.’ Among emotion researchers, it is defined as the feeling that arises when you are confronted with another’s suffering and feel motivated to relieve that suffering.”) will cause a horrifying ethical dilemma—exactly the ethical dilemma that abortion advocates refuse to accept. Buried in the Planned Parenthood apology and Dvorak’s deceit is this fact: That missing compassion only applies to the mothers of the aborted embryos, not to the embryos—you know, the ones being carefully crushed to preserve their livers for researchers–themselves.

Says Petula, after again trying to slide by what matters about the video by concentrating on what does not, the specious organ-peddling accusation—

“The truth is, this video is nothing more than another one of those graphic abortion protest posters of mutilated fetuses waved at people and passing children on the street. Totally out of context and totally horrible.”

Are the graphic photos of mangled little babies real? Did a Planned Parenthood executive actually talk about crushing embryo heads as she sipped wine? How is this “out of context?” How is it not appropriate for those who allow abortions to occur in their name, under their nation’s laws, funded by their taxes to see images of the results? How is that “out of context”?

The same complaint was made about the prosecution showing concentration camp films during the Nuremberg Trials.

Then Dvorak gets hysterical, and her arguments become even less coherent, and wildly dishonest (my reactions in bold):

“Women aren’t being persuaded to have abortions and then sell the organs. Fetuses aren’t being harvested for parts. And every one of those donations happens only if the woman consents to legal procedures.”

1. Wait: aborted fetuses are having their organs taken and used for research. They are “being harvested for parts.”

2. The issue isn’t whether it’s legal. The issue is whether crushing the brains of living humans, however small, is justified, legal or not.

3.  I hear the Planned Parenthood officer saying that that women who are unsure about having an abortion are often persuaded by the argument that they are supporting vital research as well as ridding themslves of that troublesome thing that threatens to become a child and ruin all sorts of well-laid plans.,,don’t you?

They are being persuaded to have abortions. They are not being persuaded “to have abortions and then sell the organs.” Deceit, Petula.

“So why is all this energy being wasted on trying to condemn an organization that has been one of the last resorts in reproductive health issues for women for nearly 100 years of our history? Only 3 percent of the services Planned Parenthood performs are abortions — about 327,000 last year at its 700 centers. The bulk of the services — cancer screenings, pelvic exams, birth control — are provided to hundreds of thousands of women who would probably have a hard time affording them otherwise.'”

Gee, I don’t know: maybe it has something to do with those 327,000 lives that have been ended by that organization. Just a thought. The rest is #12. The Saint’s Excuse, or “It’s for a good cause.”

“According to its own estimates, Planned Parenthood prevents more than half a million unintended pregnancies every year. You could say that makes it the nation’s biggest abortion foe.”

You could say that, and it would be outrageously dishonest.

“After the sting video this week, the governors of Texas, Louisiana, Indiana and Georgia demanded investigations into the Planned Parenthood centers in their states. They couldn’t stand hearing the details of a legal medical procedure. But it’s interesting that they can stand hearing another horrific fact: Texas and Louisiana have some of the country’s highest childhood poverty rates: Twenty-five percent of Texas children and 28 percent of kids in Louisiana are growing up dirt poor, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Kids Count Data Center. How about a sting on behalf of those kids, already born and living in misery?”

Digging deep and trying to find that elusive compassion, Petula plays the “the poor are better off dead” card, the most disgusting and revealing in the pro-abortionists filthy deck. Let’s ask one of those dirt poor kids, or better yet, some of the millions of adults, like my dirt poor kid/war hero/ lawyer/father, if they agree that it would be more “compassionate” had some Planned Parenthood ghoul had crushed their skulls to spare them the horror of living the only life they would ever have.

Sometimes I think the national support for abortion would collapse substantially if knee-jerk pro-abortion zealots like Marcotte, Dvorak and Nucatola just thought about what they were saying, because they would have to accept that the implications of their words are ethically indefensible.

And sometimes I think..something else.