The editorial headline made me laugh out loud: "Shock videos set back abortion debate" (Aug. 9). One admires the audacity.
The videos in question, of course, were the first five installments of an expose of Planned Parenthood from the Center for Medical Progress. The short versions were released simultaneously with the full-length versions and transcripts.
The editorial itself is nominally better than its headline, but no less desperate to change the subject. Somehow, the Star Tribune Editorial Board thinks that seeing large plates filled with dismembered babies is a distraction from the abortion debate — which, by implication, the Star Tribune and Planned Parenthood are eager to engage, despite the fact that PP and associates are fighting tooth and nail to block access to the remaining videos.
Here's the thing: These difficult-to-endure scenes are precisely what the abortion debate is about. This is what babies look like after they have been torn apart by vacuum, curette and forceps while still kicking in their mother's wombs. This is how the smallest, most vulnerable among us are made dead.
What the videos graphically remind us is that abortion is not an abstraction; it involves real flesh-and-blood mothers and their babies — babies with arms and legs and eyes that stare back, with hearts and lungs and livers that can be used in human research because they are the hearts and lungs and livers of human beings. Yet the lab technicians casually poke about among these "fetal remains" in the same breezy manner that Deb Nucatola, in the first video, pokes around her salad.
Perhaps these bits of baby are, to use the Star Tribune's phrase, "being used respectfully." But they are not being obtained respectfully.
However, exposing the barbarism that is abortion is not the main reason for the videos. If it were, nobody would be in statehouses and the nation's capitol seeking to defund Planned Parenthood. They would be seeking to end abortion.
The main focus of the videos, and the main focus of the campaign to defund PP, is the fundamental dishonesty of this swallower of half a billion dollars a year in federal funds and millions more in state largesse. There is evidence in the videos that several federal laws are being broken. But even if courts disagree with that assessment, here are some things we see in the videos that no claims of "dubious editing" can erase.