If I told you, “I still remember the feeling when Darth Vader said ‘Luke, I am your father’,” you might correct me, and say, “Actually, Vader never quite says that. He begins a monologue with the word ‘Luke,’ and later, in response to Luke, he says ‘No. *I* am your father.'”
You wouldn’t say, “That’s pure fiction. The movie you’re describing doesn’t exist.”
This is roughly analogous to Carly Fiorina and the videos about abortion giant Planned Parenthood’s role as a major supplier of fetal organs to the biotech industry.
Fiorina, in the second debate, gave powerful remarks about Planned Parenthood’s barbarism. I’ve flagged three elements of her statement
I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these tapes, watch [A] a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says [B] we have to keep it alive [C] to harvest its brain. This is about the character of our nation. And if we will not stand up and force President Obama to veto this bill, shame on us.
It turns out she sort of blended together three different parts of one video:
A) Footage of a baby who survived an abortion — notably, this baby may not have been at Planned Parenthood*, and we have no reason to think he or she was cut up for his or her organs.
B) Abortion clinic officials saying things that could suggest they may deliver live babies, rather than abort them, in order to preserve the value of the body parts.
C) The first-hand account of former biotech worker Holly O’Donnell, who described an aborted baby boy whose heart was still beating and who was cut up for his brain.
These three aspects of the story occur separately in the video, but Fiorina left her audience assuming that they were occuring at the same time. Had she submitted this to me as an op-ed, I would have made her change her wording to avoid that implication.
But contrary to the tone of many “fact checks” on her remarks, everything she was describing was in this Planned Parenthood video. There was a baby dying on a plate in an abortion clinic. There were abortion-industry employees talking about the organ-preserving benefits of not using feticide. There was an account of a baby, whose heart was beating, being cut up for his brain.
Maybe you doubt the video of the pre-term baby on the plate is what the provider says it was. Maybe you think Holly O’Donnell has her facts wrong. Certainly, Fiorina was less than precise in her wording. But it hardly seems fitting to call it “pure fiction.”
Mollie Hemingway at the Federalist has documented the weird claims of the media fact checkers. Those journalists who say the video Fiorina described “doesn’t exist” seem to me far further from the truth than Fiorina was.
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*CORRECTION: Originally I wrote that this baby wasn’t filmed at a Planned Parenthood, but we don’t know that for sure.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
