A new House report busted Congressional Republicans for conspiring
with the Center for Medical Progress and others on a coordinated
campaign to discredit Planned Parenthood …
The videos Republicans are using to try to defund
Planned Parenthood don’t show what they claim the show. We have all
known this since they came out. There is nothing illegal in them, and
they were edited misleadingly. But Democrats felt compelled to
investigate anyway, with bipartisan briefings no less.
The Energy and Commerce Committee has an on-going
investigation into the matter and today Committee Democratic staff
released an
in-depth memo
which “clearly discredits” the Republican claims that Planned
Parenthood allegedly sold fetal tissue for profit. There is no evidence
of this at all.
From the memo (my emphasis):
This memorandum serves
as an update on the Committee’s ongoing investigation into claims
regarding the alleged sale of fetal tissue by affiliates of Planned
Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) to tissue procurement
organizations (TPOs). The review has included bipartisan briefings
by Planned Parenthood officials as well as representatives from
StemExpress, Novogenix Laboratories, and Advanced Bioscience Resources –
three TPOs that partner with Planned Parenthood affiliates and other
healthcare providers to collect specimens to supply to researchers
working with fetal tissue.
In addition to these briefings, the Committee has
received documents and written responses to a series of questions it
posed in writing to PPFA regarding its “practices relating to fetal
tissue collection and sale or donation.” To date, the Committee has
received no evidence to substantiate the allegations that Planned
Parenthood has engaged in the sale of fetal tissue for profit.
Furthermore, the Committee has received no evidence to support the
allegations that fetal tissue was procured without consent, that Planned
Parenthood physicians altered the timing, method, or procedure of an
abortion solely for the purposes of obtaining fetal tissue, or that
Planned Parenthood physicians performed intact dilation and evacuation
in order to preserve fetal tissue for research. Thus far, the
investigation has revealed that PPFA requires all affiliates to ensure
compliance with all state and federal laws and that specific PPFA
guidance requires affiliates to ensure that reimbursement for fetal
tissue is limited to actual costs.
And they found nothing. There is zero evidence that any laws were broken. Zilch.
“Over the last month, we have carefully reviewed the
facts at hand and the materials provided to us as a result of the
majority’s inquiry,” said full Committee Ranking Member Frank Pallone,
Jr. (D-NJ) and Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Ranking Member
Diana DeGette (D-CO). “Despite the incendiary rhetoric, we have looked
strictly at the facts. We are continuing to do our due diligence, but
we have found these claims to be unsubstantiated. Instead, these
attacks appear to be part of a coordinated campaign on the part of the
Center for Medical Progress and others, to simply discredit Planned
Parenthood and undermine a woman’s legal right to safe reproductive
health care.”
Yes, this is a Democratic Committee, but Democrats
are usually the first to turn on their own, so that’s not a solid
argument against the findings. What is a solid argument is that this
entire thing has been done the wrong way. We shouldn’t be wasting
millions of taxpayer dollars and facing yet another Republican shutdown
showdown over a made up, fictional, non-existent issue.
We shouldn’t have to investigate unsubstantiated claims to prove they are not true. This is, quite simply, ridiculous.
This is the old “When did you stop beating your
wife” set up. It’s supposed to work the other way around. Accusations
and investigations should be based on some evidence that something is
amiss.
Meanwhile, the
Guttmacher Institute
destroyed the Republican argument that after they defund Planned
Parenthood, the sole safety-net provider of contraceptive care in some
areas and also the provider of cancer screening and other important
health care, other providers would fill the hole. In fact, they say, “
credible evidence suggests this is unlikely.”
So what you have here is Republicans investigating
the agency that is doing the most of any agency or organization to
actually reduce abortions by offering birth control to women. They are
doing this over a claim that was never substantiated by the videos their
activist arm released. Even after the videos were discredited,
Republicans began “investigating” Planned Parenthood with an eye to
defund them completely.
All of this is over an issue that is not happening,
and if done will result in MORE abortions. Republicans are banking on
the gut reaction people will have to the term “fetal tissue”, but they
ignore that fetal tissue is a critical tool for biomedical research. The
report cites the Department of Health and Human Services on this issue,
“fetal tissue continues to be a critical resource for important efforts
such as research on degenerative eye disease, human development
disorders such as Down syndrome, and infectious diseases, among a host
of other diseases.”
Perhaps Republicans should tell voters exactly what research they want to cancel.
It’s another Republican O’keefe style hack hit job
meant to make headlines on Fox News and incite conservatives. It has
done these things, but the claims are also completely unsubstantiated,
which is awkward when a party is threatening to shut down the government
over them.
Republicans clearly can’t handle doing actual work,
they are more comfortable with manufactured investigations and trying to
control women than they are with the real work of Congress. Someone
should be investigating the alleged coordination behind these videos and
when Republicans knew about them and why they waited to release them,
but that won’t happen because Republicans would never investigate
themselves. They leave things like self-negating integrity to the
Democrats.
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