Something that’s important to understand about the anti-abortion movement’s ongoing efforts to discredit Planned Parenthood is that for many in the movement, the women’s health provider is already guilty of committing a crime by providing abortions. But since abortion is legal in the United States, Planned Parenthood’s adversaries have been trying desperately for years to find actual crimes that the group is guilty of in order to bring it down. This summer’s smear videos from the Center for Medical Progress grew out of that line of thinking.
Priests for Life’s Father Frank Pavone, who says he was “close to” the Center for Medical Progress officials who led the most recent attack on Planned Parenthood, made this point very clearly in a conference call for anti-abortion activists that he hosted last night along with the Susan B. Anthony List’s Marjorie Dannenfelser. (GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina also spoke on the call.)
Pavone told the activists on the call that a key part of his strategy is to “expose the abortion industry” and “rip the veil off what’s going on behind the closed doors of the abortion clinics.”
“And when we look there,” he said, “we see the truth that I have often reiterated, that you cannot practice vice virtuously. If you have such a seared conscience that you’re killing babies, well, friends, you’re going to be doing a lot of other evil things as well: medical malpractice, sexual abuse of patients, violation of OSHA standards, insurance laws, money laundering, all kinds of fraud and, yes, even the sale of body parts. All of this and much more is going on in the abortion industry.”
In other words, if you are such a depraved person that you will provide abortions, then you are probably a sexual predator, fraudster, and any other sort of criminal as well and thus Planned Parenthood is probably selling fetal tissue for profit just because it is used to doing “evil” things and is just waiting to be exposed.
Pavone also boasted of his role in a previous, similar attack on Planned Parenthood orchestrated by Mark Crutcher of Life Dynamics, which we wrote about in a recent report.
