In a bid for ongoing taxpayer support, Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards will be appearing before Congress today. It’s reported that as part of her testimony, she will admit that only 1 percent of Planned Parenthood’s affiliates currently harvest fetal tissue, and that even those affiliates charge only modest fees of $60 per tissue specimen.
Which raises the question: Why should we give money to an organization that has access to a valuable resource but can’t be bothered to sell it to the highest bidder?
When your brother-in-law is out of work, you might be inclined to help him out. When your brother-in-law is out of work, deluged with job offers, and refusing even to consider them, you’ll probably be less inclined. Planned Parenthood is that brother-in-law.
This isn’t about your stance on abortion. Whether you’re pro-life, pro-choice, or pro-anything-in-between, surely we can all agree that valuable resources should not be lightly discarded, especially by those who are in the midst of pleading poverty, and doubly especially by those who are in the midst of pleading poverty as a rationale for conscripting other people’s money. This is so whether or not those valuable resources are byproducts of an event that you consider regrettable, or even appalling.
Of course those who recoil from abortion might want to prohibit the sale of fetal tissue in order to limit the incentive to abort. But that’s an argument about what the law should be going forward, not about what Planned Parenthood should be doing today.
Anyway, those who recoil from abortion don’t to need new reasons to oppose funding Planned Parenthood. Meanwhile, those who don’t recoil from abortion — or those who, at least, want abortion to be easily available — can still recoil from funding an organization that throws valuable tissue in the trash. Planned Parenthood has given every one of us a lot to recoil from.