During the latest GOP primary debate on September 16, Carly Fiorina described a video that shows “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain”. She further claims a Planned Parenthood employee said the fetus was being kept “alive to harvest its brain”.
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“The character of this nation can not be about the butchery of babies for their body parts”, Fiorina said here, and renewed her call along with other Republicans to end all federal funding of Planned Parenthood. The line “We’re going to procure brain” comes from Holly O’Donnell, the former procurement technician used as a centerpiece in several CMP videos.
“This is about the character of our nation”, said the Republican presidential hopeful, who was immediately criticized for misrepresenting the scene captured on a hidden camera by anti-abortion activists.
Just in the interest of complete and utter fairness ad absurdum, I will accept that it’s possible that Carly Fiorina is holding out on us, and she actually does have that footage on her iPad and refuses to show it to anyone else because she’s testing us all to see who her true supporters are, like some gruesome Doubting Thomas kind of deal.
One of the most dramatic parts of Fiorina’s compelling debate performance was her authoritative stance for the defunding of Planned Parenthood, a measure approved by the House last week, to be voted on by the Senate Thursday.
[Get caught up on whats in the Planned Parenthood videos]. Planned Parenthood released a statement politely pointing out that’s “totally false”. But that doesn’t matter, according to National Review’s Jonah Goldberg, because “anybody who has watched the videos would find Fiorina’s off-the-cuff account pretty accurate”.
Fiorina’s defensiveness is not a good look, but it’s hard not to feel a twinge of pity for her. After all, every single Republican in the race flagrantly lies about Planned Parenthood. Nevertheless, Fiorina’s details were in fact a bit off, and her sympathizers (a group I readily put myself into) do her and the broader cause of life and truth no favors by ignoring that fact. Sarah reported that the clip doesn’t come from a Planned Parenthood clinic, which matters because Fiorina’s point was that the government should stop subsidizing the group.
“Had this case been a miscarriage, the mother would have presented at a hospital and her baby would have been rushed to an Isolette for appropriate neonatal care – not abandoned to writhe and eventually expire in a cold, stainless steel specimen vessel”, the statement read.
In fact, as TheBlaze previously reported, this very photo caused some critics to object last month that the Center for Medical Progress was misleading viewers when it included the image in its mini-documentary. “But they do not think a 17-week-old, a 20-week-old, a 24-week-old, is worth saving”, she said.
The Grantham Collection is an anti-abortion archive which uses photos of still births or miscarriages, among other things, to deceive people into believing they are viewing aborted fetuses.
Ellyn Marionneaux of Clemson also attended the event and said she was an undecided voter hoping to learn more about Fiorina’s campaign. The people trying to dismiss the videos are the extremists, and the media give them cover.
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At publishing time, Carly Fiorina’s campaign had not responded to Yahoo Health’s request for comment. “All we’re doing is making the problem worse”, Fiorina said in an interview with Yahoo News.
