Politically Incorrect Trauma: Planned Parenthood’s Other 98 Percent

Ever since David Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress first revealed the abortion industry’s illegal trade in baby body parts, defenders of Planned Parenthood have ferociously reemphasized an old piece of disinformation—that only three percent of PP’s “services” involve abortion. Close observation reveals what constitutes the other 97 percent. The other 97 percent consists of obfuscation, evasion, and outright lying. PP’s main business aside from actually doing abortions is hiding the nature of the abortions it does.

Anyone who has ever looked closely at the abortion industry already understands this truth. However, we need to reconsider the effect of these constant lies on the abortionists themselves and on Planned Parenthood’s professed interest in women’s health.

Deadly Deeds, Double Minds

Recently, I took the time to review the CMP video that showed abortionist DeShawn Taylor complaining about how much force it takes to rip the limbs off of a baby during an abortion. It takes so much force that she has to “hit the gym,” she says with a laugh. Taylor’s statement and the callous statements of so many other abortionists demonstrate an utter disregard for human life—a reality that hit me especially hard as I marveled at the perfectly formed fingers of my favorite tiny person, who is not much older than the babies that Taylor “disarticulates,” at 24 weeks gestation, in her late-term abortion practice.

Why is it so shocking to hear Planned Parenthood abortionists and directors speak openly about the work they do? Because Planned Parenthood spent close to $100 million last year on public policy, fundraising, and “refreshing” its brand—all investments that enable the nation’s largest abortion provider to maintain a façade as champion of “high-quality health care,” rather than boast about its achievements in the field of fetal “disarticulation.” Planned Parenthood needs us to believe that it is the nation’s premier purveyor of “accurate health care information,” not an ethical cesspool where bored technicians of torture exchange crass shop talk about tearing defenseless babies apart.

The evidence provided by CMP proves that abortion profiteers know exactly what they are doing. But their expressed understanding of the moral meaning of their acts seems dull-witted to the point of insensibility. As Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood’s Senior Director of Medical Services, put it, “There’s, like, a culture war on feticide.” Imagine that.

Do Nucatola and PP’s other abortionists ever wonder how they got here, to this place where the “service” they perform for women is killing their offspring? Do they ever gasp when the perfectly formed limbs that are the target of the abortionist’s forceps wriggle away from the instrument of their destruction? Do the abortionists ever pause as the tiny human being attempts with futile motions to defend its life?

We all know the stories of people like Abby Johnsn and Bernard Nathanson, people who woke up to reality and recognized, at last, the humanity of babies in the womb. Abortionists are, after all, medically trained. Surely they know that a “wanted” baby is not intrinsically different from a baby towards whom the mother has ambivalent or even hostile feelings.

Is it possible that abortionists suffer from the same type of trauma as women who have lost a child to abortion? Dr. Anne Speckhard, Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown, is an expert on post-traumatic stress and other psychological disorders. She has written numerous articles about the traumatic effects of abortion, including “high arousal, dissociation, amnesia, feeling depersonalized, or even a feeling of derealization (separating from reality),” which may transition into full-blown PTSD. Speckhard started calling abortion “the politically-incorrect trauma” after “having the head of the national Planned Parenthood office write a letter to Harper & Row asking them not to publish my book on the subject—and to have the contract I was about to be offered suddenly rescinded. . . .”

Speckhard did ultimately get her book published by a Catholic publishing house, but not by Harper & Row.

If abortion traumatizes women, what must it do to the abortionists who perform the “service” of violently taking helpless human lives day after day, year after year? I’m not writing this to excuse in any way the evil choices they make, but I do wonder if the callousness with which abortionists talk about their work is symptomatic of one or more trauma disorders. What else could explain how Nucatola, a trained physician, could talk about a procedure during which a living human being is torn limb from limb, all while she enjoys a salad and a glass of wine?

We will likely never know, since Planned Parenthood will happily fork over whatever it costs to suppress that information.

Care about the Cover-Up, No Matter What

Alexandra Snyder, Executive Director of Life Legal was quoted as saying “As an attorney and a defender of First Amendment protections, I am appalled at the lengths to which Planned Parenthood goes to sanitize its brand. A legitimate health care provider would be interested to know of the physical, mental, and emotional effects of a procedure it performed 328,348 times last year. And a doctor researching complications from a medical procedure would not then be blackballed simply because that procedure happens to be abortion.”

We saw similar censorship tactics with the results of peer-reviewed studies showing the link between oral contraceptives and a host of health risks, including various types of cancers, heart attack, and cardiovascular disease. Life Legal reported on these studies in our amicus brief on behalf of the Little Sisters of the Poor, who challenged the mandate forcing them to provide contraceptives and abortifacients in their employee health plans.

In fact, the World Health Organization has classified combined oral contraceptives as Group 1 carcinogens, meaning they have been proven—not merely suspected—to cause cancer. In its most recent annual report, Planned Parenthood boasts that it provided “birth control services and information” to over 2.8 million people last year, many of them teenagers. I wonder if it told the women receiving birth control pills that they now have four times the average chance of being diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer.

Does Planned Parenthood tell teens that they are even more vulnerable to the side effects of hormonal birth control than adult women—that their own risk of getting the same type of breast cancer increases by a whopping 640 percent? These statistics give a whole new meaning to Planned Parenthood’s obsession with the color pink. Its officers not only wear pink hats at crazed marches but also ensure that more and more pink ribbons will have to be worn around the country.

The obvious truth that PP industriously evades is this: abortion kills babies and damages women. Planned Parenthood is the nation’s largest abortion provider, which means that it kills more babies and damages more women than any other proud group of “disarticulation” specialists. All in the name of care. No matter what.

Life Legal represents David Daleiden, who pulled back the pink shroud over the abortion industry when he released a series of videos showing high level PP employees discussing the sale of fetal body parts for profit.