As Planned Parenthood continues to sell aborted baby parts, the Professional Politicians on Capitol Hill continue to play procedural games.
Fox News reports that
The Senate failed Monday to advance a Republican-led measure to halt federal aid to Planned Parenthood, but leaders of the GOP-controlled chamber appear ready to continue the fight, galvanized by a series of unsettling videos about the group.
The vote to bring debate on the bill was 53 against to 46 in favor.
The measure had not been expected to get the 60 votes needed to move it toward a final vote because Republicans needed several “yeas” from Democrats, who largely support Planned Parenthood.
West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin was among the Democrats who voted to defund the group. Manchin, whose state has increasingly become more Republican leaning, was undecided until a few hours before the vote.
“I am very troubled by the callous behavior of Planned Parenthood staff in (the) recently released videos, which casually discuss the sale, possibly for profit, of fetal tissue after an abortion,” he said before voting. “Until these allegations have been answered and resolved, I do not believe that taxpayer money should be used to fund this organization.”
New York Sen. Joe Donnelly was the only other Democrat to vote yes. The only Republicans to vote no were Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. He voted no so he could again bring up the measure.
On the GOP side, Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa said, “The American taxpayer should not be asked to fund an organization like Planned Parenthood that has shown a sheer disdain for human dignity and complete disregard for women and their babies.”
The first of the videos were released late last month and show group officials negotiating the price of aborted fetal tissue for research.
Federal law prohibits the sale of fetal tissue for profit. And whether the officials were indeed negotiating a for-profit price, as critics charge, may never be settled.
Planned Parenthood says it only recovers costs of the procedures and gives the tissue to researchers only with a mother’s advance consent.
However, the videos have sparked renewed efforts by pro-life organizations and others to restrict abortions and undermine Planned Parenthood.
The group provides abortions and such health and family-planning services as contraception and sexual-disease treatment to roughly 2.7 million people annually, mostly women.
By law, federal funds are already barred from being used for abortions except for cases of incest, rape or when a woman’s life is in danger.
The White House says it would block legislation to defund the group.
Still, Republicans could try to gain leverage for the defund effort when Congress returns from August recess by threating to vote against spending bills to keep the government running after Sept. 30 if they include Planned Parenthood funds.
GOP leaders are reluctant to force a shutdown fight that could haunt them in the 2016 elections.
In 2013, firebrand Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz, now a 2016 presidential candidate, led a showdown against Washington Democrats over funding for ObamaCare that resulted in a partial government shutdown that voters largely blamed on Republicans.
Planned Parenthood leader Cecile Richards told Fox News on Monday that a shutdown effort would be “politically unpopular” but that her group would be prepared for such a fight.
The furtively recorded videos released in July — with close-ups of aborted fetal organs and Planned Parenthood officials describing how “I’m not going to crush that part” — have forced the group and its Democratic champions into a defensive crouch.
Democrats are sounding a theme they have employed in recent elections, characterizing the GOP drive as an assault on health care for women.
“It’s our obligation to protect our wives, our sisters, our daughters, our granddaughters” from the GOP’s “absurd policies,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev, said before the vote. “The Republican Party has lost its moral compass.”
The videos were made by anti-abortion group Center for Medical Progress, which has so far released four videos in which people posing as representatives of a company that purchases fetal tissue converse with Planned Parenthood officials.
In the longer term, GOP leaders are hoping that three congressional committees’ investigations, plus probes in several states and the expected release of additional videos, will produce evidence of PlannedParenthood wrongdoing and make it harder for Democrats to defend the organization.
Their measure calls for funneling Planned Parenthood’s federal dollars to other providers of health care to women, including hospitals, state and local agencies and federally financed community health centers.
Republicans say that transfer would enable women to continue receiving the health care they need because PlannedParenthood’s nearly 700 clinics are far outnumbered by other providers.
Planned Parenthood and Democrats contest that. They say many of the organization’s centers are in areas with few alternatives for reproductive health care or for other services for the low-income women who comprise a majority of its clients.
Have you ever heard of Peter Singer?
Peter Singer is an Australian philosopher and a visiting professor of bioethics at Princeton University. He also has worked as a lecturer at Oxford University, New York University, Monash University, the University of Colorado (Boulder), the University of California (Irvine), the University of Melbourne, and Princeton University’s Center for Human Values. Singer authored the 1975 book Animal Liberation, a landmark text that effectively launched the modern animal rights movement.
In his book, this lunatic claims that people should respect the moral worth of all animals…not on the basis of the animals’ intelligence, but instead, because of their ability to experience pain and suffering. He equates the denial of animals’ basic “rights” as a form of discrimination called “speciesism,” which he erroneously compares to racism and sexism.
According to Singer, it is wrong to value the life of human beings more than the lives of animals. Singer, an atheist, of course, rejects the scripture from Genesis that man has been given dominion over animals and that people are made uniquely in the image of God. He also believes that all animals have souls who are just as worthy of life. as ours’:
All three [of the foregoing axioms] taken together do have a very negative influence on the way in which we think about animals.
Singer goes on to explain that his mission is to challenge “this superiority of human beings”.
Singer, in 1979, wrote and published Practical Ethics, in which he continued his rant that animals are equal to human beings. He also states (hold on to something) that human parents should be legally permitted to kill a “severely disabled” infant up to 28 days after its birth if they deem the baby’s life unworthy of preservation.
According to this nutjob,
There are some circumstances…where the newborn baby is severely disabled and where the parents think that it’s better that that child should not live, when killing the newborn baby is not at all wrong.
Singer wrote an article for scotsman.com, in August of 2008. Here is an excerpt.
Abortion receives extensive coverage in developed countries, especially in the United States, where Republicans have used opposition to it to rally voters. But much less attention is given to the 86 per cent of all abortions that occur in the developing world. Although most countries in Africa and Latin America have laws prohibiting abortion in most circumstances, official bans do not prevent high abortion rates.
In Africa, there are 29 abortions per 1,000 women, and 32 per 1,000 in Latin America. The comparable figure for Western Europe, where abortion is generally permitted in most circumstances, is 12. According to a recent report by the World Health Organisation, unsafe abortions lead to the death of 47,000 women a year, almost all of them in developing countries. Restricting access to legal abortion leads many poor women to seek abortion from unsafe providers. The legalisation of abortion on request in South Africa in 1998 saw abortion-related deaths drop by 91 per cent. And the development of the drugs misoprostol and mifepristone, which can be provided by pharmacists, makes relatively safe and inexpensive abortion possible in developing countries.
Opponents will respond that abortion is, by its very nature, unsafe – for the foetus. They point out that abortion kills a unique, living human individual. That claim is difficult to deny, at least if by “human” we mean “member of the species Homo sapiens.”
It is also true that we cannot simply invoke a woman’s “right to choose” in order to avoid the ethical issue of the moral status of the foetus. If the foetus really did have the moral status of any other human being, it would be difficult to argue that a pregnant woman’s right to choose includes the right to bring about the death of the foetus, except perhaps when the woman’s life is at stake.
The fallacy in the anti-abortion argument lies in the shift from the scientifically accurate claim that the foetus is a living individual of the species Homo sapiens to the ethical claim that the foetus therefore has the same right to life as any other human being. Membership of the species Homo sapiens is not enough to confer a right to life.
We can plausibly argue that we ought not to kill, against their will, self-aware beings who want to continue to live. We can see this as a violation of their autonomy, or a thwarting of their preferences. But why should a being’s potential to become rationally self-aware make it wrong to end its life before it has the capacity for rationality or self-awareness?
We have no obligation to allow every being with the potential to become a rational being to realise that potential. If it comes to a clash between the supposed interests of potentially rational but not yet conscious beings and the vital interests of actually rational women, we should give preference to the women every time.
I know that I will be called a “‘Christianist’ Right Wing Reactionary Idiot”, by any Liberal, who happens to read this. But, frankly, Scarlett…well, you know.
I find it sadly fascinating that the Main Stream Media had to be forced by those of us in the New Media, to cover the Baby Parts Selling Scandal involving Planned Parenthood. They wanted, as sworn members of the Obama Propaganda Corps (pronounced “corpse”) to ignore PP and their callousness, because it did not fit the safe, antiseptic version of the abortion procedure, which they have been pushing since before Roe vs. Wade.
What they have been slapped in the face with is a harsh reality. The Planned Parenthood Scandal has placed the National Spotlight straight on the purveyors of American Infanticide. There is nothing that they can do to defend it.
I find it horrifying that there are Americans, who believe as Singer does, that we are no better than the toad in our front yard. Therefore, it is perfectly acceptable to “get rid” of us, while we are defenseless, in the same manner that an animal shelter gasses its unwanted animals.
But, God help you, if you shoot a lion.
Mankind wase given dominion over the animals. We Are different. Within each of us is that Divine Spark”, which eternally links us to the Creator. As King David said,
For Thou didst form my inward parts; Thou didst weave me in my mother’s womb. I will give thanks to Thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Wonderful are Thy works, And my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from Thee, When I was made in secret, And skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth. Thine eyes have seen my unformed substance; And in Thy book they were all written, The days that were ordained for me, When as yet there was not one of them. (Psalm 139:13-16)
Pray for our nation. God shall not be mocked.
Until He Comes,
KJ
Kingsjester's Blog 