An Industry Which Can be Crushed

Planned Parenthood Has Handed GOP Candidates a Gift — They’re Running with It

The era of Todd Akin-ism may be over.  

By Ian Tuttle

National Review Online

Abortion is back in the news in a big way, thanks to two harrowing videos from the Center for Medical Progress. It turns out there is such a thing as bad publicity — for example, the revelation that your taxpayer-subsidized “women’s health” operation has been trafficking in the remains of aborted babies, and that you “huddle” in the morning to figure out how many babies you need to crush and crunch” to fill orders. This is, then, prime time for left-wing media types to remind voters that, don’t you know?!, when it comes to abortions these Republicans are crazy! So it comes as a delight to see that Republican presidential candidates are not having it.

Last week, Rick Perry stopped by Morning Joe, where Mark Halperin — best known of late for trying to test Ted Cruz’s Cuban bona fides — thought he’d put Perry’s abortion “extremism” on display:

Mark Halperin: Governor, I’d like to ask you a couple of questions about Planned Parenthood. There’s a controversy swirling around that you’ve weighed in on. First, I’d like you to say, does Planned Parenthood do anything, provide any services that you think are valuable, and if so what are they, and second, why are you so troubled by this video?

Rick Perry: Well, Planned Parenthood does give some services which I would suggest are good for women’s health, but —
Halperin: Which ones, Governor? Can you be specific on that?

Perry: Oh, I think some of the cancer screenings, some of those types of screening are obviously good for women’s health. But when you look at the overall picture of what they do, they are, they’re in a business that people of Texas have a concern about.

And Mark, let me ask you, You looked at that video, and you’re good with it?

Halperin: I think the video raises a lot of questions and you and others have raised them.
Perry: It does indeed. And I think you just answered the question for us. Thank you.

Turning the question on Halperin was deadly, because there is only one acceptable answer — of course he was not “good” with the video. If your reaction to hearing Debbie “Side-of-Fava-Beans” Nucatola sip wine and talk about squashing “specimens” was a shrug — or if it was, à la four House Democrats, to call for an investigation into the Center for Medical Progress — you should probably be in a padded room. Halperin assumed that Perry’s response needed a defense. Perry showed that it’s any response other than alarm that needs a defense.

It brings to mind Governor Perry’s opponent, Kentucky senator Rand Paul, who in April rebuffed a reporter’s question about his abortion stance by encouraging the reporter to ask Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Shultz “if she’s okay with killing a seven-pound baby that is just not born yet.” (Her answer: Yes.)

Now this week comes Carly Fiorina, who, appearing on CNN’s The Lead, left Jake Tapper visibly startled by her forceful response to his question about whether she supported a Wisconsin-style 20-week abortion ban with no exemptions for cases of rape and incest:

Fiorina: Let’s talk about the legislation that’s sitting on the Senate floor right now, which does allow for [exceptions for rape and incest]. Let’s also talk about Hillary Clinton’s position. Let’s talk about what extreme is. “It’s not a life until it leaves the hospital.” That’s Hillary Clinton’s position. It’s Hillary Clinton’s position that a 13-year-old girl needs her mother’s permission to go to a tanning salon or get a tattoo, but not to get an abortion. It’s Hillary Clinton’s position that women should not be permitted to look at an ultrasound before an abortion, and yet people who are trying to harvest body parts can use an ultrasound to make sure those body parts are preserved so they can be sold. That, Jake, is extreme.

The only way Fiorina could have improved on this performance would have been to drop the mic and walk out.

What Paul and Perry and Fiorina understand — and what left-wing media personalities and Beltway liberals don’t — is that the American public is not blasé about abortion. As I noted in April, a 2014 Gallup poll found that only one in four Americans thought abortion should be legal at any time; the Pew Research Center reported only one in five. Talk in terms of trimesters, and the numbers are even starker. A 2012 Gallup poll found that only 14 percent of respondents favored legal abortions in the third trimester, and only 27 percent supported legal abortions in the second trimester. Republicans’ proposed prohibition on abortions after 20 weeks, or about halfway through the second trimester, which passed the House in May, is entirely in keeping with public opinion.

No Republican politician should answer a question about abortion without first demanding that Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer and Hillary Clinton answer for their positions.

Democrats, meanwhile, have an official platform — “We oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine” a woman’s right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy — that sides against 86 percent of Americans. And Democrats’ rhetoric is even more extreme: “I think when you bring your baby home, when your baby is born . . . the baby belongs to your family and has all the rights.” So said California senator Barbara Boxer in 1999.

As George Will wrote in 2010, “It is theoretically impossible to fashion an abortion position significantly more extreme than Boxer’s, which is slightly modified infanticide” (italics in the original).

Republican politicians have played defense on the abortion question for years, afraid to be condemned as “extreme” by the extremists in NOW and NARAL and the other squads of hands-off-my-ovaries harpies. Todd Akin’s implosion was just the most graceless version of that party-wide defensive posture.
No longer. Partial-birth abortions, abortion-by-dismemberment, Kermit Gosnell, now the Planned Parenthood organ-harvesting side business: The rot at the root of the abortion industry is evident, and Republicans are finally seeing that they can, and should, go on offense.

The strategy is simple: No Republican politician should answer a question about abortion without first demanding that Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer and Hillary Clinton answer for their positions. And putting Democrats on the defensive is not just good politics; it makes it that much more likely that the abortion industry can, finally, be crushed.

— Ian Tuttle is a William F. Buckley Fellow in Political Journalism at the National Review Institute