NEW YORK (AP) — Responding to a furor over undercover videos, Planned Parenthood says it will maintain programs at some of its clinics that make fetal tissue available for research, but will no longer accept any sort of payment to cover the costs of those programs.
Anti-abortion activists who recently released a series of covertly filmed videos have contended that Planned Parenthood officials sought profits from their programs providing post-abortion fetal tissue to researchers. Planned Parenthood said the videos were deceptively edited and denied seeking any payments beyond legally permitted reimbursement of costs.
The new policy — forgoing even permissible reimbursement — was outlined in a letter sent Tuesday by Planned Parenthood’s president, Cecile Richards, to Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health.
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That isn’t going to fix anything. It’ll probably fuel the fire.
It’s tantamount to an admission of guilt to the anti-intellectual, anti-science crowd that can’t deal with nuance. Perhaps they’re lost anyhow, but if so, why capitulate?
But it’s sad that the media just can’t get this right. Even this headline feeds the lie: my understanding is that Planned Parenthood never “accepted payment” for fetal tissue. The recipients of the tissue paid the shipping costs.
I rarely take issue with TPM’s writers, but this is just wrong. The videos WERE deceptively edited. This is an objective fact. That the videos were edited or that the editing was deceptive isn’t up for debate and it isn’t merely the opinion of PP. It’s a fact that the videos were edited in a way to make it appear that PP officials were saying one thing when they were clearly saying something entirely different. That’s deception.
This is a pointless gesture; the Republicans will just attack them tomorrow (or more likely, later today) over something else.
Planned Parenthood needs to take the approach that has worked so well for the NRA.
CONCEDE NOTHING. EVER.
Yep. Now conservatives can point to this and demand more. They can never be appeased, so there is no point in negotiating with them.