On the tragic shooting at the Planned Parenthood health center in Colorado Springs last Friday, PPFA Executive Vice President Dawn Laguens this weekend said:
It is offensive and outrageous that some politicians are now claiming this tragedy has nothing to do with the toxic environment they helped create…Instead of looking for lessons to prevent this from happening in the future, they’re doubling down on their effort to block women from getting preventive health care at Planned Parenthood…One of the lessons of this awful tragedy is that words matter, and hateful rhetoric fuels violence. It’s not enough to denounce the tragedy without also denouncing the poisonous rhetoric that fueled it. Instead, some politicians are continuing to stoke it, which is unconscionable.
Unapologetic advocates of anti-choice policies, 2016 GOP presidential candidates and sitting GOP senators have over the last several months been unrepentant in their parroting of inflammatory anti-Planned Parenthood rhetoric and amplification of insidious anti-Planned Parenthood lies.
Their attacks on Planned Parenthood are nothing more than a coordinated partisan assault on American women’s access to a full-range of health care options . The repugnant, inflammatory anti-Planned Parenthood rhetoric speaks for itself:
Marco Rubio
- Described Planned Parenthood as “a radical group” caught discussing “the dismembering of children.”
- Claimed Planned Parenthood is “trafficking in fetal tissue of aborted children.”
- Characterized the organization’s offering of a wide range of women’s health services as involvement in “atrocious practices.”
Jeb Bush
- Accused Planned Parenthood of championing an “effort to harvest and monetize unborn babies…a child with a beating heart in the form of a child.”
- Claimed, erroneously, that Planned Parenthood isn’t “actually doing women’s health issues.”
Ben Carson
- Said the highly-edited Planned Parenthood videos released by the shady Center for Medical Progress “[demonstrated] the depravity that has inhabited our society.”
Ted Cruz
- Described the Center for Medical Progress’s misleading Planned Parenthood videos as “[showing] the face of evil” and appearing to “demonstrate an ongoing pattern of criminal conduct.”
- Claimed the videos showed “senior Planned Parenthood officials callously, heartlessly laughing and sipping wine while they barter and sell the body parts of unborn children.”
Chris Christie
- Said Planned Parenthood “engaged in the systematic murder of children in the womb in a manner in which it allowed them to maximize the value of certain body parts for sale on the open market after the child is murdered.”
Carly Fiorina
- In an outright and thoroughly debunked lie intended to boost her own profile with public outrage, Carly Fiorina falsely claimed the edited videos showed “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.”
Ron Johnson
- Accused Planned Parenthood of “killing little babies.”
Joni Ernst
- Claimed Planned Parenthood was “haggling over the price of baby body parts.”
Rob Portman
- Said Planned Parenthood was engaging in the “selling of baby parts.”
Pat Toomey
- Claimed Plant Parenthood, which provides a myriad of essential health services — including HIV and STI tests and well as breast exams — and which in 2013-2014 facilitated the early-detection of cancer for 87,998 women, has a “wanton disregard for human life.”
Published: Dec 1, 2015