Abortion defenders’ complaints about the Planned Parenthood investigation are getting more outlandish by the week. At Slate, Will Saletan objects that the latest committee hearing “went way beyond Planned Parenthood or late-term abortion. What was on trial was abortion itself”…
Four witnesses, three of them pro-life, had been summoned to testify. The first, Anthony Levatino, was an OB-GYN who used to terminate pregnancies. He described his methods in grisly detail and showed the committee a video in which clinic staffers offered women very late abortions. Under questioning, however, Levatino admitted that these weren’t Planned Parenthood clinics, that he had never worked with Planned Parenthood during his practice, and that he had no evidence of wrongdoing by anyone affiliated with the organization.
This is nonsense. Nobody claimed Levatino was there to recount experiences specific to Planned Parenthood, but to explain the broader subject of late-term abortion: the humanity of its victim, how it’s normally performed, and its lack of medical necessity. Unless Planned Parenthood stopped performing late-term abortions when nobody was looking, of course all this is representative of and applicable to the organization.