fetus
When is abortion okay and when is it just killing babies? What are the limits? Is it really a women's rights issue, or is there more to it?

The so-called Reproductive Health Act states that "every individual who becomes pregnant has the fundamental right to choose to carry the pregnancy to term, to give birth to a child, or to have an abortion." This erases the state's recognition of preborn babies older than 24 weeks as potential homicide victims, removes abortion from the penal code entirely, and allows licensed health practitioners other than medical doctors to perform abortion procedures.

This has many people up in arms as it essentially removes the limits on abortion. The Left frames it as a victory for women's rights while the Right are calling those who promote the new mandate participants in a culture of death who authorize infanticide.

Join us on this week's episode of Objective: Health as we get down to the nitty gritty on abortion.


Running Time: 01:20:20

Download: MP3


Here's the transcript of the show:

Tiffany: Hello and welcome to the show formerly known as the Health and Wellness Show. Since we moved on to the YouTube video format we have decided to upgrade and change our name to Objective: Health. So we'd like to issue a formal welcome to Objective: Health. My name is Tiffany and I'm your host today and joining me are Erica, Doug and Elliot.

All: Hellos.

Tiffany: Okay, so our topic today is abortion, a difficult topic. So let's talk about it. Abortion has been in the news recently. It's always in the news during an election season. I think that is kind of a litmus test to tell if someone is liberal enough or not, if they're pro-choice, so it always comes up during those times. But it's been in the news recently because New York has now passed a law making it legal for women to have abortions right up to giving birth. Virginia also has some legislation pending, allowing the same thing.

It's been in the news lately so we decided to do a show about it. We're going to talk about the new law, abortion in general, some history of Planned Parenthood and we'll get to something completely outrageous towards the end of the show. I don't know if I should give it away now but it's shocking. Let's start with talking about New York and the new law that was put into place there.

Doug: It's crazy to say the least. For me personally, I used to consider myself quite liberal or at least liberal. I always leaned liberal before, leaned left. I never really gave a lot of consideration to the whole abortion topic. It was kind of like of course I'm pro-choice. It makes sense that people can make their own decisions on that. But it wasn't until things started getting pushed further more recently, that I really started thinking about it more and feeling like I'm not really that cool with it.

I waver on the whole thing. I think that when there's a medical reason for it, then yes of course. I think that that should happen. When you start getting into the weird things like the borderline eugenics kind of stuff, like the baby might have some kind of condition where it's not one where they would really be suffering that much, it's a more gray area for me I guess is what I would say. But then for New York to come along and say, "Oh yeah, right up until birth it's fine. You can abort a baby at nine months." It's like, whoa!! Wait a minute! I don't know if this is a gray area anymore. This is quite shocking to me, that anybody would even want this.

I can't think of a reason why somebody would. Maybe there are reasons why. I don't know. That's a good question. Are there reasons why anyone would not be able to abort within the first three months, but would need to at nine months? It just seems kind of crazy to me.

Tiffany: Yes. I think one of the rationalizations that I heard is that maybe there's some new life circumstance in the woman's life that would cause her to want to abort at such a late stage and no matter what those circumstances are it's still her choice to be able to do that. But the whole thing is where is the Roe in this case as in Roe v. Wade? In 1973 there was the Roe v. Wade case that made abortion legal and this woman Roe - which wasn't really her real name and didn't actually end up having an abortion she actually had the baby.

But in this case, who is demanding that a woman be allowed to abort her baby in the third trimester? Are there people out there protesting in front of city hall that they want to be able to abort their babies on the delivery table? I don't see where the demand is. This seems like it's a top-down thing.

Doug: Yeah. I think that's a good point. I've never heard of that before. In fact I don't think I've heard very much of anyone demanding that the limitations on it be extended. Pro choice was always the thing. Are you allowed to abort a fetus? It was well established that you could do that up until three months or something like that. I think in some circumstances it was up to six months. I don't remember anyone ever saying, "That's not long enough. We need to have it right up until birth". I'd never encountered it before.

Elliot: Although there's lots of holes in the argument and it's a really gray area, for instance, being able to determine when a fetus feels pain, being able to determine when a fetus crosses from being non-alive toward being a living being, that's almost impossible in and of itself. But to some extent at 12 weeks I could somewhat understand the concept that a fetus may not necessarily be as aware as a fully grown human being or a child and therefore the rationalization or the justification to be able to abort a fetus at 12 weeks, although I don't necessarily agree with that, I can somewhat understand it.

But when you get to the point where it's in the third trimester, basically up until birth, this I can't get my head around because if a mother had a child and she took the child home and it was a perfectly healthy baby and then you found out a couple of days later that the parents had actually killed the child, those parents would go to jail. They would be tried for murder because that's what that is, the killing of a baby.

So I don't see how this differs in any way. If you're going to perform an abortion on a fetus that's nine months gone, then what you're doing is essentially you are killing the baby. So how is this legal for one? And as has been said, who is asking for this? Who wants babies to be killed at nine months?!

Doug: Yeah.

Erica: Well I think that people who are behind it may not know the extent of it. Like Doug was saying earlier, I would definitely consider myself pro-choice. I do have two children so I was given the option of abortion of course. I chose not to do that. But for the most part, for the last 20 years I've held the belief that it's a woman's body, it's a woman's right to choose and even the first trimester because a lot of times women have miscarriages or issues arise. As you're saying with a serious medical condition, then I think it's not so controversial. Any number of things can happen. And it's also contraindicated for a lot of things, that pregnant women don't do things in the first 12 or 13 weeks because of that.

So I think that that's what people think when they say "I'm pro-choice". They don't consider for a moment that after 12 weeks these things are happening. Does that make sense? I think people are so strongly held in that belief and I know I was for a long time, that after 12 weeks then you have a viable fetus that has a heartbeat, that's usually when they start to test for a heartbeat and whatnot. I'm wondering if people are just so enamoured with this choice idea that they don't follow through on the laws that are coming out. Does that make sense?

Doug: Yeah. I think the debate about it - if it is even a debate, it's more like shouting back and forth - but it seems like it's been skewed by the left to be all about the woman's rights and it's her body, it's her choice, all those sorts of things. I think that by framing the debate in that way it's very easy to push forward that pro-choice idea and that everybody gets onboard with that. "Well whose choice is it? Is it the government's choice? Of course not. The government has to keep their hands off my body." Well yeah, of course, but if you don't frame it in that way and you say "This is a life here. Your rights obviously are an issue but it's also not even the rights but the responsibility. You have a life growing inside of you and you have a responsibility to that."

So I think by framing the debate in the way that it has been framed, it skews things in that direction where it's like, "Does the government have a right to tell you what to do with your body?" No, they don't.

Tiffany: I think that's where people stop thinking about it. They're so hung up on not being controlled and "This man can't tell me what to do with my body and my baby and my choice" and all that, they actually forget the whole fact that there is a life growing inside of you and you can debate until the cows come home about when life begins; does it begin at conception or does it begin when the baby first has a heartbeat or when their brain is fully formed or whatever. It's still a life or a potential life and there's still some value to that and people don't even consider that.

For myself, I would say that maybe at one time I was more pro-choice but that was more for other people. For myself I don't think I ever could have made the decision to have had an abortion. But I was more lenient when it came to other people, especially if it was done early enough in the pregnancy, like Elliot said before. I wouldn't even say it's a gray area because right now I would say no abortion ever, period.

Doug: For anyone under any circumstance?

Tiffany: Well I can't tell anybody what to do, but that is my feeling, yes. No abortion, even in the first trimester because people say, "Well it's not fully formed yet. It's just a clump of cells."

Doug: Yeah.

Tiffany: I just don't feel right about that at all.

Doug: You guys brought up the whole debate about where does life actually begin and at what point and I personally think that that's a relatively arbitrary distinction. There aren't significant differences at three weeks and three weeks and a day or whatever it was, 12 weeks and a day. There's no clear line where "If this is a life and before that it's just a clump of cells". That just doesn't make any sense to me. I think that really, you can't look at it any other way than to say that a life is beginning at conception.

Now that to me doesn't necessarily mean that abortion is out entirely but I think that you can't smooth over the whole thing by saying that it's not a life yet because that's just not the case. It is a life. At conception, it's a life. So we can say that there are circumstances in which it is okay to end a life. I think that that could be argued. I think there are a number of different situations where you could argue that yes, there are circumstances in which it is necessary or the best course of action to end a life. But I don't think we should sugar coat it by saying it's not a life yet because I think it is a life.

Tiffany: Yes. And there's great responsibility in accepting that you are carrying a life and that should be primary in most people's minds. "What is my responsibility?" I know it might be wishful thinking, but hoping that the vast majority of people on this earth realize the great responsibility that comes with not just being pregnant, but with sexual activity, maybe that's too much to ask for a lot of people, to feel that way, but it's something that should be taken very, very seriously and it's just not. It's treated as part of a throwaway culture. Not only do we throw away electronics when we're done using them, now we think it's okay to just throw away living beings, babies, innocent babies.

People make that argument, "How can you be pro-life but pro-capital punishment?" There is a big difference between an innocent baby and someone who is a serial killer and presents a great harm to society.

Erica: If you look through the various cases that have happened since Roe v. Wade in 1973, it's basically states battling for these rights and some states are much more liberal as far as what they allow. Obviously New York is one of those. I think that a big hot button issue, especially for women, is like you guys were saying, "US out of my uterus. It's my body." What I'm noticing in these cases is that it's always about the mother, the mother's wellbeing, the mother's mental health.

I have to say that my stance is really changing. For a long time I felt like the whole pro-life thing was a little out of bounds and kind of crazy. I'm changing my perspective on that after reading for this show because I see where they're coming from. Like you were saying, three months and a day or nine month. There is a big difference there and yes, but the bottom line is that this is a life and it is a responsibility and if you were concerned about getting pregnant in the first place you should have taken the actions to prevent that. What seems to be happening - and maybe we'll get into this with the Planned Parenthood thing is it's become a form of birth control.

Tiffany: So do we actually want to get into some of the things that the New York law actually says? Then perhaps we can play that clip.

Doug: Do you have that?

Tiffany: Let's see. Here we are.

Doug: Actually, Damian, can you pull it up?

Tiffany: Yeah.

Doug: The one that shows the actual law?

Tiffany: So it says that an abortion can be performed if the patient is within 24 weeks from the commencement of pregnancy or there is an absence of fetal viability or the abortion is necessary to protect the patient's life or health. But they don't specify specific health reasons. This is something that I was thinking about. I did see a tweet - and I cannot remember where I saw it or who it was from - from an OB-GYN and he said that there are actually not any maternal health issues that could prevent a woman from giving birth. I'm not sure if this is exactly true, but they never do actually list certain health conditions that would cause a woman to die. Women do die in childbirth but...

Doug: Yeah. There was that one incident in Ireland because Ireland recently legalized abortion. The pro-campaign was hinged on this woman who did die. It was some kind of sepsis thing or something like that. She had asked for an abortion and had been refused and ended up dying from it. I read the same tweet as you and this was a guy who said he'd performed over 2,000 births and said that he had never come across an issue where the woman's life was in danger.

Tiffany: Pregnant women go to great lengths to be able to carry a child to term or at least as long as they can. There's bed rest, there's all kinds of medications, monitoring. They sometimes check themselves into the hospital and be on strict bed rest there so they can have the baby or carry it for as long as possible or until it can survive outside of the womb. So I think that might be a bit of a stretch. So when they say to protect the patient or the mother's life or health, a lot of the time I think they're referring to her emotional wellbeing and that can be any number of things, whether having a baby can cause her emotional stress or financial stress or cause some kind of turbulence in her relationship or if she's not in a relationship, that'll cause her even more stress. So it's very vague as to what they mean by that.

Elliot: Yeah, you can define that in practically any way that you want to. If you're seeking to justify doing this based on the grounds of health but you're not specifying exactly what constitutes health then you could theoretically say anything. Anyone could make a good argument. Let's be honest, having a baby is going to cause problems in everyone's life. It's an inherently stressful thing. It completely turns people's lives upside down, not necessarily for the better at first. It's extraordinarily difficult from what I understand, although I'm not a parent myself. It's a major event. If you think of the sleepless nights, most parents could say that having a kid is pretty bad for their health, at least in the first couple of years. As you said, very vague.

Tiffany: So more about this law in New York. It's not just doctors who will be able to perform non-surgical abortions and by that they mean what they call medical abortions where they give a series of hormonal pills to induce an abortion. So nurse practitioners, physicians' assistants and midwives can do that. And then after the 12th week, any procedures have to be done in the hospital and after the 20th week a doctor has to be present to handle the care of any live birth because after the 20th week, there is a chance that the child can be born alive.

Another major thing about this New York law is that they removed from the criminal code - say for instance a woman is beaten or assaulted while she's pregnant and she loses the baby, the person who assaulted her cannot be held criminally liable for the death of the baby or the fetus. This was put in because they don't want the medical professionals who perform these abortions to be charged with murder.

Doug: Before it was once a baby is born then it has protections under the law. It's recognized as a person. If it is killed then it's murder. But because there is this chance that the abortion will actually be a living baby, it was previously illegal for them to then kill it. I think that now, if I'm not mistaken, it's no longer illegal for them to do that. So if they give the abortion medication and the baby comes out and it's still alive, they now have the right to actually kill that baby. {sighs}

Tiffany: Yes. So this is basically a law legalizing infanticide.

Doug: It's hard to look at it any other way.

Tiffany: Infanticide has happened throughout history for various reasons. You can talk about child sacrifice. You can talk about places like India where male babies are preferred over female babies and female babies are left to die. That doesn't mean that just because it happened through history that it is something that we should be doing.

So that's the law for New York and there's also pending legislation in Virginia. So people are not happy with this.

Doug: No.

Tiffany: Of course, and there have been protests. There was a march for life protest in Washington not too long ago. That's where that whole MAGA hat incident happened. They were actually going to the pro-life or anti-abortion rally in Washington, DC when all of that happened. So people don't care for it at all but the mainstream media doesn't really cover the huge numbers of people that are going to these rallies in protest of abortion.

Erica: I think it was 100,000 people that showed up for it. It was a big rally.

Doug: And some media were even reporting it as a thousand people. Being off by 100,000 to 1,000, a hundredfold difference there? Yeah, you've got to wonder. That doesn't sound like very honest reporting to me. That's not a mistake.

Virginia is even a more extreme case than the New York one, if you can believe it. So maybe we could play that clip of what's her name? The one who's proposing the bill.

Tiffany: Is it Tran?

Doug: Yeah. Her last name is Tran. Senator Tran? Congressman Tran? I'm not sure how American politics works. Can we play that Damian>

Video Clip

Interviewer: So how late in the third trimester would you be able to do that?

Tran: You know, it's very unfortunate that there are physicians - our witnesses were not able to attend today to speak specifically about...

Interviewer: No, I'm talking about your bill. How late in the third trimester could a physician perform an abortion if he indicated it would impair the mental health of the woman?

Tran: I think this was right after the bill passed.

Interviewer: Okay.

Tran: Okay.

Interviewer: I'm not talking about the mental health.

Tran: I mean, through the third trimester. The third trimester goes all the way up to 40 weeks.

Interviewer: To the end of the third trimester.

Tran: Yeah, I don't think we have the limits in the bill.

Tiffany: This is their reaction to it.

Interviewer: So where it's obvious that a woman is about to give birth, if she has physical signs that she is about to give birth, would that still be a point at which she could request an abortion if she was so certified? She's dilating.

Tran: Mr. Chairman, that would be, you know, a decision that the doctor, the physician and the woman ...

Interviewer: I understand that. I'm asking if your bill allows that.

Tran: My bill would allow that, yes.

*****

Doug: Okay. So we couldn't hear that but I think that played. That was basically it, allowing for right up until the end of the third trimester, which is the same as New York. But actually that one I don't think, talked about the possibility of after birth abortion. Now we do have another clip where it is the governor from Virginia where he's talking on a radio show about the possibility of after-birth abortion. Maybe we should play that one too, since we're on the topic of Virginia right now.

Video Clip

Interviewer: There are no exceptions. There was a very contentious committee hearing yesterday when Fairfax County delegate Kathy Tran made her case for lifting restrictions on third trimester abortions as well as other restrictions now in place and she was pressed by a republican delegate about whether her bill would permit an abortion even as a woman is essentially dilating, ready to give birth and she answered that it would permit an abortion at that stage of labour. Do you support her measure and explain her answer?

Governor: Yeah, I wasn't there Julie and I certainly can't speak for delegate Tran, but I will tell you - the first thing I would say is this is why decisions such as this should be made by providers, physicians and the mothers and fathers that are involved. There are - when we talk about third trimester abortions, these are done with the consent of obviously the mother, with the consent of the physicians - more than one physician by the way - and it's done in cases where there may be severe deformities. There may be a fetus that's non-viable.

So in this particular example, if a mother's in labour, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that's what the mother and the family desired. And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother. So I think this was really blown out of proportion, but again, we want the government not to be involved in these types of decisions. We want the decision to be made by the mothers and their providers and this is why Julie, the legislators, most of whom are men by the way, shouldn't be telling a woman what she should and shouldn't be doing with her body.

Interviewer: And do you think multiple physicians should have to weigh in as is currently required? She's trying to lift that requirement.

Governor: Well I think it's always good to get a second opinion and for at least two providers to be involved in that decision because these decisions shouldn't be taken lightly. So I would certainly support more than one provider.

Interviewer: Alright.

*****

Doug: Okay. So that's really something. The baby is delivered, resuscitated if necessary, taken into the next room and then a conversation will be had with the mother and the father or just the mother, whatever the case may be, discussing whether or not they should kill it. Jeez!

Tiffany: And he's also back again to that whole mention of 'telling women what to do with their bodies' argument.

Doug: Yeah, exactly. It's all about the rights of the mother. Nothing else is taken into consideration here. I just think that's a terrible way - of course the rights of the mother should be taken into account in this kind of discussion, but for that to be the only point on which anything is discussed, is just completely stacking the deck towards this kind of action.

Tiffany: I wonder if, like in that clip where the people were applauding the bill passing, did they really know what they were saying? Do they know that they're cheering for infanticide, killing babies? I don't know. I just don't understand how they could not know that and how is it that as a society we've come to this point?

Maybe this is a good time to talk about Planned Parenthood and it's evolution. Planned Parenthood started with Margaret Sanger. She's hailed as a proponent of women's rights and women's reproductive rights, a feminist leader in history. So I always like to try and find out - like these ideologues that come along, these spellbinders - how they can sway people to their point of view and influence an entire country or influence the entire world in some cases.

I just have a little bit about Margaret Sanger's background and how she got started and how Planned Parenthood got started. Margaret Sanger I think grew up in upstate New York or somewhere in the northeast. She grew up poor. She had an abusive, atheist, alcoholic father and her mother was frail and sickly and Catholic and her father was really, really against religion. I guess Margaret Sanger, as she grew up, had her family influences like everybody else does and she went to a school, I think she was going to go and try to become a teacher but she never went to class. She joined some feminist groups. She indulged in promiscuous sex and she ended up dropping out of school.

After that she somehow became a kindergarten teacher but she hated it and she tried going to nursing school. She did that for a little while but she quit. But often she would talk about how she had this nursing training and that she was a nurse. I guess she wanted to lend a little bit more credibility to herself. She was floundering around, really didn't have any direction. She ended up marrying for money. She had three children herself, two boys and a girl. I think later the girl had pneumonia and died.

But from what I could read, she wasn't very involved with her own children and her husband, Mr. Sanger at this point, started taking her to political lectures. She was pretty bored with that. She thought it was all bunk and she was criticizing all the people who went to these lectures until she came across somebody who was talking about subverting society and being rebellious and that was the thing that really drew her to her cause. She was all in at that point and she wanted to create some kind of utopia - and this always comes up with these types of people.

So she essentially became radicalized. She started hanging out with these atheists, anarchists, communists, Bolsheviks. She started hanging out with this radical feminist and free love proponent named Emma Goldman. Margaret Sanger herself would have her group of friends and she would start giving them lectures. What she wanted to talk about most of the time was the joys of sex and her talks were very licentious. She was talking about being free from sexual mores and she talked about birth control a lot and started writing for these militant magazines.

She eventually dumped her husband. She was having affairs and she was quite the tart from what I read. {laughter} She was eventually indicted for publishing lewd and indecent articles because she was talking about sex a lot and birth control and how awful marriage was and how people just needed to be free to love anybody they wanted. So she was indicted and she fled the country. I think she went to England to avoid prison.

While she was there she hooked up with some Malthusian eugenicists. They followed the works of Thomas Malthus and Malthus was a guy who was really into 'the world is too overpopulated and if there's many more people the world is not going to survive and we need to start culling the herd and get rid of certain defectives and the mentally feeble'. So he was a eugenicist and she was really into that whole message that he was giving out. She thought that since he presented his reasoning for eugenics that since he was more scientific in his argument, that would lend her some more credibility as well.

So she eventually came back to the US and she opened a back alley abortion clinic and it was in an immigrant area but it got shut down after two week and she got arrested and was sent to the work house. When she got out she founded a birth control league and had a magazine that went along with it. She wrote a book called The Pivot of Civilization and in this book she called for the elimination of human weeds, is what she called them. She wanted people to not perform charitable acts or give to charity. If people were in a bad way they should just be left to it and no one should help anybody.

Doug: Jeez.

Tiffany: She wanted to sterilize genetically inferior races that included black people because there's lots of chatter around that she was a racist and in fact she was but I think it's even greater than just being a racist. She did speak at this KKK rally and she said that they liked her speech so much that many other similar groups wanted her to come and talk. So what could she be saying to KKK people that they liked a lot? It had to be something about race and getting rid of one particular race.

So she started getting more popular. The money started coming in. She opened up more clinics in poor minority neighbourhoods. She did create a negro advisory council to distribute birth control to southern blacks but she wanted to make sure that nobody knew that there was some racist intent behind it.

So basically she just kept getting more money. The organization got bigger. Eventually the name became Planned Parenthood and that's where we are right now.

Erica: What a misnomer on the name, Planned Parenthood.

Tiffany: Yeah.

Doug: Yeah.

Tiffany: Like it's all about family and Margaret Sanger was not pro-family at all.

Doug: Well no. I don't imagine many people know the history of Planned Parenthood, that it comes from a racist eugenicist who basically wanted to sterilize minorities.

Tiffany: And anybody that she thought was feeble-minded or...

Doug: Human weeds.

Tiffany: But she was all for the more fit people having a lot of babies. But basically she wanted to encourage promiscuity. She wanted value-free sex education and she wanted to undermine parental authority. So if you look at Planned Parenthood, it pretty much encompasses her vision. If you look at Planned Parenthood sex education in schools, there's all these parents who were up in arms because it's basically pornographic and they're teaching children about sex in kindergarten and different sexual acts and masturbation. It is just disgusting.

Erica: It's interesting that on that note, last year in New York parents are upset after high school brings in Planned Parenthood to teach students about abortion and sex without permission. I have some experience with Planned Parenthood. In Hawaii it's popular and yes they do give out condoms. But the one thing that was so disturbing that I found out is that a 14-year-old girl can go to Planned Parenthood and receive contraception, whether that be condoms or the pill or even the depo shot without parental consent.

I feel like that is wrong on so many levels. This goes into the whole education thing. I think that it should be talked about and parents need to really deal with that in a lot of ways, but 14? You can't even drive!

Tiffany: That is undermining parental authority. I remember when I was in elementary school, in the 5th grade we had sex education and we talked about what is sex and I remember that we spent a lot of time talking about pregnancy and how the baby developed in the womb and I wonder if they even teach that anymore because I remember there was a movie that we watched - I think it was shown on PBS or something - called The Miracle of Life. That might not have been the title but they actually showed video footage of the child as it developed in the womb.

Doug: I remember that.

Tiffany: Yeah.

Doug: And the birth.

Tiffany: Do they even do that now? Do these girls know that there's actually a life growing in them or have they just fallen for the whole 'it's just a clump of cells' lie?

Erica: Well back to this case in New York, they went after this superintendent and he said he was under the impression that the parents were given the opportunity to opt out and it sounds like the classes were intentionally kept from the parents.

Tiffany: So that's where we are.

Doug: There was that one article that we had called The Abortion Agenda on CoreysDigs.com. Maybe you can pull that one up Damian. I'm not going to go too much into it, but it really gets into the push for abortion and opening abortion clinics around the world, particularly in third world countries. What did it talk about? The connection to the Clinton Foundation and all this other big money that's involved in it and they're getting nurses and midwives trained in abortion and it's like this weird kind of push to export these more liberal values around the world. It kind of does have this weird eugenics side to it, that they're trying to get it into all the 'brown people countries'.

That's kind of the way it comes across, that they want to have these countries fully set up and encouraging abortions. In the article they're going into their own literature where they're bragging about the fact that for every one adoption there's 82 abortions, what they have worldwide. Why would you value abortion so much more than adoption in those situations? That's just one thing that I don't understand. Why are they placing more value on an abortion than on an adoption? In both cases, isn't it the case where the person who doesn't want the baby, isn't going to have the baby, but in the case of adoption somebody who does want the baby is going to get the baby? Doesn't that seem like a better turn of events there?

Tiffany: Yeah.

Doug: I understand there might be some situations where that's not an option. Okay, fine. So you can't argue across the board that adoption is always a better option or even an option. It might not be an option in some circumstances. But to be placing more value on an abortion over an adoption across the board just doesn't make any sense to me. Why is that a better situation?

Tiffany: Who benefits from it? There's a monetary aspect because Planned Parenthood does get funding from the government and abortions do cost, but in a lot of cases, if you're under a certain income level it can be free or Medicaid might pay for it. I think abortions cost between $4,000 and $1,200 or something like that. So there's that aspect. But it seems like it's much more than that, like somebody is going to be benefiting from the fact that there are babies that can be killed.

Elliot: Well! Interestingly, if I remember correctly, Planned Parenthood has been investigated a couple of times for organ harvesting, no?

Doug: Yeah.

Elliot: So for those who don't know, that involved trafficking organs on the black market, essentially selling body parts for various purposes and that goes on. Organ harvesting or trafficking is more common in places like war-torn areas. It goes on a lot there, places where there's lots of orphans. In India apparently there's a lot of organ harvesting. Apparently this is what Planned Parenthood has been up to.

Tiffany: They were caught on tape a couple of times and as far as I know, there were no sanctions against them, nobody was arrested, there was no legal action against them. But there was legal action against the people who filmed them.

Doug: Yeah.

Tiffany: So they were caught on tape actually talking about how - I guess it was the people that were filming them disguised themselves as...

Erica: Potential buyers.

Tiffany: ...potential buyers of these organs and they were talking to the medical director of a certain Planned Parenthood affiliate or organization about how they could get more organs that were intact. Livers were very popular, hearts. Sometimes they wanted just some muscle tissue and the lady was saying, "Oh yeah, muscle tissue is easy. You can just take that off."

Doug: Well why don't we actually play the clip?

Tiffany: Yeah, play the clip.

Doug: Can you play that one Damian?

Video clip

Deborah Nucatola: Federal abortion ban is a law and laws are up to interpretation. So if I say on day one I do not intend to do that, what ultimately happens doesn't matter.

Undercover: So yesterday was a clinic day. For example, what did you procure?

Deborah Nucatola: You know, I asked her at the beginning of the day what she's wanted, yesterday she wanted, she's been asking, a lot of people want intact hearts these days, looking for specific nodes. AV Nodes, SA, I was like wow! I didn't even know. Good for them. Yesterday was the first time she said people wanted lungs. And then, like I said, always as many intact livers as possible. People just want...

Undercover: Yeah. Livers.

Deborah Nucatola: Some people want lower extremities too which, that's simple. I mean that's easy. I don't know what they're doing with it. I guess they want muscle.

Undercover: Yeah, a dime a dozen.

Deborah Nucatola: If you maintain enough of a dialogue with the person who's actually doing the procedure, so they understand what the end-game is, there are little things, changes they can make in their technique to increase your success.

Undercover: Even though they have a set way that they do it, they're open to changing that.

Deborah Nucatola: Reasonable, if they're reasonable people, sure. For example, so I had 8 cases yesterday. And I knew exactly what we needed, and I kinda looked at the list and said okay, this 17-weeker has 8 lams and this one - so I knew which were the cases that were probably more likely to yield what we needed, and I made my decisions according to that too, so it's worth having a huddle at the beginning of the day and that's what I do.

*****

Erica: That is so disturbing.

Doug: Yeah, quite disturbing.

Tiffany: She mentioned having a huddle at the beginning of the day. That's something that happens in medical facilities a lot, where they get together and they talk about the patients that they have and what needs to be done and the way she just so flippantly said that they have a huddle to decide which baby parts they're going to harvest is just so cold and so chilling! What kind of woman is this?

Doug: I wonder what kind of ethical implications there are to changing their technique depending on what organs they want to be able to get. Changing the way that they're actually doing the procedure? I don't know enough about it to be able to say one way or the other, but I wonder if that does bring up some kind of ethical considerations. You've got to assume that there's going to be the right way to do it and the wrong way to do it and if you go off and start doing it a little bit wrong because it makes it more likely that this organ will be intact, I don't know.

Tiffany: I don't know if there is a right way or a wrong way to do abortions because how they do it is they have the woman on the table and they put the speculum in to open up the vagina and then some other tool they insert into the cervix and they have this seaweed kind of stuff that they insert into the cervix to dilate it, open it up, so it's easier to put the tools in or put in the vacuum sucker that will suck out the baby. So depending on the age of the baby, that can be either easy or more difficult. So what this woman's talking about, they can change how they actually go in with the tools and pull out certain body parts. It's so disgusting.

Erica: And I doubt that they're telling the client on the table that that is their intention.

Doug: No.

Erica: The doctor doesn't say, "By the way, your child is going to be used for - or this aborted fetus is going to be used for medical applications later".

Doug: They use them in things like skin creams and stuff like that, don't they? Or is that not true.

Tiffany: Yeah. Vaccines, skin creams. I think there are what they call penis facials.

Doug: Oh, yeah.

Tiffany: They use the circumcised foreskin from male babies' penises. So yeah, baby body parts are used. I can't even believe that we're talking about it. This is so really very difficult to talk about and I'm just really disgusted right now. Just thinking about this, the thing that gets me about abortion - I've never been pregnant myself - but I've imagined being pregnant and what that would be like and I'm sure it's different than actually being pregnant, so imaging a pregnant woman who knows that she's pregnant, she has a life growing inside of her, she talks to the baby, she sings to the baby, she imagines what kind of life the baby will have, whether it'll be a boy or a girl, pick out names, decorate the baby's room, have baby showers. They develop love for the baby before the baby is even born. And to just snuff that life out, what kind of woman does that? Who can be so cold as to do that sort of thing? Maybe there are people who really don't know the extent of what they're doing.

Doug: I'm totally imagining because obviously I don't know, but I would say in most situations where a woman would choose to have an abortion, the baby is completely unwanted and is looked at as an inconvenience or a burden in some way. I don't imagine there's any kind of connection there, that they haven't had any emotional connection. Maybe it's just a really cold person who doesn't have that kind of capability or maybe they're doing it early enough that they don't form that bond. Or maybe in whatever situation they're in, the fear just takes over and they can't actually see any other way out of it.

I would imagine, to be able to go through with that sort of procedure, one would either have to be incredibly cold and unfeeling or they would just have to be so overwhelmed and desperate that they would make that kind of decision. It can't be, for a normal, functioning emotional individual, it can't be a decision that's taken lightly. At least I can't imagine that it would be. I would think that it would have to be a situation where the person is just so desperate and so at the end of their rope that they would do something like that, or completely cold and clinical and like, "No, this is an inconvenience. I don't want to deal with this."

Tiffany: Or in such a state of denial they can't even really think about anything more than what they feel that they need to do at that point.

Erica: Well I can speak about it because I've been pregnant twice and both of my pregnancies were unplanned and I was young and not married. It's interesting - and this is just my own personal experience - but again, I grew up in a very liberal environment in California and my mother was pro-choice, avidly. Again, it's a woman's right to choose and if you have an unwanted pregnancy you can choose that. When I became pregnant, oh the story changed. She was like, "I'll pay for the abortion. Here's the money." It was a temptation for sure. I was 20 years old. We went through the whole discussion and it was emotional and this topic is very emotional. I went to Planned Parenthood. I didn't get the abortion, obviously. But it's very nonchalant. I don't even think that they offered counseling after the fact and I walked out of there.

Of course you know, if you go to a clinic there are people outside protesting a lot of the time. So it becomes morally questionable and very emotional. I had no financial support at all but for me, I could not go through with that. I felt like it was not something that I could do. And then I got pregnant again two years later {laughing} and the same thing happened. And of course, back to that idea of rights versus responsibility. Sure I could have gone and had the abortion the second time. Well now I already had a child and so any woman that has carried a child, like Tiffany was saying, and had that feeling inside of you and maybe has two or three and then they don't want a fourth, I can't even wrap my mind around it, again, because I've never gone through the procedure.

But it was so willy nilly, "Well come back tomorrow and we can do this procedure for you. You can move on with your life." I will say I know many women who have had abortions and who have emotionally never been the same. Later in their lives when they're ready and they're married and want to have children, they cannot because they have been mutilated from the procedure. So it's a slippery slope.

Tiffany: And there have been lots of young girls - I know one girl when I was in college, her mother actually forced her to get an abortion. I know that that happens and that's sad. So it's not the case that all women who have abortions are unfeeling psychopaths. But it's a difficult thing.

Erica: And I don't think if they outlaw it completely that it will not continue to happen. Doing the reading for this show, if a woman really does not want to have a baby, she can find a way to abort that baby whether it's legal or not. That's just the bottom line.

Tiffany: Yeah.

Erica: So I don't want to come across as this heavy pro-life, it's all wrong in all instances. There's always circumstances.

Doug: Yeah.

Tiffany: Yeah, and the fact that there are always circumstances, yes that can be a reason to keep abortion legal, but that doesn't mean that we have to go to the other extreme where we are applauding infanticide either.

Doug: Exactly, yeah.

Tiffany: That's what has happened.

Doug: Yeah. That's the thing. I have to wonder about the origins of Planned Parenthood. It's actually still those same values that are put forward. Like that whole thing you brought up about the mutilation that can happen when an abortion happens and it actually sterilizes some of these women, maybe this is too Alex Jones or something like that, but honestly, seeing the organizations and how they're working around the world and everything like that, where's my tinfoil hat?

Tiffany: Yeah. It's not a completely safe procedure. There are certainly risks. There's the risk of death. There's the risk of infection. There's tools and scraping and sucking involved, hemorrhaging. It's not just an in and out, easy procedure like getting stitches or something.

Erica: It's interesting too, if you do a cursory search as I did on the web about the history of this topic, some of the quotes are that pregnancy is far more dangerous than abortion. It is true. It's been said that when you choose to have a baby it's the closest a woman will ever choose to death because everything can go wrong. You can have hemorrhaging, you can die during childbirth. There's all these things. But I think that by saying that it's kind of like throwing the discussion out the window. "Oh well, I have a safer chance of surviving if I abort this child, especially if I don't want it."

Doug: But what are the statistics there? How likely are you to die in childbirth these days?

Tiffany: Yeah.

Doug: Does that still happen often? Certainly in western countries I can't imagine that that happens very often these days.

Erica: And with the whole advent of Caesarean sections there is the possibility. I had a friend that had a baby. The baby was six months. It was not even full term. It was born three pounds and it survived. So there are medical interventions that can help. Again, I don't know. I'm with Tiffany. It's a very hotly debated topic and I just think that if people are out there saying "Women's rights. We have a right to choose", they need to do their research and really check in with what they're supporting because I think it's easy to say that "I am this way" until you are in that situation.

Tiffany: Yeah. So do we want to go to the last, worst aspect of this?

Doug: Yeah.

Tiffany: Okay.

Doug: Let's do it.

Tiffany: This isn't the only article or journal article that's been written on this topic. There have been others. But this one I just happened on because a friend posted it on Facebook. It was written by two Italian philosophers - and I use that in quotes - and it was called After Birth Abortion - Why Should the Baby Live. In this article, I think it was in the British Journal of Medical Ethics, they're actually making an argument for infanticide, killing the baby after it is born. So this is not the third trimester on the delivery table, decide to kill the baby. This is after the baby is born and viable.

It has to be read in its entirety to fully realize the absolute horror of this, but they go through all of these arguments. They consider a person to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some basic value so that if they are deprived of that existence it is a loss to the person. So they're saying that the baby cannot attribute any value to itself. The only value that is attributed to a baby is given to it by the mother or the parents or the family. So the baby cannot attribute any kind of aim or value to its own life because they're not mentally capable of doing so at that point, thereby it is okay for them to be killed after birth.

Doug: Yeah. Honestly, reading this article, I thought these guys - a man and a woman I think - I was like, these people are psychopaths.

Tiffany: Yeah.

Doug: Honestly, the reasoning in this, reading through it, I thought it was so cold and so twisted. The way that they twist logic to get the idea that killing babies is okay. They even say, "We're not the ones who would decide at what age it's too late to have an afterbirth abortion". So they're leaving that open, but from their definition of being able to formulate an aim is what makes you a person, from that perspective, that's probably up until two years old or something like that, I would think. I don't know. Maybe they would define it more stringently than that, but I thought this is like eugenics but it's defining everything that isn't able to make an aim is not a person, therefore you can kill it.

Tiffany: And they go on to say that the interests of the actual people involved - meaning the mother or the parents - outweigh any rights that the newborn would have. And then - oh god! - toward the end of the article they talk about afterbirth abortion versus adoption and they argue that afterbirth killing of the baby - and actually use the word killing frequently in this article - they say that it's acceptable over adoption because birth mothers experience grief when they give their babies up because sometimes they might dream that their baby might come back to them whereas if you kill the baby, there's no possibility that the baby can ever come back to you.

Doug: God!!

Tiffany: So that makes it more acceptable for you to be able to kill your baby.

Doug: That's psychotic!

Tiffany: Yeah! And they said that they don't put any claims forth about the moment at which afterbirth abortion would no longer be permissible. So I think they said something about going a few days after being born, but again, they don't say that this is the definite cut off point. So how long will it be? Can you kill the baby after a week? A month? A year? And it would still be okay?

Doug: What about if your teenager isn't really working out? Can you just bump them off?

Tiffany: What if your child has Down's syndrome or can't actually formulate any aims for its own life?

Elliot: Well based on their logic, you would be justified to execute that child. That's essentially what they're pushing for. Reading it, the way that they're justifying this is they're basically saying, "Okay, if you're going to abort the child it's no different if it's in the mother's womb or it's out of the mother's womb." Whilst I agree with that logic, I think it makes perfect sense, that there's not really much difference.

But I go the opposite way and say that's murder. That's killing the baby. But what they're saying is, because we allow women to go through abortions, say at 12 weeks, what's the difference between actually doing it when it's outside of the mother's womb? That's where they're coming from. I honestly don't know how it's acceptable that these two morally reprehensible individuals have a career in academia and are allowed to publish their drivel! Their pure and utter shite, if you don't mind me saying! It's absolutely disgusting that the British Medical Journal would even publish this!

I actually took a look at some of the authors. They're quite young actually. The one author looks really quite young, maybe in his 30s. The second one is a self-proclaimed feminist and that doesn't surprise me whatsoever because looking at the roots of Planned Parenthood, the anti-human ideology, the anti-humanness of this whole stance is quite astonishing to see. But that's generally what these people would like to see. That's the kind of reality that these people would like to see. And they are insane. They are absolutely insane.

Tiffany: And this is utopia for them, which I do not understand, how anybody could think that this would be a nice world to live in where these sorts of things can happen.

Doug: You know it's funny. The conservatives always talked about the slippery slope on abortion or on any issue really, but they talk about the slippery slope in regards to abortion; if you allow it up to this amount of time then it's going to go further, then it's going to go further and then it's going to go further. They would get ridiculed for that idea, "Well how can it go any further?" But it did! The fact that you've got New York passing it - third trimester abortions - you've got an academic paper coming out talking about afterbirth abortions. Honestly, the slope is gone at this point.

Tiffany: Yeah. I don't know. I think what these types that embrace these types of ideologies, it's like they cannot put any value on anything. Nothing has any value. It's like moral relativism. There's nothing that is better than anything else, nothing that is worse than anything else. Everything is just level. They can't weight their decisions in one way or the other, either everything is acceptable or nothing is acceptable. I still can't quite understand how their minds work, but it's just so bizarre to see and I'm not quite sure that these type of things shouldn't be published because if they are published then at least you know what kind of person you're dealing with and what kind of ideology you're dealing with and you can make a decision for yourself. So to keep that sort of thing in the dark, I don't necessarily think is the best idea but for god's sakes please have the discernment to know that it is pure bullshit!

Doug: Well actually on a happier note, at the top of that article they've got a thing where you can click on all the tweets that have gone, the number of times it's been tweeted and I scanned through it. There's close to 3,000 tweets on it and I just scanned through some of them and I didn't see a single one that was neutral or positive. Every tweet was "What the hell is this?!" Or "Look at these sick bastards!" or something like that. It was all just completely trashing it. So that's positive in some respect I guess, that at least it looks like people aren't so far gone out there that they can recognize something pathological when they see it.

Erica: And maybe it's just a test to see that Doug?

Doug: It could be. It could be.

Erica: Let's put this out there and see what kind of response we get. If it's 50/50 maybe we can move forward with this idea. I don't know.

Doug: Well the paper was published in what? It was a while ago wasn't it?

Tiffany: I think it was 2013.

Doug: Okay, so not that long ago.

Tiffany: Yeah.

Doug: And then what is it? Six years later out comes New York. When's the post-birth abortion bill going to come forward? We're looking at you Virginia.

Elliot: What they do is they slowly feed it into the public eye, don't they? I think to some extent, all of these developments evoke a negative reaction somewhat in the beginning but as generations, especially with the younger generations, like for instance you're talking about Planned Parenthood sex education in schools, the moral relativism, teaching kids that there's nothing that has any intrinsic value and that everything is subjective and whatnot and all of this kind of stuff, this stuff is drip fed into the public and eventually the more traditional or conservative values are going to be drowned out. It's gradually becoming more and more accepted.

Doug: Yeah.

Elliot: It doesn't matter. Any attention is better than no attention. That's what it kind of seems like because even though people react and they say "This is crazy", they still push forward with it! And it still manages - I don't even understand how they keep going with it because no one would accept that, where we are now. But in 10 years time, maybe people will accept it.

Doug: Yeah. I bet it won't even take that long. It's like the concept of the Overton window where 'everything within here is what's allowed to be talked about' which actually gets seriously considered. What they do is they start pushing that window further and further along. So stuff that was previously outside the window suddenly starts to become acceptable. And they just keep on incrementally doing that process until stuff that was so far out 10 years ago that nobody would even consider is now something that's within the norm. First it's fringe, but even when it's fringe that's already acceptable to a certain extent and then it gets further and pretty soon it's mainstream.

Tiffany: I think that's why they target young people because they have no sense of history. They haven't had enough life experiences yet to be able to discern what is truly bad from what is just "oh that's just the way the world is". So do we have anything else?

Erica: I do have one thing because this is going to continue to be an issue, for sure. For parents that have young children, I think it is their responsibility, if they want their children to know, to talk about things like sex, as crazy as that sounds.

Doug: Insane.

Erica: If you leave that discussion untalked about, Planned Parenthood's going to step in and fill in the gaps for you.

Tiffany: Yup.

Erica: I don't know what else to say other than that with the media, the children and young teenagers are exposed to, it's all about sex. You've got to have the discussion. It has to be talked about. A lot of parents aren't comfortable with that.

Tiffany: And it has to be talked about repeatedly! Not just one time and you think that they get it. At a young age you could start with a certain level of talk and then as the child gets older, you have to refine the talk to their level of understanding.

Doug: Yeah.

Erica: I know particularly in the pro-life communities, they really don't want to have that discussion with their children and they definitely don't want schools teaching their children, but you've got to push past that because with the age of consent being 14 or 16, depending on which state in the United States you're in, if that child can't feel like they can come to you then they can go have that service done without your consent.

Tiffany: I know that parents want their children to remain innocent and not be corrupted, but at the same time, you don't want them to be stupid fools that can be easily taken in.

Doug: Yeah. That's totally true. It's funny because when we had sex ed when I was a kid in grade 4, the one girl whose parents actually refused - she wasn't allowed to take sex ed because the parents had to give permission for it - she was the one who was pregnant once we were in high school. It kind of drove home that point. You need to educate your kids on this stuff. You really do.

Tiffany: Yeah.

Erica: And I don't even know if it's really taught in school curriculum anymore. It may be one of those things that gets cut out, but even health class or biology in high school, I don't even know. It's so crazy.

Tiffany: Anything else anyone wants to touch on?

Doug: I think we've covered it pretty well.

Tiffany: Well I just want to say that I'm glad that it's over. {laughter} This has probably been the most difficult show that we've done in a while. So next week we have to do something lighter. Let's not talk about euthanasia for our next show!

Erica: I'm with Tiffany. I do think though it needs to come out. I think people need to know. I think people need to do more research instead of just hopping on a bandwagon and fighting for something that they may not have any idea of the implications of later on down the line.

Doug: Yeah, I agree.

Tiffany: So I guess that is our show for today. We will see you next week with another show, topic as yet to be determined. So everyone have a good week and do your own research.

Erica: Knowledge protects.

Doug: Bye everybody.