In a media dominated by thinly veiled propagandists for Democrats and left-wing causes posing as impartial journalists, some conservatives used to say that Jake Tapper, former ABC News correspondent now with CNN, was one of the rare objective reporters not pushing an ideological agenda. If that was ever true, it sure isn’t anymore, judging by his interview this weekend with radical pro-abortion Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).
He started with a respectable question about the Center for Medical Progress undercover videos into Planned Parenthood’s —“Is there nothing on the videotapes that you saw that bothers you at all?” Warren answered (if you can call it that):
Look, let’s remember what we were debating on the floor of the United States Senate, and that was defunding Planned Parenthood. 2.7 million people get their healthcare from Planned Parenthood every year. One in every 5 women in America, sometime in her life, will get her healthcare from Planned Parenthood.
False—according to Planned Parenthood’s own material, the actual statistic merely claims that one in five women has entered a Planned Parenthood. And the last time FactCheck.org asked Planned Parenthood for the source of that statistic, they didn’t get an answer. Even assuming Tapper didn’t do adequate interview preparation and didn’t know any of that, Warren’s own “sometime in her life” qualifier should have been a signal that women weren’t nearly as dependent on Planned Parenthood as Warren made it sound:
Planned Parenthood, what does it mostly do? 97% of what Planned Parenthood does is about cancer screenings, screenings for STDs, about birth control.
We’ve known “abortion is only 3%!” was a lie for a long time, but don’t take it from an anti-choicer like me. Take it from pro-abortion Slate senior editor Rachael Larimore, who calls it the “most meaningless abortion statistic ever” both because “Planned Parenthood ‘unbundles’ all of its services” in its reporting “so that a pack of pills, an STD test and an exam are three separate services,” and because “Planned Parenthood gets at least a third of its clinic income—and more than 10 percent of all its revenue, government funding included—from its abortion procedures.”
It’s also worth noting that the number of breast exams and pap tests Planned Parenthood does a year have been going down while its abortions have been going up, and according to the methodology it uses to get the 3% number in its annual report, prenatal services and adoption referrals are even less of their business—0.2% and 0.02%. (Oh, and zero mammograms.)
Planned Parenthood is in – more than half of all the Planned Parenthood clinics are in places where there is limited access to healthcare.
The flip side is that Planned Parenthood is nowhere to be found in areas where a far greater number of real health centers dwarf them.
So for many people, for many women, is their only healthcare provider, sometimes their principal healthcare provider—And the Republicans say the first issue that we’ve got to discuss, the number one thing, everything else can go forward on the budget or we can cut, everything else, the first thing we’ve to do is defund Planned Parenthood. That means defunding healthcare for women.
Funny, then why did the Planned Parenthood defunding bill Warren voted against specify that “All funds no longer available to Planned Parenthood will continue to be made available to other eligible entities to provide women’s health care services” and that “Nothing in this Act shall be construed to […] reduce overall Federal funding available in support of women’s health”? Why did Warren’s pals at Planned Parenthood launch into the same women’s health hysterics in July over the prospect of sending the same amount of money to breast cancer research, simply through organizations not associated with Planned Parenthood? It’s almost as if “women’s health” is a pretext rather than an actual concern…
And make no mistake: what this is really about is women’s access to abortion. And even though not one federal dollar goes to pay for abortions through Planned Parenthood, the Republicans want to find one more way to make it harder, to make it impossible, for a woman who is facing one of the most difficult decisions of her life, they want to find a way to make it harder on her to get the healthcare she needs.
Warren’s fans are constantly telling us she’s a genius (Jezebel’s Marie Lodi: “it’s a shame she’s not running for president”), so particularly with her interest in fiscal issues, surely the concept of fungible assets—tax money Planned Parenthood gets for other services freeing up more of their private revenue to spend on abortions—isn’t beyond her grasp. As Susan B. Anthony List points out, from 2000 to 2013 federal Planned Parenthood funding increased by more than $326 million while their annual abortions rose by 130,583 — a 66% increase.
And all I can say is, we’ve been in that world before. When I talk about 1955, I’m talking about a world when women died. I’m talking about a world when women committed suicide rather than go forward with a pregnancy they could not handle. And what the Republicans are saying is that they want to go back. And I want to make sure we are not going back. Not now, not ever.
Actually, she’s talking about a world created by pro-abortion revisionism. Here in the real world, the drop in abortion-related deaths preceded legalization, and was instead due to medical advancements. Here in the real world, the vast majority of pre-Roe abortions took place not in back alleys but in clinics, and were performed by licensed physicians.
Click image for full size. Hat tip to Jill Stanek.
As usual, Warren completely ignored any need to explain why abortion is not an act of violence that warrants defunding and prohibition. But more strikingly, she didn’t come even close to answering Tapper’s original question, either. She didn’t discuss whether it was horrendous to see people stopping and restarting a helpless child’s heart for entertainment, joking about receiving severed heads in the mail, or acknowledging their next victim was “another boy!” She didn’t discuss the numerous federal and state laws Planned Parenthood has very likely broken.
Surely, no self-respecting interviewer would let a politician get away with blatantly dodging his question, would he? Tapper—who earlier in the interview tried multiple times to get Warren to say which Democrat she supported for president—must have at least followed up, right?
Nope. Instead, he cracked a joke about the applause her monologue received: “It’s too bad they’re not doing a straw poll here.” Warren responded with some smack talk about how Republicans running against Planned Parenthood are “gonna have a real fight on their hands.” Tapper then moved on to a question about financial reform. Pathetic.
Last week we talked about how pro-abortion politicians like Nancy Pelosi’s evasive bravado is a paper tiger that would collapse if only someone would give them a challenging question once in their lives. Warren, from rabidly left-wing Massachusetts, is no different. But she gets away with it because even the respectable journalists like Jake Tapper choose not to ask them.
Because in the world of the mainstream media, the job isn’t actually journalism—it’s protecting favored partisans from the truth.
