The Rude Pundit gets it, dear conservatives. Lady parts are mysterious and difficult to sort out. Sometimes they're all up inside there and sometimes there are bits that are just hanging out there in the breeze. What the fuck is up with that, right? And as for what works for what things, which flaps and buttons are useable in sexual situations, where the hell the babies and pee come from, well, shit, there should probably be a freakin' guidebook. Besides, have you actually touched lady parts? They're all squishy and, if touched right, slick, like a hairless cat in the rain. Since we're supposed to fear that which we don't comprehend, of course you're gonna do everything you can to make sure that women can't enjoy their parts as much as men enjoy theirs. Of course you're gonna punish women for having parts that you don't understand. Of course, conservative women, you fear the pleasure in your parts or want to please your conservative men by punishing the poors so, hey, it's all good.
But listen: you don't have to. You don't have to keep making life a misery for women who haven't received the just rewards of capitalism. You don't have to get all ACORN on Planned Parenthood, whose only sin, it seems, is following the laws that you don't like.
You know what else is icky? Disembodied baby parts. Baby organs. Sliced up baby tissue. It's fucking gross, grosser even than a vagina. But so are all cut up human bodies. So when you see the latest video from fake organization Center for Medical Progress with its fake representative from a fake fetal tissue procurement firm, Biomax, looking at pieces of aborted fetuses from Planned Parenthood clinics, of course it's gonna be gross. The fake fucks who made it want you to be grossed out. They rejoice at how appalled you are. Medical science is not for the weak-stomached.
You ought to know, though, that everything Planned Parenthood has done is legal. In fact, it's so fucking legal that a recently released document from Planned Parenthood shows that it changed language in the agreement with "Biomax" so that it would specifically comply with federal law. In fact, Planned Parenthood wanted to make very, very clear that it was not going to profit from the sale of fetal tissue: "The lawyers wrote that Biomax would cover only the cost of 'transportation, processing, preservation and storage' of the samples." That's a little more complicated than "Holy shitballs, those are baby parts." The statutes say you can make back your shipping and handling on the tissue. If you don't like the law, change it. But don't condemn people for following it to the letter.
You ought to know that we've been down this road before. Yeah, back in 2000, ABC's 20/20 ran a piece about a company in Kansas that sold fetal body parts to researchers. The anti-choice media was gleeful about it, and the man at the center of it, Miles Jones, was investigated by the FBI for eight years until they cleared him of any charges. Jones didn't violate a single law. So back to the drawing board for the anti-choice forces.
You ought to know, also, that this gets back to other debates, like research using fetal stem cells. Charging money for baby parts, even to cover expenses, is hard to comprehend for many people. Using baby parts to try to cure illnesses and genetic conditions seems like a pretty fucking noble pursuit to most of us. That context is left out of most of the hollering about baby brain markets or whatever. According to one doctor working to cure eye diseases, "Eye tissue from fetuses has played a crucial role in studies aimed at finding treatments for degenerative diseases of the retina that are a major cause of vision loss in people as they age." The same goes for things like muscular dystrophy.
You ought to know that fetal tissue is only harvested (yes, terrible word, but there it is) with permission from the woman who had the abortion. But that turns women getting abortions from tormented, depressed victims to beings with agency to make decisions about their bodies, women who understand their lady parts and know what they want to do with them, the very thing that the enemies of Planned Parenthood want to crush.
Finally, you ought to know that, if you defund Planned Parenthood, if you get rid of it, you will ensure there are more abortions, more teen pregnancies, and more suffering women, especially poor women, poor pregnant women who want to have healthy babies and who won't have access to the prenatal care that Planned Parenthood provides.Yeah, they help women give birth, too. The words "planned" and "parenthood" don't just mean "abortion." In fact, they barely mean that.
You won't know any of this because the voices yelling loudest, like the desperate madman Rand Paul, trying to get some heat for his dying presidential campaign, don't want you to know or understand. They want to you to rise up, like the internet mob you are so easily whipped into joining, and blindly destroy that which they tell you to destroy, not even realizing that what you are destroying are not just lady parts, but the women who own them.
(Since we live in an era with irony illiteracy, the Rude Pundit would like to state that he loves vaginas in all their forms, from dainty closed rosebuds to full-bloom sunflowers.)
