Earlier this month, Senator Elizabeth Warren asked her fellow United States senators, “Do you have any idea what year it is?” just before their vote on a bill to defund Planned Parenthood. Luckily, the bill didn’t pass, but it was yet another swipe at the women’s reproductive health service. Now Funny or Die is addressing these attacks in a new response video.
A little background: the most recent attacks on Planned Parenthood are thanks to a heavily edited video which surfaced this July. In it, Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood’s senior director of medical research, explains the clinic’s procedures to have fetal tissue donated. She believed she was speaking privately with a medical company. However, it was actually a group called Center for Medical Progress who secretly filmed the so-called “sting” video and distributed it to conservative blogs.
The Daily Caller took Nucatola’s comment on fetal tissue donation to mean that Planned Parenthood “[sells] the body parts of aborted babies, in some cases using an illegal partial-birth abortion procedure.” This characterization is false; the reality is that federal law has allowed Planned Parenthood to donate fetal tissue to medical research with a patient’s permission for decades.
Conservatives predictably went bananas. Although false, the allegations still led to a congressional clusterfuck with funding for Planned Parenthood — which provides numerous cancer screening and family planning services — in the bull’s eye. A defunding bill did not pass the Senate, but will still be voted on in the House.
Okay, so it’s not the cheeriest of topics. Alas, the out-of-touch nature of conservatives’ stance on the service has reached the level of parody. That’s why it was so easy for Funny or Die to skewer these vilification attempts. In “The Shocking Truth About Planned Parenthood” we’re hit with harsh truths like, “Planned Parenthood is relentless in screening for breast and cervical cancer” and “Planned Parenthood overwhelmed me with the ability to make my own choices.”
Prepare to be shocked. Prepare to be awed.
Knowing there’s a resource to make sure your health needs are met is a daily struggle. Stay strong out there, ladies.
Screengrab via Funny or Die