One of the main reasons I don't write much about my private body business is that it ISN"T anybody else's business besides me and my doctor. I will say that I have been to Planned Parenthood in my life for birth control and health screening. I couldn't afford a doctor at that point and it was pretty great to be able to do the aforesaid at an inexpensive price. I've wondered WHY Republicans are so vitriolic and concerned with women's private health care and don't treat women as adults. 

About those videos on fetal tissue-NY Times.

have you ever heard an apology from a crisis pregnancy center formasquerading as an abortion clinic? What about the women in Texas who lost access to gynecological care when the state defunded Planned Parenthood and did not, as promised,adequately replace its services? Has anyone said sorry about that?

Logically, it’s not important how doctors talk at supposedly private meetings. If they were heart surgeons I doubt it would be an issue. But these are abortion providers, and that makes all the difference. So far, the surreptitiously filmed videos, five of which have now been released, do not, as claimed, show that Planned Parenthood sells fetal tissue for profit, which is against the law.

But the videos do cleverly evoke visceral feelings of disgust — graphic images, physicians using the words “crush” and “crunchy” — to activate the stereotype that abortion providers are money-grubbing baby killers.

Why women end up having second trimester abortions, why they choose to donate fetal tissue, what good the research achieves — who cares, when there is outrage to provoke and express?

From the Arkansas blog of the Arkansas Times

Abortion is legal. Medical research involving use of fetal remains is legal, even vital to research. The debate on fundingPlanned Parenthood is not about abortion funding, but about medical services. The record shows that loss of accustomed providers of cancer screenings, disease testing and family planning has not been readily filled by other providers where states like Texas have crippled Planned Parenthood's service to women. Don't believe Sen. Tom Cotton'sincessant claims to the contrary.

But finally the issue is about women's control of their medical destiny and their ability to make decisions for themselves.

Yes, the videos "cleverly evoke visceral feelings of disgust," Pollitt notes. (Imagine how people would feel if shown the ways in which medical students sometimes handle the cadavers on which they learn their profession?)

I agree. I avoid any of those types of things. I have seen television shows that show about harvesting hearts, kidneys, eyeballs, or grafting one part of the body onto another- I am squeamish and avoid those. It is, however, the choice of the person who gives permission to donate to do so. AND, it's not like there aren't Republicans who are glad to be part of the fetal tissue waste disposal business- Take Mitt Romney and Stericycle, for example-and HE was the Republican choice for president last time around! 

And don't forget fetal tissue research is legal in most states.

Fetal tissue research is legal in all but a handful of states, and it has been conducted in the United States, with federal support, for decades, except for a brief moratorium on the use of National Institutes of Health funds in the 1980s. It is regulated by federal law, and was funded by the Clinton, Bush 43 and Obama administrations, most recently to the tune of about $76 million per year.

Support for this research has been bipartisan. And individuals who are both anti-choice and pro-choice have benefited. Indeed, almost every American has benefited, in the form of vaccines for polio, chicken pox and German measles; and research toward treatments for blindness and furthering our understanding of cancer cells. It may shock our sensibilities to hear about fetal “remains” being treated as medical products — GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s campaign was called out in 2012 when Mother Jones reported that he had a business connection with a company called Stericycle that disposed of fetal remains as “medical waste.” Equally disconcerting may be the language used routinely every day to “harvest” (as opposed to “recover”) the hearts and bones from “cadavers” (not “donors” or “the deceased”).

 

But multiple federal advisory commissions have found fetal tissue research ethically acceptable. The National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research was asked to study fetal research and in 1975 issued a report, Research on the Fetus, that concluded that the practice was ethically permissible. Despite this, the practice has been caught up in the abortion debate. Unlike our use of organs from deceased adults, opponents have claimed that using fetal remains for medical research makes funders and users “complicit” in the underlying abortion.

In the 1980s, while research proceeded in other countries to treat Parkinson’s disease, the Reagan administration rejected a request for NIH support, thus beginning a moratorium on federal funding. President Reagan created a Human Fetal Tissue Transplantation Research Panel to review the research. It concluded that use of the tissue did not encourage ambivalent women to choose abortion, and the panel distinguished the moral analysis of abortion from the moral analysis of using remains for research. Like the earlier advisory committee, this panel found the research to be ethically permissible, provided that the decision to have an abortion was separated from the decision to donate the remains, and that tissue recovery did not affect the safety of the procedure for the woman.

 The NY Times article, above, also makes some excellent points about women being proactive instead of reactive. 

We need to say that women have sex, have abortions, are at peace with the decision and move on with their lives. We need to say that is their right, and, moreover, it’s good for everyone that they have this right: The whole society benefits when motherhood is voluntary. When we gloss over these truths we unintentionally promote the very stigma we’re trying to combat. What, you didn’t agonize? You forgot your pill? You just didn’t want to have a baby now? You should be ashamed of yourself.