February 22, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – Pro-life legislation to restrict abortion or defund Planned Parenthood may be off the table for the next two years, but even with a Democrat-occupied House of Representatives, we have a greater opportunity than most pro-lifers realize. And not just new judges or regulatory tinkering, but long-overdue movement on an old promise that could make Donald Trump’s third year Planned Parenthood’s worst ever.
In December 2017, the pro-life community went wild when the Trump Justice Department requested unredacted documents from the Senate Judiciary Committee’s investigation into Planned Parenthood’s harvesting and sale of fetal organs. This was a year after the committee recommended an investigation and potentially criminal prosecution, something the Obama administration refused to do for obvious reasons.
It’s a new day! we all thought. After two years, Planned Parenthood will finally face the music!
…And then nothing happened. More than a year later, we haven’t seen any further developments in the case, let alone any charges brought against anyone at Planned Parenthood.
Granted, investigations take time. But given how blatant Planned Parenthood officials’ own words were in the original undercover videos discussing multiple federal crimes – desiring to do “a little better than break even” on fetal organ transfers, committing federally-prohibited partial-birth abortions, altering abortion procedures to obtain intact organs, even infanticide – it’s hard to imagine a good reason why we haven’t heard anything about progress being made. Suspects bragging about their crimes on video is a prosecutor’s dream.
This week, Operation Rescue released an interesting report suggesting an explanation for the silence:
Even then, there is information from highly placed sources that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe may have provided cover for Planned Parenthood, delaying the investigation. It is no coincidence that many resignations [of Planned Parenthood officials] took place after the firing of McCabe in January 2018.
McCabe and Rosenstein had an interest in killing the Planned Parenthood investigation. Apart from a willingness to cover up wrongdoing by Planned Parenthood, any investigation into the abortion giant would have exposed as fraudulent one of their primary sources in their investigation of Trump.
The theory is that an investigation would have further discredited Fusion GPS, the Democrat opposition-research firm Planned Parenthood hired to discredit the Center for Medical Progress videos, in the process hurting the efforts to dirty up Trump via the Russian collusion investigation, since Fusion was also a key player there.
So could the Planned Parenthood investigation be yet another casualty of the president’s failure to crack down on left-wing bureaucrats his own administration is still teeming with? Most likely; we know one of the reasons Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions was his hands-off approach to those hunting “collusion.”
That brings us to why now is the time for pro-lifers to do something about it. The Senate just confirmed William Barr to take over for Sessions, a man with a track record of saying all the right things about Roe v. Wade. Operation Rescue’s Cheryl Sullenger notes that Rosenstein is leaving next month, as well.
Starting immediately, pro-lifers must demand that the Trump administration and Attorney General Barr report to the American people what progress has been made so far, commit to pursuing Planned Parenthood’s crimes to the fullest extent of the law, and promise to regularly reassure the public it hasn’t been abandoned.
The CMP videos first broke four years ago. If a comparable scandal had rocked, say, the National Rifle Association, it’s inconceivable that the national organization would have lasted another six months. Yet after all this time, Planned Parenthood has continued mostly unscathed. That should be almost as big a scandal as the videos themselves.
Pro-lifers cannot allow those revelations to fade into obscurity, as just another bullet point in Planned Parenthood’s rap sheet. Those responsible need to be brought to justice, to show the country just how real, how severe this really is, and to give the abortion industry something almost entirely alien to them: consequences.
Investigating and prosecuting Big Abortion’s baby-parts harvesters could do vastly more for the abortion debate than a string of show votes on doomed bills…but for that to happen, the pro-life movement has to make clear to the GOP and Team Trump that words and gestures won’t fly anymore as substitutes for results.