Elizabeth Warren relies on emotional fallacies in rant against Republicans
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) gave an intense speech against bill S. 1881 to defund Planned Parenthood on August 3.
Furious, Warren scolded Republicans with hasty generalizations, rather than debate the merits of the legislation.
In her speech, Warren mocked those voting against Planned Parenthood…
Because it is not. Planned Parenthood is not the only source of women’s health care centers, which the bill makes clear. Margaret Sanger’s brainchild has lately given the public reason to believe that women’s health is not their true priority. She continued:
Yet Democrats didn’t want to help human trafficking victims unless abortion was included. Priorities? Warren continued to try to distract from Planned Parenthood’s current fetal parts trafficking scandal with something likely out of Planned Parenthood’s own talking points:
Because if you haven’t noticed, lots of Americans decided they really, really don’t like the ACA, and thus voted for people who don’t like it either.
So when states choose to keep abortion from being a hastily made, uninformed decision, and encourage maternity homes, pregnancy resource centers, and food shelters instead of padding the coffers of a major abortion provider, they’re automatically conspirators against women’s health care? On the contrary. Maybe they’re just more aware of the actual dangers facing women and babies.
No, it’s just about washing taxpayers’ hands of a corrupt organization, regardless of what it provides, and redirecting the money to worthier health care centers.
Even FactCheck.org notes that the frequent claim of how many women’s lives value Planned Parenthood is questionable at best: “We asked Planned Parenthood for the source of that statistic, but we have yet to hear back.”
Rich Lowry of National Review sums it up best: “By Planned Parenthood’s math, a woman who gets an abortion but also a pregnancy test, an STD test, and some contraceptives has received four services, and only 25 percent of them are abortion. This is a little like performing an abortion and giving a woman an aspirin, and saying only half of what you do is abortion. Such cracked reasoning could be used to obscure the purpose of any organization. The sponsors of the New York City Marathon could count each small cup of water they hand out (some 2 million cups, compared with 45,000 runners) and say they are mainly in the hydration business. Or Major League Baseball teams could say that they sell about 20 million hot dogs and play 2,430 games in a season, so baseball is only .012 percent of what they do. . .If abortion is really incidental to what it’s all about, it could give up the alleged 3 percent. But it will never do it. Abortion is just a tiny portion of what it does exactly the way the heart is a small muscle in the body.”
If there are multiple exceptions then you can’t assuredly say “not one dime.” Furthermore, we’ve had evidence over the years that the federal funding for Planned Parenthood doesn’t stay as clean as Warren says. Regardless, why should any shady organization be given millions of dollars a year in taxpayer money?
Citizens don’t like having their money funneled to organizations they don’t trust, no matter how much you insist it’s for the good of the people. “Of all tyrannies,” wrote C.S. Lewis, “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”
Like the breast cancer screenings Planned Parenthood claims to do but doesn’t? If the vote to defund Planned Parenthood was a vote to deprive women of health care, the text of the bill would not have specified that the money cut from Planned Parenthood would be given instead “to other eligible entities to provide women’s health care services.” Preferably entities that aren’t so morally dubious.
It’s not 1525 B.C. Egypt either, where “another boy!” meant you were supposed to break a baby’s neck or dispose of him in the Nile if he was inconveniently Hebrew. It’s also not 1942 Germany, where unwanted human beings could be treated as specimens for research. We have no excuse for devaluing human life in American society.
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