Soylent Green

Ok, so I think I'm finally ready to weigh in on the controversy surrounding Planned Parenthood and the selling of aborted fetus tissue.  Fortunately, PolitiFact has weighed in on this.  It turns out that while it is illegal to sell such tissue, it is perfectly legal to donate it for a fee - a fee that is meant to recoup the losses of storage, transport, and so on.  So, even if PP is donating for a fee, it's still not breaking the law, assuming that the fee is "reasonable" (and we'd have to do a lot of accounting to determine whether that's the case or not).

So, at issue is not whether it's legal, but whether it's moral.  The question started out as "should Planned Parenthood be profiting off of such tissue," but as PolitiFact notes, they're not profiting:

"The amounts she cites do not appear to be out of the ordinary, but no one knows because there is no registry or compendium of fees charged by organizations (or) institutions supplying fetal tissue," said Arthur Caplan, director of the Division of Medical Ethics at New York University’s Langone Medical Center. "When she haggles about fees, that does not appear to me to be trying to profit."

But it also seems wrong for Planned Parenthood to profit from abortions because of the inherent belief that abortions are bad.  Ergo, if they're able to sell fetus tissue at a profit, it's in their best interests to try to abort as many babies as possible, rather than try to provide alternatives to abortion (such as prevention, parenting, and adoption assistance).  It would represent a conflict of interest.

But we know that this all hinges upon this inherent belief in the immorality of abortions because we don't have the same arguments against similar conflicts of interest in other arenas.  For instance, hospitals have the same guidelines, and can donate aborted fetus tissue or human cadavers of all age, with similar fee requirements.  We don't question their ability to do so, because we recognize that there's a valid medical need for it - namely, that scientists and medical students might be able to use the bodies for study.

Which raises the question: what do the people angry at Planned Parenthood think PP is doing with these fetuses?

Again, this comes down to the issue of "us vs them" or self vs other that I've talked about before.  On the right, there is a constant campaign to smear Planned Parenthood and other providers of abortion and abortion-related services as monsters who are out to murder babies.  And when you vilify an "other" in that way, it's easy to imagine the other as capable of any number of atrocities.

Sure, they may not say that Planned Parenthood is grinding up fetuses and turning them into food and food-fillers for our fast food industry, but they're also not saying that they're donating them to research.  By leaving the question open, and by filling the minds of those listening with monstrous ideas, their minds fill in such horrible ideas as "what ifs."