When doctors discuss slicing open a woman's chest, taking out her heart and replacing it with the heart of a teenager accidentally shot by his friend, they don't talk about the woman and young man whose life was cut short. They talk about "a procedure."
When surgeons take two brothers to the operating room to transplant bone marrow from one to the other, they literally pummel both boys as they lay on the tables.
Local journalists watching such procedures in years past were as surprised as they were fascinated by surgeons' seemingly cavalier attitude toward patients in the operating room. But doctors aren't cavalier or casual about their patients' care. They simply have to compartmentalize to do their work.
But the same "shock" is apparent now nationwide as operatives of the anti-abortion group, Center for Medical Progress, released secretly recorded video snippets of Planned Parenthood doctors discussing abortion procedures with words like "crush" and "crunchy," along with conversation about fetal tissue donations. The videos, selectively edited by the rabidly anti-abortion group looking to elicit the most visceral disgust possible, have left Americans putting their heads in their hands.
Planned Parenthood's president, Cecile Richards, has apologized for the lack of "compassion" in the medical-speak language at lunches arranged by group trying to discredit Planned Parenthood.
But she emphatically denies what the edited video snippets suggest - that "Planned Parenthood sells the body parts of aborted babies." The lie is exposed in the CMP video - but viewers have to go to the group's website for unedited versions.
For example: The group released a video with this snippet from a Planned Parenthood doctor: "I think for affiliates, at the end of the day, they're a non-profit, they just don't want to - they want to break even. And if they can do a little better than break even, and do so in a way that seems reasonable, they're happy to do that."
The very next word's out of the doctor's mouth, however, were not included in the video: "Really their bottom line is, they want to break even. Every penny they save is a just penny they give to another patient. To provide a service the patient wouldn't get." Later the doctor says, "we're not looking to make money from this. Our goal is to keep access available. And if we do something that makes a target, that just removes access for everybody." Still later she reiterates: "Our goal, like I said, is to give patients the option without impacting our bottom line. The messaging is this should not be seen as a new revenue stream, because that's not what it is." None of those "snippets" are in the released videos.
Here's what really happened. The Center for Medical Progress obtained tax-exempt status in 2013 for a fake company it set up called Biomax Procurement Services. The company's "representatives" contacted Planned Parenthood staffers and led them into conversations that were secretly recorded. The hoaxers' claimed on their website that they made "a 30-month-long investigative journalism study" documenting their claim. The claim is not proven even in the 60-page transcript the group now also has released and claims is complete.
But most of America will never see the whole conversation. The result, unfortunately, is misplaced and unfair disgust.
It's also unfair that most of us don't want to know and understand the full issue. We don't want to look in the mirror at ourselves and each other and have an open conversation about abortion and fetal tissue research. This much does come through loud and clear in the supposedly full transcript through words like "perception" and in careful sentences filled with clinical and bureaucratic euphemisms.
Republican presidential candidates are jumping all over themselves to defund Planned Parenthood. Some even want to "shutdown the government" over it. If we want an issue completely confused, let's just trust it to Congress. Confusion and division are its specialty.
By law (Congress' and the Supreme Court's), abortion is rightly legal - even in the second trimester. Further, women getting abortions can voluntarily donate the tissue from that procedure to medical research. Also by law the abortion provider can request nominal reimbursement of $30 to $100 in most cases - for saving, packing and shipping the tissue to a research firm.
Planned Parenthood receives federal funding for the health services it provides to 2.7 million people annually, but cannot use federal funds for any abortion-related procedures. And the group certainly prevents more abortions than it facilitates by preventing about 1 million unwanted pregnancies a year.
Neither we nor politicians seem to want to talk about the benefits or ethics of stem cell research and therapy that began in 1998 when scientists discovered how to extract stem cells from human embryos. Stem cells have the ability to differentiate into any type of cell and are being introduced now in treatments for everything from COPD to Alzheimer's disease. But embryotic stem cell discovery has prompted moral questions: Should there be restrictions on studies using these types of cells? And is it just to destroy an aborted embryo cell if it has the potential to cure countless numbers of patients?
For now, the deceptive Planned Parenthood videos have reminded us of these unspoken but needed conversations. Sadly, what is really shocking about the videos - deceptive or not - is that we've all buried our heads in the sand so long that we're still shocked.