Good for Carly Fiorina. She challenged complacency about our abortion regime. Referring to the tapes released this summer that exposed Planned Parenthood’s harvesting of body parts from aborted children, at the second Republican primary debate she said, “I dare Hillary Clinton [and] Barack Obama to watch these tapes. Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says, ‘We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.’ This is about the character of our nation.”
The next day the usual suspects denounced her, saying the tapes show nothing of the sort. In his New York Times column, Paul Krugman writes off the anguished testimony of a former Planned Parenthood technician as “just assertions” and then, with his usual nuance, implies that Fiorina is “deliberately spreading a lie.” The ever-reliable Gloria Steinem called Fiorina’s remarks “a 100 percent lie.”
The relevant footage is to be found in “Human Capital: Episode Three,” beginning at 5:39 with an interview with Holly O’Donnell, a former technician for a company that secures and provides fetal body parts for medical research. With visible anguish, she describes a procedure in which she participated. It required the dismemberment of a living fetus to remove its brain. For two or three seconds, footage is shown of a living, second-trimester fetus so that viewers can visualize what O’Donnell describes.
