Face these questions about abortion

It’s difficult to look away from a train wreck.

But as a society, we seem to do it all too often.

Whether our longstanding struggles with race and poverty, the death penalty or more recent moral wrangling over torture and drone strikes, we have a collective history of turning away from issues when their realities become too difficult or too inconvenient to address.

We appear to be doing it again now after the release of undercover videos about abortion.

The secretly recorded videos are the culmination of a 30-month investigative project by an anti-abortion group called the Center for Medical Progress.

The footage released to date depicts Planned Parenthood officials and doctors who appear to be haggling over the price of aborted fetal remains, sorting through tiny limbs and organs in petri dishes and casually discussing how doctors can alter abortion procedures to extract, intact, organs of freshly aborted fetuses.

These alleged activities are disturbing and unethical at best and illegal at worst.

Yes, the footage was collected by a team of individuals with clear motives.

David Daleiden, CMP’s executive director, makes no bones about his desire to help put an end to the practice made legal throughout the U.S. by a 1973 Supreme Court decision.

So it’s reasonable to be skeptical of CMP given the surreptitious methods used to collect the video content and its motivations for doing so.

A memo sent to the Star-Telegram Editorial Board by Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas accuses CMP of producing “heavily and deceptively edited” videos that depend “on comments edited out of context to support their claims.”

The memo argues that the full footage proves Planned Parenthood is and has been in full compliance with federal law.

But the raw, unedited versions of the videos, which CMP has made available on its YouTube channel, raise many questions that need to be answered.

At the very least, Planned Parenthood’s culture, practices and motivations deserve further scrutiny from legitimate investigative agencies.

For example, in a video released Tuesday, Savita Ginde, vice president and medical director of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, tells an actor posing as a representative of a fetal organ procurement company that the clinic has little control over whether specimens come out in whole usable pieces.

But she adds, “Sometimes, if we get, if someone delivers before we get to see them for a procedure, then we are intact.”

If “delivery” occurs before a procedure, in what state is the fetus during delivery?

Similarly, director of medical services Dr. Deborah Nucatola, in a video that went viral on the Internet on July 14 seems to suggest that the federal law banning partial-birth abortions — a method by which the fetus is intentionally delivered breech and then the skull is punctured — is “up to interpretation” by the doctor performing the procedure.

Delivering the body cavity first would presumably produce more “whole” specimens that would be more valuable to researchers.

We learn in one video that feticides frequently used to kill the fetus before extraction make the stem cells unusable.

So it’s reasonable to ask if clinics are employing methods they might not ordinarily use to deliver fetuses for procurement firms that request higher tissue quality and if full and knowing consent of the woman was obtained for those modified methods.

Federal law bans the sale of fetal organs.

Planned Parenthood has stated repeatedly that it does not sell organs but receives reimbursement for costs incurred procuring them.

However, the videos indicate that in some cases outside biotechnicians harvest the fetal organs while in the clinics; Planned Parenthood simply makes the aborted fetuses available.

If that is the case, what are the significant costs to Planned Parenthood that would require compensation?

While Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion provider in the U.S., conducting abortions is only part of its work.

The organization provides contraceptive counseling and cancer screenings for women who might otherwise have limited access to such services.

Wholesale condemnation of the organization based on the videos released to date would be premature.

But the footage does raise legitimate questions about Planned Parenthood’s internal controls and transparency.

Perhaps more important, the videos force us to participate in an important exercise over a legal but controversial practice that has become so common that we regularly look past it.

A just society can and should revisit complex moral questions whenever new information warranting consideration arises.

These videos constitute such new information, and they compel us to look anew at an issue that frequently evades our collective gaze.

This story was originally published July 31, 2015 at 6:05 PM with the headline "Face these questions about abortion."