Aug 2^nd

George Will has taken up the cudgel lately swung against Planned Parenthood (PP) by Cal Thomas. This must be a contest among right wing columnists to see which one can be most hyperbolic in their criticism of PP.

George gets a spectacular start on his hyperbolic journey by titling his piece “The barbarity of a nation, Planned Parenthood.” “The barbarity of a nation” Wow! That’ll get your attention. Note that the “Barbarity of a nation” is not the killing of about 500 thousand Iraqis from 2003 to 2011 on the false premise that they were a threat to this country because they had, or were developing, weapons of mass destruction. Or the mass killing of our own citizens, 150 thousand over the last five years, by gunfire. Yes sir, Planned Parenthood is far more barbaric than any of that.

I know that George Will is a busy guy; what with public appearances and columns to do and all, but given what he’s paid one does expect originality.  On July 26^th Cal Thomas, writing on the very same topic and excoriating PP to a fare-the-well wrote, “…if we are of no greater moral value than a hamburger…” Then George Will, on August 2^nd speaking of PP’s attitude toward a fetus, “Never does it have a moral standing superior to a tumor or a hamburger in its mother’s stomach.” This is surely an accidental borrowing of an image; but that’s points off for George and he was doing so well. Oh and George, the fetus is not in its mother’s stomach; it’s in the mother’s uterus, or womb if you like, but please not her stomach; impressionable children may be reading this.

George Will tells us that life begins when a sperm fertilizes an egg. Actually, life begins before that; egg cells are alive and so are sperm cells. George wants us to accept a fertilized egg cell travelling down a fallopian tube is a human being. This is rather like insisting that acorns are oak trees.

George has a field day with his adjectives: Consider his observation that SCOTUS “discovered constitutional significance in the number nine.” Well no George, the significance was that prior to the second trimester the fetus cannot survive as a separate being. George finds this a “preposterous assertion.” Then he claims the court follows this with “faux humility” then swerves back to “breathtaking vanity.”

Finally George gets to his trump card “partial birth abortion” (A term which has no medical significance.) where he can talk of “tiny limbs and hands.”  Now he can provide colorful descriptions of the procedures required to reduce the size of a hydrocephalic infant’s head so that it can move through the birth canal without killing the mother. Of course the mother is never mentioned; it’s only the “pre-born” that concerns George, the post-born of whatever age is irrelevant.