How Ron Fournier Pissed Me Off Today

Correct: Planned Parenthood is legally selling baby parts. https://t.co/MekQbZzoTT

— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) November 30, 2015

So, as you may know, I take the Planned Parenthood story pretty seriously, because I consider this agency to be on the front lines of reproductive health for a lot of people, so when people get stupid in their reporting about what Planned Parenthood does, I get a wee bit stroppy. So when Ron Fournier decided to make the Twitter assertion that "Planned Parenthood is legally selling baby parts" there really wasn't any sense in Tweeting at him by the time I could have got around to doing that.

Planned Parenthood is a non-profit. They provide services at cost. It isn't the same as for-profit selling. I had a an occasion where I needed three stiches from a kitchen incident and made an emergency room visit, and it cost about $1500 to my insurance provider. Planned Parenthood abortion services are a little more involved, but don't cost as much as a little three stich deal at a for-profit institution.

Now, maybe Fournier thinks he's being cute when he says that they "legally sell body parts". By sale, I guess he was referring to the contract whereby the collection and storage costs were covered by the recipients of the fetal tissue donation, which is still by no means a "sale" because the compensation didn't even necessarily cover the cost of procurement and storage--many media fact-checkers came to this same conclusion.  Saying this was done legally is conditionally true--but he's using that inflammatory configuration of "body parts". This was never a sale, and this was never about "parts" as such, but their value as research tools.

They legally donated tissues. There is no need to "both sides" this cognitive cock-up to legitimize the people who want to see Planned Parenthood as some kind of fetus sausage-factory. Fournier's flippancy here is a disgrace.