Them’s fighting words, for sure. But it doesn’t take away from the fact that Perry addressed his comments explicitly to voters, which indicates that he saw a strategic advantage. Needless to say, the billionaire blowhard didn’t take Perry’s words lying down:
This is precisely what the Glass-Steagall Act was designed to prevent – and did prevent for more than six decades. Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards issued an apology on Thursday for the tone of a controversial, highly edited video released earlier this week, which accuses the organization of participating in the illegal sale of donated fetal tissue. The seemingly damning 9-minute clip, surreptitiously recorded by the antiabortion group Center for Medical Progress, reveals Planned Parenthood senior medical services director Dr. Deborah Nucatola talking rather casually about fetal tissue donation — and it’s Nucatola’s tone for which Richards has felt the need to apologize.
“Our top priority is the compassionate care that we provide,” Richards said in a recorded message. “In the video, one of our staff members speaks in a way that does not reflect that compassion. This is unacceptable and I personally apologize for the staff member’s tone and statements.”
Richards also clarifies in her message that Planned Parenthood has not and does not benefit financially from fetal tissue donation, and that any mention of money in the video refers to reimbursement for specimen transport costs. Her clarification is, unfortunately, all too necessary in a cultural climate often hostile to reproductive rights — especially abortion.
But the urgency underpinning Richards’ apology is also what leaves me unconvinced that she needed to apologize for Nucatola’s less-than-sentimental tone. One would certainly hope that as a medical care provider, Nucatola would approach the topic of fetal tissue donation in a more sensitive way, and it doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect that she would. While it’s important to see Planned Parenthood acknowledge that any conversation about abortion requires compassion, the fact of the matter is that Nucatola wasn’t using her best bedside manner because she wasn’t treating patients. She was discussing her work — not exactly the most palatable work — with people she believed to be in the same field, to have the same level of familiarity with the ins and outs of the job. It’s clinical, and it’s not packaged in a pretty way.
And though there’s certainly room for reproach from within, Planned Parenthood’s response to the video — specifically Richards’ apology — is another example of where the pro-choice conversation about abortion needs to change. Abortion is basic healthcare; reproductive rights advocates say this all the time, to make clear that it’s not so radical for a healthcare provider such as Planned Parenthood to treat the procedure as such. But, as I wrote earlier this week, that view does not always infuse the organization’s public approach to talking about abortion.
Given the hostile cultural climate I’ve already mentioned, it’s understandable that Richards felt the need to apologize; perhaps it’s right that she did. But we should take something else away from her request for forgiveness. The fact that the leader of one of the nation’s largest, most critical healthcare providers must approach the public and say sorry, all because a doctor described a medical procedure in a straightforward, clinical way, indicates just how far we still have to go to eradicate abortion stigma.
Hillary Clinton, of all people, should remember.
Robert Reich, one of the nation’s leading experts on work and the economy, is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. Time Magazine has named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written 13 books, including his latest best-seller, “Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future;” “The Work of Nations,” which has been translated into 22 languages; and his newest, an e-book, “Beyond Outrage.” His syndicated columns, television appearances, and public radio commentaries reach millions of people each week. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, and Chairman of the citizen’s group Common Cause. His new movie "Inequality for All" is in Theaters. His widely-read blog can be found at
Aly had gone out onto the street on the twenty-fifth. Of course, after the revolution everyone you ever met declared they had been on Tahrir from the very beginning, but Aly was not puffing and I was curious about the very first moments.
“Why did you decide to go?” I asked him. Even as donors pledged an additional $3.4 billion last week to those countries hit hardest by Ebola – Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia – those working closely on recovery remain cautious about how the international community is internalizing the lessons learned from the epidemic as it strives to preempt future health crises.
Humanitarian workers, advocates, and other experts in global health welcome the additional funding, but fear that the focus on Ebola could take away from existing work on other diseases and that without stronger donor accountability, the funds might not have their intended impact.
“It is encouraging to see additional resources being devoted to the Ebola outbreak and there is clearly still work to be done here,” said Erin Morton, director of Global Health Technologies Coalition, a group of more than 25 nonprofit organizations working on health research and development. But the group has urged the United States not to support Ebola efforts at the expense of research programs for other neglected diseases. It seems like only yesterday that the Beltway establishment was assuring us that the Tea Party had fundamentally transformed the GOP’s approach to foreign policy and national security, paving the way for Rand Paul and perhaps some of the other more conservative Republicans to attract the anti-war faction to its side. Some even went so far as to say that the Robert Taft conservatives were back, referring to the famous Roosevelt-era isolationist. Never mind the fact that the Tea Party has never been the least bit isolationist, or that conservative Republicans are all unreconstructed hawks; it was taken as an article of faith among many that this was the path by which the Republicans would “moderate” and once again become the reasonable party the Beltway fantasizes could serve as the proper balance to the liberal hippies of the left.