The Big Secret of Abortion: Women Already Know How It Works

-  Rebecca Traister

“I gave birth to two premature kids,” said California’s Barbara Boxer on the Senate floor last week, during the debate over cutting federal funds to Planned Parenthood. Boxer sounded impatient, irritated.

"I just don’t like lectures by men about what it’s like.” Her comment came in response to the furious fight that has erupted over the undercover videos, made by an anti-abortion outfit calling itself the Center for Medical Progress, purporting to show that Planned Parenthood is profiting illegally from the sale of aborted fetal tissue to medical-research companies. So far, the heavily edited videos have offered no clear evidence of wrongdoing but have shown Planned Parenthood doctors and administrators in frank conversations about specific protocols and ethical concerns involved in the donation of fetal tissue, for which consent is obtained from the women undergoing procedures. (Fetal tissue is crucial to research into ALS, Parkinson’s, sickle-cell anemia, and Alzheimer’s; Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was among the Republicans who voted to make its donation legal in 1993.) But the real message of the campaign is far more visceral.