“We’ve seen almost four million children killed by abortion – just at Planned Parenthood – while Cecile Richards has been president, so that is her legacy,” said Lila Rose, addressing Cecile Richards’ plan to step down from the helm of Planned Parenthood sometime this year.
Rose, founder and president of Live Action, made her comments in a Friday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with Breitbart News’s Senior Editor-at-Large Rebecca Mansour.
“It’s heartbreaking,” said Rose of Richards’ legacy. “It’s unjust. It deserves mass outcry that she has been the boss of the group that has been committing the nation’s biggest human rights abuse by killing its children in the womb, the most vulnerable among us, depriving them of their first right to life.”
Richards’ legacy is “something to be mourned, something to be outraged by, and something to stand up against,” added Rose. “We took the news of [Cecile Richards’] stepping down this week soberly. She has presided over the deaths of four million children and been the leading proponent, politically, of abortion-on-demand without apology.”
“This is a woman who has steered Planned Parenthood through scandal after scandal,” continued Rose. “We’re talking scandals showing Planned Parenthood covering up child sexual abuse and sex trafficking; scandals of Medicaid fraud and abuse; scandals of the selling of baby body parts at top affiliates in California and Texas and other places.”
Democrats support “hardcore abortion without apology,” said Rose, pointing to the party’s support for lawful access to abortion without limits based on length of pregnancy.
“Democrats are voting like a bloc for abortion,” said Rose. “That’s a very sad part of the Democratic Party right now. The Democratic platform is hardcore abortion without apology, all through nine months, up until birth, and their candidates have to espouse that. So we have this bloc of Democrats in the Senate who are hardcore pro-abortion … who are going to vote out-of-touch with what the rest of the country wants.”
In 2015, Planned Parenthood received $554.6 million in taxpayer funding – out of a total of $1.354 billion in revenues for that year – according to its 2015-2016 annual report.
“Planned Parenthood is still receiving $1.5 million a day,” said Rose, joining Mansour in noting dual Republican congressional majorities alongside a Republican president.
“It is astonishing to me that Republicans control the Senate, the House, and the White House, and we still can’t get behind defunding an organization whose primary business is abortion,” said Mansour. “If we want to offer subsidies for women to get mammograms and all that sort of thing – which is the cover that Planned Parenthood uses – there are so many other organizations we could fund to provide those services. I don’t understand why the American taxpayer should give a nickel, a dime, to this abortion provider. I just don’t get it.”
Obstacles on the GOP side for moves to cease federal funding of Planned Parenthood include Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), said Rose.
America is a global outlier with lawful access to abortion as late as five months into a pregnancy term, noted Mansour and Rose.
“We are one of seven countries in the world that allow abortions [as late as five months into a pregnancy],” said Mansour. “It’s considered savage, barbaric, in most of the world to terminate a pregnancy that late, when the child can live outside of the womb.”
“Pro-choice [advocates join] with some of the most extreme countries in the world, like North Korea and China, on abortion policy, and those policies are allowing abortion past five months,” said Rose. “At five months, a child is within a week or two of being able to survive outside the womb with medical support. … Most of Europe and most of the Western world has laws to protect children at least in the second and third trimesters.”
Modern technological developments offer deeper insights into neonatal development when compared with prior decades, said Mansour, providing scientific data to bolster the personhood of unborn children.
Mansour pointed to a January-published article in the Atlantic entitled “Science Is Giving the Pro-Life Movement a Boost” as evidence of the pro-life movement’s “winning the moral argument” in advancing the humanity of unborn children.
“New technology makes it easier to apprehend the humanity of a growing child and imagine a fetus as a creature with moral status,” wrote Emma Green in the Atlantic article.
“This is an astonishing victory,” said Mansour. “The moral argument, and the winning of that moral argument, is becoming increasingly obvious, and that is a huge and important thing.”
Life begins at conception, argued Rose. “Do we have the right to say this group of humans don’t deserve rights, but this group does? I think that’s a wake-up call that the country is having more and more. This is a human life in the womb, and no argument – whether it’s for my convenience or for my claims to health or claims for my own life – justifies taking that life. We should not be pitting women against children, mothers against their children. This is a false dichotomy that we’re creating to say that women’s rights are against children’s rights. No, they’re human rights, and all humans share the first right, which is life, and nobody has the right to take that away from you.”
Planned Parenthood Federation of America holds tax-exempt status with the IRS as a 501(c)(3) organization, issuing tax-deductible receipts for donations it receives from its benefactors.
Breitbart News Tonight airs Monday through Friday on SiriusXM’s Patriot channel 125 from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific).
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Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.
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