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Thursday, Nov 12, 2015 7:55 PM UTC
Wingnuts go batsh*t over Katie Couric, again: The insane right-wing freak-out over her Planned Parenthood interview
Reporter who had the gall to ask Sarah Palin what she reads faces fire for showing what PP clinics are really like
Topics: Katie Couric, Planned Parenthood, Abortion, Pro-lifers, Cecile Richards, aol_on, Media News, News, Politics News
Katie Couric has once again become the scourge of frothing conservatives everywhere. In 2008 she singlehandedly ended John McCain’s presidential bid by asking Sarah Palin whether she ever read a newspaper. (All evidence suggested the true answer was “No.”) Now she has antiabortionists upset because she has dared to take her cameras inside a Planned Parenthood clinic, which looks like a fairly normal medical center and not the blood-soaked abattoir of dismembered baby limbs that conservatives just know it to be in their tiny blackened hearts. For shame, Katie Couric!
The perky newswoman recently sat down with Planned Parenthood head Cecile Richards for an interview for Yahoo! News, during which Richards defended the organization and pushed back on the infamous videos released over the summer by the undercover antiabortion (and Orwellian-named) group Center for Medical Progress.
As a side segment, Couric and her camera crew toured a new Planned Parenthood facility in Queens. The resulting four minutes of video made antiabortionists angry, presumably because none of it was dubiously-sourced stock footage that claimed to have been shot inside a PP clinic but was actually from somewhere else.
As you can see here, the Queens facility looks like an anodyne medical clinic, the type of place members of either gender might go to get a mole removed or some new bridgework. Except for the metal detector inside the front entrance and the bulletproof windows. Which protects even patients who are coming into the clinic to get treatment for something unrelated to abortion services, like a sexually transmitted disease. It’s great that some poor 17-year-old girl who needs treatment for an STD should have to go behind bulletproof glass and through a metal detector before being treated for gonorrhea. That is definitely a healthy message that in no way implies sexual activity is shameful that we should want to send to teenagers.
Watching this, I couldn’t help but think back to some of the justifications I read about HB2, the Texas antiabortion law that led to the infamous filibuster by Wendy Davis and was eventually signed into law by then-Governor Rick Perry. HB2 mandated (there’s an ironic-sounding word for it) that abortion facilities follow the same standards as Ambulatory Surgical Centers, an expensive and unnecessary upgrade for clinics that already often operate on tight budgets. The practical effect was to ensure that all but six clinics in the entire state would have to close, making abortion services inaccessible for vast swaths of women across Texas.
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