US News’s on-staff radical feminist Bonnie Erbe returned to attacking pro-lifers, her favorite subject of ire, in a blog entry on Monday. This time, she singled out “20-something abortion foe” Lila Rose, a junior at UCLA, for her “dishonest” and “pointless” undercover videos which she has taped at several Planned Parenthood locations. She seems to be most upset by how Rose has “created a public relations nightmare” for the abortion-mongering group, and called for the young woman’s prosecution for “trespassing, fraud, and whatever other law she violated” for impersonating a 13-year-old statutory rape victim. The blogger later told pro-lifers to just “go away,” since they will “will never succeed in banning abortion.”Erbe began by excerpting Robin Abcarian’s fair profile of Rose in the Los Angeles Times on Sunday, introducing her as a “20-something abortion foe who videotapes counseling sessions at Planned Parenthood clinics in which she poses as a 13-year-old impregnated by an older man.” The blogger saw two large “crimes” in this activity -- it has gained Rose quick notoriety in the “netherworld” of the pro-life movement, and it has given Planned Parenthood a few headaches:
After posting these videos on YouTube and campaigning with them throughout the netherworld of the antiabortion movement, Lila Rose has succeeded in getting state and local governments to cut of hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding to Planned Parenthood clinics. She has also created a public relations nightmare for the group. NB: The aides who violated rules by telling the ‘girl’ to lie about the father have been fired as they were violating Planned Parenthood rules. She’s made herself a heroine in the antiabortion movement.Actually, the part about the aides isn’t completely true. One caught on camera in Indiana was fired, and another resigned. But in Arizona, another state where Rose has taped, Planned Parenthood has not taken any kind of action.
The US News blogger then posed “three questions for prosecutors who are now considering investigations into the Planned Parenthood operations in some of the six states where Rose posed as something she was not.” Actually, only the first two were directed towards the prosecutors:
1. Why don’t they investigate Rose for trespassing, fraud, and whatever other law she violated by posing as something she was not to make the videos?So Erbe wants Rose to be prosecuted for something that her colleagues in the mainstream media do all the time with investigative journalism. In fact, the Big Three networks, like Rose, used hidden camera footage from pro-life crisis pregnancy centers in “exposes” in 1991.
2. Why don’t state authorities prosecute her for violating state privacy laws by videotaping private counseling sessions? According to the L.A. Times:In May 2007, Planned Parenthood of Los Angeles accused Rose of breaking state privacy laws when she secretly taped her interactions. It demanded she remove the videos from her website, which she did, though they are still easily found on YouTube. (Arizona, Indiana, and Tennessee, where she went next, have less restrictive privacy laws.)
It’s something that even left-wing politicians have dabbled in to target crisis pregnancy centers. For example, a 2007 front-page article by the aforementioned L.A. Times detailed how Representative Henry Waxman “asked undercover investigators to contact 23 crisis pregnancy centers.” According to a press release, Waxman’s investigators “posed as pregnant 17-year-olds,” and were supposedly “misled...about the medical risks of abortion...that abortion leads to breast cancer, infertility, and mental illness.” One would guess that Erbe had no problem with these hidden camera videos, since pro-lifers were the subject.
Erbe’s third question was a rhetorical question directed towards pro-lifers:
3. Since antiabortion foes will never succeed in banning abortion (they got as close as they will ever get with eight years of George Bush in the White House, and he left office as the worst president in American history) why don’t they just go away?Sad to say, Bonnie, but pro-lifers have actually benefitted from the election of President Obama. The Politico reported on April 13 that the president’s first days in office “have been like an extended recruiting drive for the anti-abortion movement, reinvigorating a constituency he sought to neutralize during the campaign,” and listed significant initiatives made by pro-life organizations. We should still expect, however, the blogger to continue her jihad against those darned “abortion foes.”