CNN's Candy Crowley adopted the pro-abortion lobby's talking points on Friday's Situation Room, as she asked Rep. Steve King about the House's vote to defund Planned Parenthood: "There's that term, 'penny wise and pound foolish.' Would you worry that, by cutting off those services, people...would have sicker babies, or certain people...wouldn't have HIV testing...and that would just cost us more?"
The journalist, who was substituting for regular anchor Wolf Blitzer, brought on the Iowa Republican and his Democratic colleague, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, to comment on the current budget debates at the state and federal levels. Towards the end of her interview, at the 42 minutes into the 6 pm Eastern hour mark, Crowley raised the 240-185 vote earlier that afternoon to eliminate federal funding of Planned Parenthood, and used an argument similar to that of liberal Fox News contributor Jehmu Greene, who emphasized on the February 3, 2011 edition of The O'Reilly Factor how the organization's employees "provide mammograms [and] provide birth control advice." The anchor also hinted that cutting off Planned Parenthood would end up costing more tax dollars in the long run:
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CROWLEY: Congressman King, you all voted to cut off fending (sic)- funding for Planned Parenthood as part of some of these votes you're taking. Now, Planned Parenthood has services like HIV testing, prenatal care. You know, there's that term, 'penny wise and pound foolish.' Would you worry that, by cutting off those services, people have- there are certain people that would have sicker babies, or certain people that wouldn't have HIV testing, and then pass it along to something (sic) else, and that would just cost us more?
An on-screen graphic echoed Crowley's question: "House Cuts Planned Parenthood Funds: What about health services for women?"
Note how Crowley doesn't once mention the most controversial procedure that Planned Parenthood provides: abortion. The organization's own annual report for 2008 notes that their facilities across the country performed 324,008 abortions that year. Yet, the CNN anchor shows more concern about infants that theoretically might end up ill due to the proposed cuts than the hundreds of thousands of unborn babies who were actually killed!
Rep. King answered by bringing up one of the key driving factors in the campaign to defund Planned Parenthood: the recent release of undercover videos by the pro-life organization Live Action:
KING: Well, I think of it in terms of Planned Parenthood is conducting the majority- the largest abortion provider, not the majority of abortions, but the largest abortion provider in the country, and some of the things that we've seen in the videotape inside the Planned Parenthood offices are just appalling, and they're revolting, and they're repulsive. And the culture inside the Planned Parenthood office, I think, is reflected in those videos, just like the culture of the ACORN offices was reflected in the videos that we saw then.
I've long been opposed to providing taxpayer dollars to organizations that do abortions or provide pro-abortion counseling, and I think that's a good plan.
Just days earlier, on the February 13, 2011 edition of CNN's State of the Union program, Crowley expressed a more general liberal concern about budget cuts as she interviewed the Obama administration's budget director, Jack Lew: "So let's get down to the basic question, who's going to get hurt in this budget?" One thing is certain: if the defunding of Planned Parenthood manages to survive the budget process, it will certainly hurt them in their large pocketbook, and it will dampen their efforts to butcher the unborn.
