Internet Explodes After Planned Parenthood Pres. Talks About 'Harm' Parent-Child Separation Causes
It’s become one of the most groan-worthy jokes an MSNBC pundit can tell: “Will someone please take Trump’s Twitter away?”
Apparently, the mere sight of the president not acting expressly presidential in 280 characters or less is enough to send people into conniptions even the better part of a decade after he became one of the social media service’s most well-known and colorful users. Everyone more or less expects someone in the West Wing to rip his phone right out of his hands and scold him like a naughty puppy: “No! No tweeting! Bad president! Bad!”
Not only is this ridiculous, but Trump is relatively effective at getting his message across on social media. Whether or not you agree with the message is another matter. When it comes to people and/or entities where the iPhone should be forcibly ripped from their mitts, however, I can think of no better organization than one best known for forcibly ripping babies from the womb: Planned Parenthood.
It’s not that Planned Parenthood says grotesque things on social media (although they do), but few institutions so frequently manage to say things so profoundly tone-deaf that you wonder if anyone vets their missives.
If you need an example of what I’m talking about, take this infamous tweet from August 2017, in which Planned Parenthood tried to engage users in literally the worst way possible:
Fill in the blank: The person I’m going out with can never ________. Tell us your dating dealbreakers.
— Planned Parenthood (@PPFA) August 29, 2017
If you were wondering how many of the responses were some permutation of “kill babies,” I’ll save you some time and assure you the number was not insignificant.
The ratioed tweets have just kept on coming, and it’s not just from the official account, either. The group’s president, Dr. Leana Wen, managed to earn herself a slice of the infamy last week when she tweeted about a federal health official who said he warned the Trump administration about the health risks of separating children from parents while in federal custody.
“Jonathan White, a career civil servant who helped lead efforts to reunify thousands of separated families, told a congressional oversight panel he first learned in February 2017 the administration was considering separating migrant families,” Politico reported.
“He said he quickly encouraged the Department of Health and Human Services officials to intervene to stop the policy, but he said they told him the administration would not implement the policy — though it would later be formally announced in May 2018 before being scrapped amid public uproar about six weeks later.”
Well, one could certainly debate the health risks of illegally trying to sneak your child into the United States, often with the aid of a human trafficker, but this is besides the point for our demonstration.
In any case, it seems that Wen was outraged by this. So on Friday, she let everyone know in the most unfortunate of ways:
Forcibly removing a child from their parent or guardian can cause lifelong physical and emotional harm to the child’s well-being. #HowDareYou https://t.co/4FTMJL9QZ8
— Leana Wen, M.D. (@DrLeanaWen) March 1, 2019
So, uh, did you think about that one before you pressed send, Dr. Wen? Maybe run it by someone else? I dunno, just spitballing here, because the reaction was something like what you might expect.
What about removing them from the womb or denying them care if they survive the removal? https://t.co/oeBSdp6ZLO
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) March 1, 2019
CC: Planned Parenthood
— Ron in Free Texas (@RonEthridgeTX) March 1, 2019
Is this an official policy position change against abortion?
— Austin Roebuck (@AustinRoebuckPR) March 2, 2019
Especially if they’re still in the womb, right?
— Joe Caradine (@joecaradine) March 2, 2019
This is Planned Parenthood’s president? Oh the irony…
Pretty sure an aborted child is harmed slightly more. But sure, keep telling yourself that you care about the well being of children.
— Luke Vickery (@LukeV14) March 1, 2019
And those were some of the nicer ones.
How did Wen not know she was lobbing up one of 2019’s great sociopolitical softballs here? It’s utterly unbelievable that she thought this wasn’t going to receive the responses that it did.
When you’re decrying “forcibly removing a child from their parent or guardian” and saying how it “can cause lifelong physical and emotional harm to the child’s well-being,” and you just happen to be the head of an organization that forcibly removes the body of a child from their parent, thus doing the ultimate in lifelong physical harm to them, you’re either utterly lacking in self-awareness or engaged in some sort of elaborate performance art.
This tweet, by the way, came on the same week Senate Democrats blocked a bill which would “prohibit a health care practitioner from failing to exercise the proper degree of care in the case of a child who survives an abortion or attempted abortion.”
This would already be bad enough when you remember that the Democratic Party may as well be the official party of Planned Parenthood. However, consider the fact that, as Townhall noted, the Democrats who blocked it received almost half a million dollars from Planned Parenthood, combined, in the past five years.
Again, this is when you want to tweet this, Wen?
Maybe Planned Parenthood and its leaders should go back to focusing on the dating tips stuff. It may be profoundly inappropriate coming from an abortion mill, but at least it’s not, you know, this. Failing that, I’m just going to fall back on the old Trump joke: Will someone please take their Twitter away?
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