I don’t have all that much to say, at the moment, but thought people might like having a thread to discuss it.
- The Planned Parenthood controversy over aborted fetus body parts, explained – Vox
- 3 Deceptive Edits In The Video Claiming Planned Parenthood Is “Selling Aborted Baby Parts” | Research | Media Matters for America
- No, Donating Fetal Tissue Isn’t Illegal
- A Fact-Based Guide to Resisting Anti-Choice Propaganda in the Wake of the Attack on Planned Parenthood. Some useful vocabulary words defined here.
- Why Planned Parenthood won’t stop donating fetal organs – The Washington Post
- Planned Parenthood fetal body parts video: How it was used to attack breast cancer funding.
Andy Borowitz anticipated this story:
It seems we’ve found our issue.
RE closed thread: Why I doubt that “63 percent of young men between the ages of 11 and 20 who are imprisoned for homicide have killed their mothers’ batterers.”
Posted on September 8, 2014 by Ampersand
I traced this claim back, it’s most often to March of dimes 1992, after contacting March of Dimes, they deny it’s theirs. I subsequently traced it further back to oral testimony in Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on VAWA legislation by an assistant MA prosecutor Sarah Buel, in 1990 with a citation in her later written submission in the same transcript. I have written the publisher of the pamphlet originally cited from 1985 and am awaiting further information after receiving a simple bibliography from them. So far 1985 is the earliest definite attribution I have found but it’s clear it doesn’t constitute original research by the author Ackerman and at any rate appears anecdotally to be from research done in the 70s.
My letter to the publisher:
Hello, my name is Andrew ******* .
I was trying to determine the origins of a claim in a 1990 Senate
Judiciary committee hearing attributed to a “H. Ackerman, The War
Against Women: Overcoming Female Abuse, 2 (Hazeldean Foundation,
1985)”
The War Against Women: Overcoming Female Abuse
Author Hal Ackerman
Publisher Hazelden, 1985
ISBN 0894862820, 9780894862823
Length 28 pages
The claim is “63% of young men between 11 and 20 serving time for
homicide, killed their mother’s batterer”.
It was hard tracking down even the original source of this claim as
the statistic is most often erroneously cited to “March of Dimes 1992”
with whom I have been in contact and they are unable to find it in any
of their own publications.
What I would like to know is the original statistical source material
or research used by H. Ackerman in establishing this claim in the 1985
publication.
The claim first appears on page 123 in oral testimony of a Sarah Buel
a prosecuting attorney in Massachusetts at the time and again appears
in a prepared statement by Ms. Buel on page 131 where the citation is
found in the footnotes.
Full transcript may be found here:
http://niwaplibrary.wcl.american.edu/reference/additional-materials/vawa-legislative-history/violence-against-women-act-hearings-and-reports/vawa-related-hearings-1990/Senate%20Hearing-%20Aug%2029-%20Dec%2011-%201990.pdf
*Note: page numbers given above are the original pagination printed in
the document and not the pagination of the adobe .pdf file.
Thank you for your time
Regards
Andrew ********
THEIR REPLY
Andrew,
I was able to find a bibliography from our Librarian, she has forwarded this email to someone who may have more information and they will contact you directly.
Thank you,
Customer Support
THEIR BIBLIOGRAPHY ATTACHMENT (I don’t yet know if any of these are the original source material but I’m closing in on it)
Page 1
OTHER HELPFUL BOOKS
Alcoholism: A Merry-go-round Named Denial by Joseph L. Kellermann(1980, Hazelden Foundation, Center City, Minnesota). Available through Hazelden Educational Materials.
The Attorney General’s Task Force on Family Violence, Final Report, September 1984.
Battered Wives by Del Martin (1981, Volcano Press, San Francisco).
The Battered Woman by Lenore Walker (1979, Harper & Row, NewYork).
Behind Closed Doors: Violence in the American Family by MurrayStraus, Richard J. Gelles, and Suzanne K. Steinmetz (1981, Doubleday andCo., New York). The Burning Bed by Faith McNulty (1981, Bantam Books, New York).
Dos and Don’ts by Hazelden Family Center (1982, Hazelden Foundation,Center City, Minnesota). Available through Hazelden Educational Materials.
The Hazards of Being Male: Surviving the Myth of Masculine Privilege by Herb Goldberg (1977, New American Library, New York).
The Male Machine by Marc F. Fasteau (1976, Dell Publishing Co., New York).
Male Sexuality: A Guide to Sexual Fulfillment by Bernie Zilbergeld(1978, Bantam Books, New York).
Men and Masculinity edited by Joseph H. Pleck and Jack Sawyer (1974,Prentice-Hall, New Jersey).
The New Assertive Woman by Lynn Z. Bloom, Karen Coburn, and JoanPearlman (1976, Dell Publishing Co., New York). Available throughHazelden Educational Materials.
Like you, I don’t have much to say about this particular contrived controversy. No one in my day-to-day life seems interested in it. The only place I see it come up is on social media where some of my fundamentalist Christian immediate and extended family members post rants about this sort of thing. So, in short, the only people I’ve seen getting up in arms about this are people who think abortion is murder and that Planned Parenthood is therefore an employer of baby-killing mass murderers. Of course someone who thinks that is going to be offended by the selling of fetal tissue and is more than happy to think the worst of a group like Planned Parenthood.