Former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel once said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste when it’s an opportunity to do things you had never considered or you didn’t think were possible.” There’s no better advice for Republicans when it comes to the recent scandal involving Planned Parenthood’s selling of aborted baby parts.

Since the release of several videos from the Center for Medical Progress showing Planned Parenthood officials discussing how they crush babies and harvest their parts, the abortion provider is definitely in crisis. It should be. It takes a lot of public-relations savvy to manage comments as horrific as, “Here’s the heart. My fingers will smoosh it if I try to pick it up. The heart is right there… A lot of times I’ll get a full torso, spine, kidneys. You could send the whole thing or pick that apart… It’s a baby,” or “We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver… so I’m not going to crush that part. I’m basically going to crush below, I’m going to crush above and I’m going to see if I can get it all intact.”

In the latest video, an abortionist discusses harvesting organs from babies older than 16 weeks and coldly says, “If we alter our process, and we are able to obtain intact fetal cadavers, we can make it part of the budget that any dissections are this, and splitting the specimens into different shipments is this. It’s all just a matter of line items.”

In response to the videos, Planned Parenthood hired a crisis management firm, the Democratic-aligned SKDKnickerbocker. But even they want to keep their distance from the abortion provider despite their business arrangement.

Planned Parenthood is definitely in crisis and, as Emanuel said, Republicans need to see this as an opportunity to make real change, to bring about lasting reform. That reform plan needs to have three parts: defund, develop, and de-legalize. Unless all three are accomplished, the Republican Party will have let this serious crisis go to waste. 

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