Problem with Planned Parenthood video is tone? Really?

The head of Planned Parenthood is apologizing for the tone used by a staffer as she described how to properly crush the head of a soon-to-be aborted fetus in order to harvest precious body parts.

Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards says Deborah Nucatola's comments don't reflect the compassion Planned Parenthood workers feel as they go about performing abortions.

"Our top priority is the compassionate care that we provide," she said Thursday, in a videotaped statement. "In the video, one of our staff members speaks in a way that does not reflect that compassion, this is unacceptable and I personally apologize for the staff member's tone and statements."

By "one of our staff members" she means the organization's senior director of medical services, not some low-level employee in Boise.

By decrying tone, Richards implies that what Nucatola said is OK. She just should have sugared it up some and perhaps not discussed it over a glass of Pinot.

Sorry Cecile, not buying it.

I've long supported a woman's right to choose what to do with her own body up to a point, hoping that abortion is a choice made rarely and early. Hoping that everybody involved respects the enormity of what they do.

Hoping that women will find it in their hearts to do otherwise but believing that it's their choice. Up to a point.

Yet this woman, one of Planned Parenthood's top officials, talks as if she's removing a tumor.

No matter how you feel about abortion, you cannot help but feel queasy as you listen to Nucatola talk about the gruesome process of partial-birth abortion and the harvesting of body parts.

But is it her tone that's really the problem?

Or is it what she's describing -- a horror story that is apparently repeated every day, all over America?

"I'd say a lot of people want liver," Nocatola says on the sting video. "And for that reason, most providers will do this case under ultrasound guidance so they'll know where they're putting their forceps. The kind of rate-limiting step of the procedure is the calvarium. Calvarium — the head — is basically the biggest part. . . . We've been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I'm not gonna crush that part. I'm gonna basically crush below, I'm gonna crush above, and I'm gonna see if I can get it all intact. And with the calvarium, in general, some people will actually try to change the presentation so that it's not vertex. . . . So if you do it starting from the breech presentation, there's dilation that happens as the case goes on, and often, the last step, you can evacuate an intact calvarium at the end."

Nucatola also discusses the going rate for a body part -- $30 to $100, depending on the clinic.

"They just want to do it in a way that is not perceived as: This clinic is selling tissue. This clinic is making money off this," she explained. "In the Planned Parenthood world, they're very, very sensitive to that."

Clearly, Planned Parenthood is all about sensitivity.

Richards says the organization doesn't profit from the sale of those body parts – the $30 to $100 Nucatola mentions in the video -- but only charges fees that cover the cost of providing the various parts to medical researchers.

Then she resorts to the default excuse of those under fire: Nucatola's comments were taken out of context.

That may be but suddenly, abortion is looking a little different. Suddenly, it doesn't sound like a simple medical procedure or just a morning-after problem that can be washed away with a couple of pills.

And I am left to wonder whether it's time for a real gut check in America.