Undercover video of a high-ranking Planned Parenthood official casually discussing the graphic dismemberment of the unborn rocked the abortion debate last week, and the head of the group behind the video says there’s much more to come.
The initial video focused on Planned Parenthood conducting abortions in a manner that would preserve fetal organs intact. The Human Capital Project of the Center for Medical Progress produced the video, alleging Planned Parenthood sells the body parts of aborted babies for profit. That is a violation of federal law punishable by imprisonment and hefty fines. Planned Parenthood says it donates fetal tissue for medical research and only charges for the amount needed to be reimbursed for its efforts to donate the specimens.
Reaction to the both the content of the video and the casual manner in which Planned Parenthood Senior Director of Medical Services Dr. Deborah Nucatola describes such grisly actions elicited a swift response. Five states and three congressional committees are launching investigations.
Center for Medical Progress President David Deleiden says this video was part of a 30-month undercover operation at Planned Parenthood. He says what we’ve seen thus far is just the tip of the iceberg.
“We have dozens and dozens of hours of very shocking, troubling footage and admissions from within the top levels of the abortion industry and Planned Parenthood, coming straight from the words of top level Planned Parenthood executives and officials and medical directors and abortion doctors,” said Deleiden.
And it doesn’t stop there.
“We have probably 100-200 pages of Planned Parenthood body parts purchases, internal documents about the practice,” he said.
Several of those documents have already been posted to the group’s website.
Deleiden says other compelling video will emerge as well.
“We also have very compelling eyewitness testimony from people who were actually in real life involved in the harvesting of aborted baby parts at Planned Parenthood clinics,” he said.
The roll-out of the videos and documents will come over the coming days and weeks. Deleiden says there are good reasons for this to come out in stages.
“The whole issue of Planned Parenthood’s baby parts sales is such a complex and multi-layered phenomenon that it’s really important, especially in out 24-hour news cycle, that each piece of evidence gets a fair hearing and gets all the attention that is due to it, so that you don’t actually lose the audience as you’re trying to move forward and educate the public about everything that’s going on,” he said.
How did the harvesting and alleged selling of unborn baby body parts become the focal point of this probe? Deleiden says he and his allies did not know much about the issue when the undercover work started because no one had aggressively investigated it in the past 15 years.
“There’s sort of been a renaissance of fetal tissue harvesting at Planned Parenthood Clinics in the past five years. That was the extent of our knowledge getting into this whole project. Really, everything we’ve learned we’ve learned from the mouths of the abortion doctors and the Planned Parenthood leaders themselves. So we just listened and continued to add to the pile of evidence for two-and-a-half years,” said Deleiden.
On Thursday, Planned Parenthood President Cecille Richards released a video statement to respond to the allegations from the Center for Medical Progress. Richards vehemently denies selling aborted baby parts for profit but admits to donating fetal tissue for research if the families wish to do so. She denounced the Center for Medical Progress but did apologize for the tone of Dr. Nucatola’s comments as lacking compassion.
Deleiden is not impressed.
“It’s a pretty belated apology, coming three days late from Planned Parenthood. I’m also curious what they think is compassionate about saving a baby’s head for laughs or making sure that you don’t crush a certain part so you can sell it later. It seems to me like it’s less of an apology and more of a cynical, last-minute excuse,” he said, noting the tone doesn’t change in the videos still to be released.
“The kind of conversation that our investigators had with Planned Parenthood’s new director of medical services was pretty much mirrored in every other conversation that we had with their abortion doctors. There were many statements made over the past two-and-a-half years that were even more shocking than what was said at that lunch meeting,” said Deleiden.
He says Nucatola’s comments also give lie to Planned Parenthood’s insistence that patient safety is always the top priority.
“If Planned Parenthood is really a legitimate medical provider, you’re expecting them to put the interests of the patient first. As the Planned Parenthood senior director of medical services says in the video, when they are manipulating the abortion procedure and changing things about their technique with the goal of getting better body parts for sale, they’re not putting the interests of the patient first,” said Deleiden.
As for the long-term impact on the abortion debate, Deleiden says these videos will demonstrate how illogical abortion laws really are.
“According to our laws, an unborn child is not considered fully human enough to be fully protected by the law. They’re not protected from being killed by abortion. At the same time, it’s precisely because of their humanity that their body parts are so valuable for sale to biotech companies and for scientific experimentation. That’s why researchers hunt after their body parts like buried treasure,” he said.
“It’s a really disturbing paradox to a lot of people, where we’re saying children are more valuable dead than alive,” said Deleiden.
