Planned Parenthood offers defense in baby-parts probe
Critic: Letter to Congress itself contains admission of improper activity
Published: 10 hours ago
Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards has written to Congress to defend the nation’s biggest abortion industry player from allegations it is involved in the baby parts resale business, but critics say the letter itself contains admissions of wrongdoing.
Planned Parenthood has been under the spotlight of a horrified nation for the last few weeks as the Center for Medical Progress has been releasing videos it obtained when it dispatched undercover video investigators to Planned Parenthood and other abortion industry locations to ask questions about the trade in the body parts of unborn babies – or even full cadavers.
The result has been a series of revelatory videos showing Planned Parenthood executives negotiating for the best price for the parts. One executive not only worried about not being “low-balled,” but she also said she wanted a Lamborghini, a $200,000-plus exotic car, as a result.
Four congressional committees, as well as several states, are investigating claims that Planned Parenthood profited from the business, which is disallowed under federal law, and also altered procedures to obtain the parts, which also is disallowed under the law.
Several other states have concluded their investigations with no charges.
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On Thursday Richards sent an 11-page letter to members of Congress to try to turn the attention onto the investigators rather than the abortionists.
She confirmed that Planned Parenthood was getting $60 “per tissue specimen” but called that a “modest reimbursement.” And she confirmed, “even adjustments that facilitate fetal tissue donations rarely occur at our few clinics that offer women this service.”
David Daleiden, the chief of CMP, noted the admissions.
“Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards makes two key admissions today in Planned Parenthood’s letter to Congress: that Planned Parenthood gets paid $60 per baby body part harvested, and that Planned Parenthood doctors alter their abortion procedures to get higher-quality body parts.”
He continued, “Both of these admissions speak to Planned Parenthood’s financial benefit and profit motive for supplying fetal tissue, and both are the points CMP’s videos have documented and illustrated from the very beginning. When a tissue procurement organization handles all dissection, packaging, and shipping of fetal organs, and all Planned Parenthood does is spend 10 minutes consenting a patient, the $60 per body part harvested quickly adds up to illegal baby parts profit for Planned Parenthood.
“And when a Planned Parenthood doctor manipulates the abortion to get higher-quality baby parts, they are prizing Planned Parenthood’s financial interests ahead of women’s health,” he said.
Richards’ letter charged that the CMP videos are manipulated, “replete with distortions and selective editing,” even though the full videos have been made available by CMP. She accused the CMP of illegal activity and said, “there is absolutely no indication [abortion centers] have deviated from the law or done anything inappropriate.”
She suggested Congress, instead, should be investigating CMP.
She charged that the investigators may have violated laws against misrepresentation, forgery, fraud and perjury, recording individuals without their consent and impersonation.
She suggested Congress consider how its members would like to be investigated, and said she hopes her letter “will help put us on a different path.”
The most recent video, on which WND reported earlier this week, included a statement from Cate Dyer, of StemExpress, which until just recently was a major partner with Planned Parenthood in the business of retrieving the body parts of unborn infants and selling them to researchers, that she would like, “Another 50 livers a week.”
It was the eighth video released by the Center for Medical Progress, and reveals the stunning possibility that some aborted babies are being legally "born alive."
The newest video was released after a judge in California ruled a week ago that the organization had a First Amendment right to release it.
The judge also suggested that the conversation was private, even though it was in a public room in a restaurant, and that issue still may have to be litigated.
The StemExpress video reveals the company "gets a lot of intact fetuses" and suggests "another 50 livers a week" still would not be enough to meet demand, CMP said.
"StemExpress is the 'weakest link' that unravels Planned Parenthood’s baby parts chain – they readily admit the profit-motive that Planned Parenthood and their proxies have in supplying aborted baby parts," said Daleiden. "Congress and law enforcement should immediately seize all fetal tissue files from StemExpress and all communications and contracts with Planned Parenthood. The evidence that Planned Parenthood profits from the sale of aborted baby parts is now overwhelming, and not one more dime of taxpayer money should go to their corrupt and fraudulent criminal enterprise."
Dyer also complains of a lack of supplies.
"So many physicians are like, 'Oh I can totally procure tissue,' and they can't," she said.
When asked about "intact specimens," she states, "Oh yeah, I mean if you have intact cases, which we've done a lot, we sometimes ship those back to our lab in its entirety."
CMP said "case" is the clinical term for an abortion procedure. An "intact case" refers to an intact abortion with a whole fetus.
The actor from CMP responds, "The entire case?"
"Yeah, yeah," said Dyer. "The procurement for us, I mean it can go really sideways, depending on the facility, and then our samples are destroyed. ... So we started bringing them back even to manage it from a procurement expert standpoint."
CMP reported feticidal chemicals like digoxin "cannot be used to kill the fetus in a tissue procurement case, so a fetus delivered intact for organ harvesting is likely to be a born-alive infant."
Asked what would make her happy, Dyer said: "Another 50 livers a week. We're working with almost like triple digit number clinics and we still need more."
She cited Planned Parenthood as "a volume institution."
The Operation Rescue organization, whose president, Troy Newman, is on the board of CMP, noted the latest video.
Operation Rescue cited the profit motive discussed.
"There can be no doubt of the profit motive behind Planned Parenthood's participation in the illegal selling of aborted baby remains. If they say otherwise, they are just trying to deny their part in criminal conduct. Right now, everyone at Planned Parenthood is trying to save their own hides from criminal prosecution, so they'll never admit to anything," said Newman.
Dyer also discusses, as WND reported immediately after the judge's ruling on the video, that shipping neural tissue is difficult. The solution is to ship babies' severed heads intact.
"And I mean, we've actually had good success with that," she said.
She also describes why many researchers are squeamish about using fetal tissue.
"Because they sort of want to get away from having to publish a picture – a paper that says this was derived from fetal tissue," she explained.
Read the tested and proven strategies to defeat the abortion cartel, in "Abortion Free: Your Manual for Building a Pro-Life America One Community at a Time."
Watch the No. 7 undercover video released by CMP. (Warning: Graphic content):
The first undercover video released by CMP:
See the other five videos that already have been released (more are reportedly coming):
No. 6:
No. 5:
No. 4:
No. 3:
No. 2:
An old story
WND also has reported that as horrific as the videos appear, they should surprise no one, since such practices have been documented for nearly two decades already.
A price list uncovered by a pro-life organization dated June 1998 shows that the price per specimen from a second trimester abortion is $90 fresh and $130 frozen.
Mark Crutcher, whose Life Dynamics organization was a ground-breaker in investigating the abortion behemoth that gets some $500 million annually from U.S. taxpayers, worked on that investigation.
His group reported back in February 2000 how the baby parts market works: "A baby parts 'wholesaler' enters into a financial agreement with an abortion clinic in which the wholesaler pays a monthly 'site fee' to the clinic. For this payment, the wholesaler is allowed to place a retrieval agent inside the clinic where he or she is given access to the corpses of children killed there and a workspace to harvest their parts."
He continued: "The buyer – usually a researcher working for a medical school, pharmaceutical company, bio-tech company or government agency – supplies the wholesaler with a list of the baby parts wanted. … when such orders are received … they are faxed to the retrieval agent at the clinic who harvests the requested parts and ships them to the buyer."
The documentation was provided at that time to Life Dynamics by a worker who left Comprehensive Health for Women, a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in Overland Park, Kansas.
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Among the documents was a "Fee-for-Services" Schedule A, effective June 1998, which outlined a charge of $220 per specimen for first-trimester aspiration abortions and $260 if the baby parts were frozen.
Crutcher's report, citing Planned Parenthood's own paperwork, found that one agent sold during February 1996 alone 47 livers, 11 liver fragments, seven brains, 21 eyes, eight thymuses, 23 legs, 14 pancreases, 14 lungs, six arms and one kidney-adrenal gland.
He also sold three orders of blood from the unborn child. The retrieval agent "harvested all of the parts," the report said, explaining that "in order for the blood of an aborted child to be sold, the dead baby had to be brought to him intact."
The "specimens," the report said, would have generated up to about $25,000 in revenue for one month from one retrieval agent at one Planned Parenthood business.
Crutcher reported that the tissue logs reveal that one baby is often chopped up and sold to many buyers.
For example, babies taken from donors 113968 and 114189 were both killed late in their second trimester and cut into nine pieces. By applying the price list, buyers would have been invoiced between $3,510 and $5,070 for these parts, he said.
Read more at
http://www.wnd.com/2015/08/planned-parenthood-offers-defense-in-baby-parts-probe/#JRAwygRY5WPkxVbV.99
