Pro-life activists from The Center for Medical Progress posed as fetal tissue buyers in meetings with Planned Parenthood employees, and began posting their shocking findings in a series of videos in July.
Planned Parenthood took the videos very seriously, and hired crisis communications firm SKDKnickerbocker at the end of July to snuff out media coverage of the videos.
Many conservative members of the U.S. legislature have called for the investigation and defunding of Planned Parenthood, however Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell said it wouldn't happen as long as President Barack Obama is in office.
Gathered below are eight things we've learned from the videos.
1. Planned Parenthood is selling aborted fetal organs — The early Planned Parenthood videos showed more than one abortion doctor haggling over prices for fetal organs. It is illegal to sell fetal tissue for a profit, and the videos raised many questions about whether the organization was violating the law. Planned Parenthood defended itself by saying it was merely trying to recoup the shipping and handling fees associated with tissue donation.
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2. Abortion doctors made jokes about the fetuses they killed — Planned Parenthood’s Dr. Mary Gatter joked in one video that she wanted a "Lamborghini" in exchange for fetal organs when negotiating prices.
3. Abortions are sometimes performed on babies as they're being born — In the ninth video, Perrin Larton, second-trimester fetal tissue procurement manager for Advanced Bioscience Resources Inc., a
Planned Parenthood contractor, explained what she's encountered herself.
"I literally have had women come in and they’ll go in the O.R. and they’re back out in three minutes, and I’m going, 'What’s going on?' Oh yeah, the fetus was already in the vaginal canal whenever we put her in the stirrups, it just fell out."
4. Abortion providers sometimes use the cardiotoxic drug digoxin to kill babies in the womb — "Providers who use digoxin use it for one of two reasons,"
Planned Parenthood doctor Deborah Nucatola says in the video released July 14. "There’s a group of people who just use it so they have no risk of violating the Federal Abortion Ban. Because if you induce a demise before the procedure, nobody’s going to say you did a 'live' — whatever the federal government calls it. Partial-birth abortion."
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After inducing a heart attack that kills the baby, Nocatola explained that many abortionists "actually think it makes the tissue softer and it makes it safer and easier to do the procedure."
5. Digoxin renders fetal tissue unusable for donation, so crushing the fetus is preferable — Planned Parenthood’s Dr. Mary Gatter explained in the second video that many drugs used to kill babies in the womb taint the tissue, making the fetal stem cells unusable for scientists.
This makes clear why Dr. Nucatola's explained in the first video that she usually crushes the baby's head with forceps and other tools inside the womb before removing it from the mother's body.
6. One baby born intact had its face cut off for brain harvesting — Holly O’Donnell, a former Blood and Tissue Procurement Technician for StemExpress, explained in the seventh video that a nearly intact late-term fetus aborted at Planned Parenthood Mar Monte’s Alameda clinic in San Jose, California, was instructed to harvest brain tissue from a dead fetus.
"She gave me the scissors and told me that I had to cut down the middle of the face. I can’t even describe what that feels like," O'Donnell said, referring to instructions from her supervisor.
7. Abortion doctors can make the heart of an aborted baby beat — "And she just taps the heart, and it starts beating," O'Donnell continued her story. "And I’m sitting here and I’m looking at this fetus, and its heart is beating, and I don’t know what to think . . . I don’t know if that constitutes it’s technically dead, or it’s alive."
8. Major news outlets refuse to cover the videos — "In fact, the three broadcast networks, ABC, NBC and CBS, haven’t reported on a single video exposing Planned Parenthood’s trafficking of aborted babies during their news shows in 31 days — or one full month," the
Media Research Center’s Katie Yoder wrote August 31.
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"The last time a network mentioned a particular video came July 31, when CBS This Morning correspondent Julianna Goldman acknowledged the fourth video."
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