Pro-life groups ratcheted up their attacks on Planned Parenthood Tuesday after a fifth undercover video surfaced — this time showing staffers discussing the sale of "intact fetuses" and how the organization sells fetal parts to enhance the "diversification of the revenue stream."
"It raises the disturbing question as to whether some of these babies are born alive and then killed," said Father Frank Pavone, the national director of Priests for Life.
"Kermit Gosnell is serving life sentences for doing that," said Pavone, referring to the Philadelphia abortion doctor who began serving a life sentence in 2013 for murdering three infants who had been born alive during attempted abortion procedures in his office.
"It may be time for some Planned Parenthood doctors to join him in prison."
"These clips are so hard to watch because they really show how horrible abortion is," said a spokesman for March for Life in Washington. "If seeing little human beings in pieces in a dish doesn’t break your heart, you don’t have a pulse.
"We must hold Planned Parenthood accountable for these human-rights abuses."
Arina Grossu, director of the Center for Human Dignity at the Family Research Council, said that "the fifth video is the most devastating yet. Planned Parenthood sees aborted children as 'line items' to diversify their 'revenue stream.'
"Planned Parenthood endangers women and scavenges through baby parts for sale, yet receives over half-a-billion taxpayer dollars a year," Grossu said. "Congress must investigate Planned Parenthood, defund it, and reallocate this money to the thousands of healthcare centers around the nation that provide a broader array of medical services than Planned Parenthood."
In the latest video from the Center for Medical Progress, Melissa Farrell, director of research for Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, discusses the organization's rationale behind the sale of the "intact fetuses."
"Just depending on the patient's anatomy, how many weeks, where it's placed in the uterus ... we're going to potentially be able to have some that will be more or less intact, and then some that will not be," Farrell says. "But it's something that we can look at exploring how we can make that happen so we have a higher chance.
"We've had studies in which the company, or in the case of the investigator, has a specific need for a certain portion of the products of conception and we bake that into our contract, and our protocol, that we follow this," she later adds. "So we deviate from our standard in order to do that."
Planned Parenthood has long denied selling body parts and organs for profit — saying that it only donates the remains to for-profit and nonprofit entities.
"If we alter our process and we are able to obtain intact fetal cadavers, then we can make it part of the budget, that any dissections are this, and splitting the specimens into different shipments is this," Farrell says in the video. "I mean, it's all just a matter of line items."
Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called Tuesday's footage "repulsive and unconscionable."
The state's attorney general, Ken Paxton, said the video was "simply appalling." He is leading an investigation into Planned Parenthood in his state because of the previous videos.
Cecile Richards, Planned Parenthood's president, has said that none of the videos showed organizational staff actually selling the human remains.
"No doctor ever signed a contract with these folks," she told
The New York Times. "They repeatedly said we don't do this for financial gain."
However, her remarks did not stop Republican presidential candidates Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and billionaire businessman Donald Trump from calling for Planned Parenthood's defunding.
Trump said Tuesday that the group's federal aid should not be provided, even if it meant shutting down on the government.
The Republican-controlled Senate on Monday
failed to derail Planned Parenthood's funding, losing a 53-46 vote that did not clear the 60-vote threshold needed to keep the measure moving toward passage.
The footage released Tuesday appeared to confirm what Abby Johnson, a former clinic director at Planned Parenthood in Texas, told Newsmax TV about the organization's practices.
"Planned Parenthood is not interested in promoting the health of women," Johnson told "Hard Line" host Ed Berliner on Monday. "They are interested in promoting their bottom line and padding their bottom line — and the best and easiest way that they know how to do that is to sell abortions to vulnerable women who come into their clinics."
Johnson is the author of
"unPLANNED: The True Story of a Former Planned Parenthood Leader’s Courageous Choice in Favor of Life."
"If Planned Parenthood was really interested in reducing the abortion numbers and helping women, they would not impose an abortion quota on their abortion clinics that are affiliated with Planned Parenthood," she added.
Johnson made it clear that Planned Parenthood sold the fetal parts to improve its bottom line.
"We were given a directive to increase the number of abortions to actually double the number of abortions that we had performed in the previous year," she told Berliner. "We were told that we were to turn every phone call and every client visit into a revenue-generating visit — and the only way Planned Parenthood can do that for a woman who comes in who’s pregnant is to sell her an abortion because Planned Parenthood can’t help her through her pregnancy.
"They don’t provide any prenatal … care, and they can’t help her with adoption services," she said.
Other pro-life groups slammed the organization, with Ryan Bomberger, co-founder of the Radiance Foundation in Ashburn, Va., likening Planned Parenthood to some of the world's worst despots throughout history.
"Many refuse to see that the Pol Pots, the Stalins, the transatlantic slave traders, the Mao Zedongs, the Hitlers of world history have simply donned a different outfit, a splashy new pink banner, and a few new euphemisms," Bomberger told Newsmax. "But they’re still the same culprits of corruption and inhuman injustice.
"Science is not supreme," he added. "And the ends rarely justify the means, especially if it means selling our children as line items… in 'war-torn' pieces."
"Once again, these undercover videos show the callousness of Planned Parenthood to eagerly strip away the human dignity of the prenatal child, rip it up (or keep it intact for a higher fee) and sell the baby piece by piece," said Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America.
"Today’s video also shows without a doubt that Planned Parenthood sells the body parts of aborted babies," Hawkins added. "Planned Parenthood is also double-dipping on costs. The mother pays for the abortion and then the fetal tissue company pays for the baby parts."
Charmaine Yoest, president and CEO of Americans United for Life, said that Planned Parenthood’s embracing "of profiting from a culture of infant death paints a video picture worth a thousand words and not worth half-a-billion in taxpayer dollars.
"It’s time to investigate the potentially illegal acts, including possible infanticide evidenced in this latest video, taking place behind the closed doors of Planned Parenthood and to sever their ties to the American taxpayer," she said.
Penny Nance, CEO and president of Concerned Women for America, slammed mainstream news organizations for their "muted" coverage of the debacle.
"Every day, it’s more behind the scenes proof of Planned Parenthood’s blatant disrespect for the lives of babies and their mothers," she told Newsmax. "Yet, the reaction by most news organizations to this taxpayer fueled outrage has been muted to say the least."
On Tuesday Nance wrote CNN President Jeff Zucker, calling on him to sever the network's ties with political contributor Hilary Rosen, who recently joined Planned Parenthood as crisis communications consultant.
"This is the biggest story on abortion in this decade," she told Newsmax. "CNN needs to separate themselves from Planned Parenthood and give serious coverage to this issue.
"The cozy relationship between mainstream media and big abortion is unacceptable."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.