The secretly recorded Planned Parenthood videos have done nothing to incriminate the organization's employees, said the president of Planned Parenthood, Cecile Richards.
According to
The New York Times, Richards emphasized that staff repeatedly said the clinics did not seek profit, merely reimbursement for the expense of providing fetal tissue.
"No doctor ever signed a contract with these folks," Richards told the Times. "They repeatedly said we don't do this for financial gain."
The "video stalking," she added, "is really part of a much larger and longer campaign to try to end access to both safe and legal abortion" and "certainly to end access to Planned Parenthood."
On Monday, Republicans in the
Senate failed to pass a bill that would end federal funding for Planned Parenthood.
But the fight is not expected to end there. A number of Republicans have vowed to resurrect it when the spending bill comes up for debate in September,
potentially forcing a government shutdown.
Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton last week criticized Republicans for their response to the videos, even though she conceded the videos were "disturbing."
"If this feels like a full-on assault on women's health, that's because it is," she said, according to the Times.
Meanwhile, more videos are set to be released in the coming weeks, according to
David Daleiden, founder of the Center for Medical Progress, who said he had hundreds of undercover video footage that was shot over 20 months.
Richards was resolute in her condemnation of the group.
"The depravity of these tactics and the invasion — the willingness of this group to invade the most personal, private space and to violate the medical relationships — I've never seen anything as low," Richards told the Times.
"These folks — they lied, they put up fake businesses," she said. "They displayed at medical conferences as if they were actually concerned about fetal tissue research."
She added, "Our doctors — they are not detectives. They assume that people who claim good intentions, who claim that they're about medical research to benefit women and families on everything from Alzheimer's to ALS [Lou Gehrig's disease] to sickle cell anemia — they take them at their word."
Abortions account for less than 10 percent of the services provided by Planned Parenthood nationwide, according to Richards. She added that just "a handful" of the group's 59 affiliates with 700 health centers had fetal tissue programs.
Richard said that fetal tissue transfers would continue despite the controversy.
"I feel strongly that even though it is a very small part of what Planned Parenthood does, that women and families who choose to make fetal tissue donations, that decision or that choice that they have made is really important to them," she said.
"And that research is really important to millions of Americans."
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