"Everything We Provide Is Fresh:" New Planned Parenthood Video Talks Up Harvesting Children for Money

Maybe the most ghoulish quotes yet.

They describe their business as a chop shop for babies.

And they seem to be talking about profiting in the trade of money for organs, which would put them afoul of the law.

The video highlights conversations with Dr. Carolyn Westhoff, Senior Medical Advisor for PPFA; Dr. Vanessa Cullins, Vice President for External Medical Affairs for PPFA; and Deborah VanDerhei, National Director for the Consortium of Abortion Providers (CAPS) at PPFA.

"We've just been working with people who want particular tissues, like, you know, they want cardiac, or they want eyes, or they want neural," says Dr. Westhoff to a prospective fetal organ buyer. "Certainly, everything we provide--oh, gonads! Oh my God, gonads. Everything we provide is fresh."

Westhoff continues, "Obviously, we would have the potential for a huge P.R. issue in doing this," before offering to introduce the buyers to "national office abortion people" from Planned Parenthood.

Deborah VanDerhei is the National Director for CAPS, an influential committee within Planned Parenthood that drives abortion policy across the organization. VanDerhei refers to payments for fetal tissue as "donation for remuneration," which carries the connotation of financial reward or benefit without regard for actual expenses. VanDerhei explains, "I have been talking to the executive director of the National Abortion Federation, we're trying to figure this out as an industry, about how we're going to manage remuneration, because the headlines would be a disaster."

"Is this really worth getting--I don't even know what in general, what a specimen generally brings in?" VanDerhei later asks a prospective buyer. When she is told $100 per specimen, she remarks, "But we have independent colleagues who generate a fair amount of income doing this." VanDerhei suggests that Planned Parenthood goes to great lengths to avoid leaving a paper trail about their fetal tissue activity: "It's an issue that you might imagine we’re not really that comfortable talking about on email."

The only oversold aspect, which I've seen in many of these vids, is that the officials in question are not on the selling-organs-for-money side of things, but are instead guessing about what that side of the "industry" looks like. Further, they usually are not the ones bringing up money at all; that's CMP, pushing on that issue.

Still, if anyone had the idea that it was "clumps of cells" being extracted from women's bodies, this ought to disabuse such people of that.

Republicans have responded with a, get this, compromise on Planned Parenthood funding.

As the House and Senate return on Tuesday to begin confronting a spending impasse, Representative Charlie Dent, a moderate Republican from Pennsylvania, says he has come up with a way to avert a possible government shutdown over Planned Parenthood funding: a bill that would take away money only from clinics involved in selling tissue from aborted fetuses.

...

Mr. Dent plans to offer a bill similar to the one written by the Republican senators Susan Collins of Maine, Mark S. Kirk of Illinois and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska that would only defund those specific clinics -- about seven in three states, Mr. Dent said -- while leaving the funding in place for the scores of other Planned Parenthood clinics in the country. That bill never got a vote in the Senate, which instead took up and rejected a measure to take all federal funding from Planned Parenthood, and a similar measure is expected on the House floor this week.

Mr. Dent's bill -- which has some Republican support but no Democrats yet -- would also require a 90-day investigation by the attorney general and tweaks to language in the current law that would make it even more difficult for health care workers to change the way they perform abortions to help extract tissues for sale.

This seems designed deliberately to miss the point, and to actually help Planned Parenthood, by removing a PR nightmare from their plate. Pro-life people are interested in defunding Planned Parenthood to stop abortions, not merely in stopping the trade in organs post-abortion. The exposure of the trade in organs is being used as leverage to generally agitate against the procedure of abortion, and at the least, cut out forced taxpayer funding for it.

Dent's bill seems to miss all that, and just help Planned Parenthood by forcing it to give up on its PR nightmare practice, while still keeping the taxpayer-paid abortion regime in place.

This is a Democrat sort of bill, a bill that removes Planned Parenthood from the headlines so that the quiet taxpayer funding can continue.

Or at least it's what an old-style Democrat bill would look like -- now Democrats just dig in their heels and say "NO. No to every single thing you say."

And our guys keep trying to compromise with them. Because they have to prove they can govern or something.

posted by Ace at 01:53 PM

| Access Comments