Planned Parenthood Exec caught on tape...again!

Just in time for the government shutdown deadline this weekend, The Center for Medical Progress releases another video of a Planned Parenthood Exec discussing the price of fetal parts. She is the same woman who was caught on film discussing prices for fetal parts a few years ago. Some people never seem to learn! She asks, "What kind of volume do you need and what gestational ages?"

Supressing free speech and covering up

Joe Cunningham reports at Red State that Stem Express, the group which Planned Parenthood has been selling body parts to, has obtained a restraining order against the Center for Medical Progress, which is the group that has been investigating Planned Parenthood. The restraining order prevents them from releasing any more videos for the time being. CMP has a video taken of three Stem Express officials in May.

Cunningham brings us CMP’s statement on the restraining order:

StemExpress, a for-profit company partnered with over 30 abortion clinics, including Planned Parenthood, to harvest and sell aborted baby parts and provide a “financial benefit” to Planned Parenthood clinics, is attempting to use meritless litigation to cover-up this illegal baby parts trade, suppress free speech, and silence the citizen press reporting on issues of burning concern to the American public. They are not succeeding—their initial petition was rejected by the court, and their second petition was eviscerated to a narrow and contingent order about an alleged recording pending CMP’s opportunity to respond. The Center for Medical Progress follows all applicable laws in the course of our investigative journalism work and will contest all attempts from Planned Parenthood and their allies to silence our First Amendment rights and suppress investigative journalism.

Read more here.

Silence is how you kill the story

Mark Steyn writes that Planned Parenthood's

ministrations fall disproportionately on minority women, so in that sense it is still true to the racist and eugenicist theories of its founder, Margaret Sanger: among blacks in New York City, there are more abortions than births - a grim ratio one otherwise has to go to Russia and its satellites to find.

Will the recently released undercover videos change the perception of what Planned Parenthood does? In USA Today, Kirsten Powers (a rare pro-life Democrat) notes that PP head honcho Cecile Richards has apparently apologized for "the uncompassionate tone her senior director of medical research, Deborah Nucatola, used to explain the process by which she harvests aborted body parts to be provided for medical research". "Dr" Nucatola's "tone" is certainly arresting. As she explains to a potential organ client over lunch:

You're just kind of cognizant of where you put your graspers, you try to intentionally go above and below the thorax, so that, you know, we've been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I'm not gonna crush that part, I'm gonna basically crush below, I'm gonna crush above, and I'm gonna see if I can get it all intact.

That's the easy part. But these days a lot of customers are interested in harvesting an intact brain to work on, so you gotta keep your graspers away from crushing the head - or, as "Dr" Nucatola prefers to call it, the "calvarium":

With the calvarium, in general, some people will actually try to change the presentation so that it's not vertex, because when it's vertex presentation, you never have enough dilation at the beginning of the case, unless you have real, huge amount of dilation to deliver an intact calvarium. So if you do it starting from the breech presentation, there's dilation that happens as the case goes on, and often, the last, you can evacuate an intact calvarium at the end.

The chit-chat's all nice and medical, isn't it? If it's "vertex presentation" - ie, the baby comes out head-first - it's hard to get a nice clean intact skull. But, if it's "breech" - feet-first - then "you can evacuate an intact calvarium".

If it is, as Ms Richards says, merely a "tone" problem, it's a revealing one. It's not possible to "crush" as many nine-month-old "fetuses" as "Dr" Nucatola does and still retain your humanity. If would be an unbearable burden to regard the "fetus" as a baby and the "calvarium" as a head and the "evacuation" as a birth, and still go to work in the morning. So the de-humanization is part of what's necessary to survive as an abortionist.

In her USA Today column, Kirsten Powers adds:

It's a measure of how damning the video is that Planned Parenthood's usual defenders were nowhere to be found. There was total silence from The New York Times editorial board and their 10 (out of 11) pro-abortion rights columnists. Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi — both recipients of Planned Parenthood's highest honor, the Margaret Sanger Award — have been mum.

The silence is not from shame, or from having to defend the indefensible, but part of a much colder calculation: Silence is how you kill the story, for Planned Parenthood as for Gosnell.

And that's part of the dehumanization, too. When kids are slaughtered in a Connecticut schoolhouse or churchgoers are shot down in Charleston, the media jump straight on the public policy implications: gun control, Confederate flags at state buildings... But when baby parts are sold by an organization that receives half-a-billion in taxpayer funds, there are no public policy questions at all, and it is necessary to look away. Because the realities of abortion have to be crushed and smothered by the slick, blurry evasions of "a woman's right to choose". That's a dehumanization strategy, too. When the pro-choice rally ends and Cameron Diaz, Ashley Judd and other celebrities d'un certain age return to Hollywood, and the upper-middle-class women with the one designer baby go back to their suburbs, poor and minority and under-age women are left in the abortion-industrial complex's pro-choice back alley

Read more here.

California Attorney General to go after group that exposed Planned Parenthood

Here it comes. AP reports,

SACRAMENTO, Calif. --
California Attorney General Kamala Harris said Friday that she plans to review two undercover videos released by anti-abortion activists aimed at discrediting Planned Parenthood's procedures for providing fetal tissue to researchers, to see if any laws were broken.

Harris announced the move in a letter to four Democratic members of Congress who had requested an investigation, saying she'll use her office's authority to regulate charity organizations to see if the organization that made the videos violated registration or reporting requirements, or broke any other rules. Harris, a Democrat, plans to run for the U.S. Senate in 2016.

"We will carefully review the allegations raised in your letter to determine whether there were any violations of California law," Harris said in the letter to four members of the U.S. House of Representatives.

She said her office will look into "allegations that individuals impersonated corporate officials from a fake biologics company, resulting in the release of secretly filmed videos of Planned Parenthood physicians without their consent."

Thanks to William Teach, who writes at Pirate's Cove,

Democrats are Very Concerned over an undercover group exposing Planned Parenthood, but not that PP officials were offering to sell aborted baby tissue and everything else that went with the videos. Then again, they aren’t concerned with abortions in the first place. This is, once again, political targeting by elected Democrats. Go after the whistle blowers. Investigate the exposers, not the wrong doers.

Update from Politico:

JUSTICE TO PROBE CENTER FOR MEDICAL PROGRESS — While congressional committees investigate Planned Parenthood’s practices, the Justice Department agreed to look into whether the group that released the sting videos obtained the footage legally. In response to a request by House Democrats, Attorney General Loretta Lynch saidWednesday afternoon that Justice would “review all of the information and determine what the appropriate steps moving forward would be.” Planned Parenthood has staunchly defended its practices and claims that the Center for Medical Progress illegally obtained its footage, then excessively edited it to misrepresent what the organization does.

— Center Executive Director David Daleiden isn't phased. "They will attack me and my organization all day long, but that does not change the facts about what our investigation has uncovered and what the American people now know — that Planned Parenthood is engaged in an enterprise-wide operation that traffics and sells baby body parts," he said in a statement.

Stomach turning

Kirsten Powers writes in USA Today,

Planned Parenthood head Cecile Richards apologized last week for the uncompassionate tone her senior director of medical research, Deborah Nucatola, used to explain the process by which she harvests aborted body parts to be provided for medical research.

Nucatola had been caught on an undercover video talking to anti-abortion activists posing as representatives of a biological tissue procurement company. The abortion doctor said, “I’d say a lot of people want liver,” and “a lot of people want intact hearts these days.” Explaining how she could perform later-term abortions to aid the harvesting of such intact organs, she said, “We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.”

A second undercover video released Tuesday shows another Planned Parenthood official talking about using a “less crunchy” way to perform abortions while preserving salable fetal tissue.

This is stomach-turning stuff. But the problem here is not one of tone. It’s the crushing. It’s the organ harvesting of fetuses that abortion-rights activists want us to believe have no more moral value than a fingernail. It’s the lie that these are not human beings worthy of protection. There is no nice way to talk about this. As my friend and former Obama White House staffer Michael Wear tweeted, “It should bother us as a society that we have use for aborted human organs, but not the baby that provides them.”

Read more here.

A second video of a Planned Parenthood official caught on camera haggling over the prices of aborted baby parts

Sean Davis writes at The Federalist,

One week after Planned Parenthood was rocked by video-taped admissions of the harvesting and sale of aborted baby body parts, a new video has surfaced, and this one may be more shocking than the first. In one portion of the video, a top medical officer for Planned Parenthood says she wants a good price for aborted baby remains because, “I want a Lamborghini.”

In the newly released video, which was obtained by the Center for Medical Progress, another top official with Planned Parenthood is caught on camera haggling over the prices of aborted baby parts and admitting that she’ll alter the method of abortion used in order to harvest organs for eventual sale.

“What would you expect for intact tissue?” a prospective buyer of fetal remains asks Dr. Mary Gatter, the medical director for Planned Parenthood Los Angeles, over what appears to be a meal in a public restaurant.

“Why don’t you start by telling me what you’re used to paying?” Gatter replies.

Read more here.

Not human until outside the womb?

Darleen posts at Protein Wisdom,

Isn’t it interesting that Planned Parenthood and its advocates are adamant that unborn babies are never human beings until completely outside of the womb; yet they are human enough to have parts and organs valuable enough to harvest and sell.

Read more here.

French media picks up Planned Parenthood sale of baby organs story, while American media continues to ignore the story

Ace of Spades posts an extensive article here in the French media about the Planned Parenthood sales of baby organs here in America. Ace adds,

So, it's news in other places. Just not in America, the land of free speech and the free press.