"making huge profits selling and buying fetal tissue"

In the Daily Wire, Phelim McAleer reports,

The judge in the “Baby Body Parts” trial of activist and journalist David Daleiden has ordered the jury find him guilty of trespassing at Planned Parenthood conferences and clinics — before the jury retired to consider a verdict.

...Addressing the jury at the close of the trial, Peter Breen, counsel for Daleiden and his colleagues, said the case is “about the steps it took for private citizen investigators to cut through a curtain of silence and concealment.”

“They didn’t do it for profit or for personal gain. They did it for the paramount public purpose of letting Americans know and law enforcers investigate whether and to what extent our laws may have been violated. And they are not just any laws, but these are laws relating to homicide against born human beings, laws against the selling of body parts and organs of aborted human fetuses, and the laws against changing medical procedures without knowledge and consent to obtain more valuable fetal parts,” he told the jury.

...Also addressing the jury was Charles Limandri, another lawyer for Daleiden and his colleagues, who said the evidence they heard showed “people, obviously, making huge profits selling and buying fetal tissue, which is not legal.”

“Different people understanding they have different views about using undercover techniques where you have to misrepresent your identity and misrepresent why you’re there. But if you’re doing it to save human lives and to stop the type of atrocities that we’re talking about here, it’s fully justifiable,” he added.

Read more here.

Kill babies and call it Planned Parenthood!

At Town Hall, Deanna Wallace reports,

One hundred and one is a big number, but 328,348 is even bigger- that’s the number of abortions done by Planned Parenthood in 2016. As Planned Parenthood celebrates its 101st birthday, it’s important to remember that because of Planned Parenthood, there are 328,348 children that will never celebrate their birthdays.

When I bring this up, there’s always someone quick to remind me that “Planned Parenthood is more than abortion, and provides care to millions of women with nowhere else to go.” But is this really true? The answer is a resounding “NO.”

A quick look at the numbers from Planned Parenthood’s 2016 Annual report shows a clear picture of their true priorities, and it’s not “women’s health”:

Planned Parenthood performed 328,348 abortions, which is up from 2015’s 323,999.
When combining all pregnancy services (abortions, prenatal care, miscarriage services, and adoption referrals), abortions accounted for 95.8% of services to pregnant women.

Read more here.

"a politically motivated exercise in weaponized government."

Ace of Spades reports,

Court Dismisses 14 of 15 Charges in the Persecution of Those Who Exposed the Trade in Organs of Aborted Babies
—Ace

When you charge someone with 15 counts, and 14 of them are so obviously without merit a judge dismisses them pre-trial, it shows the prosecution to be a politically motivated exercise in weaponized government.

Read more here.

California government authorities raid anti-abortion activist's home, steal his videos.

Joe Crowe reports for Newsmax,

An anti-abortion activist said agents from the California Department of Justice raided his home and stole videos that he claims, showed Planned Parenthood officials planning illegal sales of fetal tissue, according to Fox News.

David Daleiden, founder of the Center of Medical Progress said in a Facebook post the agents took videos that showed "Planned Parenthood's criminal trade in aborted body parts."

Read more here.

In February Ted Cruz announced that if elected President, he would pardon the makers of undercover videos showing Planned Parenthood employees discussing the sale of fetal tissue.

Humane?

Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine has accused Planned Parenthood of tossing fetal remains into landfills. At PJ Media Rod Kackley reports that

Gov. Kasich promised “appropriate legal action.”

Read more here.

Get your $125 sex kit here!

Our old friend Planned Parenthood is back in the news. Here in Colorado there is a recall election on November 3 in one of the state's largest school districts. Three conservatives are presently serving on the board. Those conservatives are in the way of Planned Parenthood, which is aggressively pushing sex ed to younger and younger kids. Jennifer Kerns reports at Life News,

Why is Planned Parenthood interested in a local school board election in the battleground state of Colorado?

That is what parents and voters are asking themselves in Jefferson County, Colo., this week after Planned Parenthood waded into a local recall election aimed at ousting three Republican school board officials in the middle of their terms.

Planned Parenthood Votes Colorado, a non-profit 501(c)4 organization, has sent letters to voters asking them to become involved in the school board recalls by first signing the petition to recall their elected officials, then volunteering for the effort to oust their local school board members.

The Planned Parenthood affiliated organization has also endorsed some of the candidates who are running to replace the current school board members in an announcement titled, “Vote in the Election on November 3rd for Real Sex Ed!”

...the Planned Parenthood group boasts of advancing “Colorado youths’ rights to real sex education and reproductive health care.” The group still opposes the state’s Parental Notification Act passed by the legislature in 2003 that requires parents of school-aged children under the age of 18 must be notified within 48 hours prior to abortion.

So what exactly does Planned Parenthood stand to gain from involvement in a local school board race?

Access, for one thing.

It turns out that Planned Parenthood is selling sex kits to local schools—including schools in the county in question—which Planned Parenthood’s own national website calls “Birth Control Training Kits.”

According to Planned Parenthood’s website, each of the kits contains 10 male condoms, two “female condoms,” one intrauterine contraceptive, one package of oral contraceptives, one “dental dam,” two samples of “water-based lubricants,” “cycle beads” for natural family planning purposes, one “Today” contraceptive sponge, one “syringe” containing a Depo Provera shot, and two vaginal contraceptive spermicidal films.

At least one local official in Jefferson County familiar with the kit reports that it includes a faux “Plan B” pill to familiarize school-aged students with “the morning after” pill.

At $125 per kit per student, it stands to reason that Planned Parenthood may view access to schools not simply as an opportunity to educate, but rather as a lucrative business opportunity.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the population of children enrolled in school is expected to increase 6 percent through the school year 2024-2025—from 49.8 million to nearly 53 million.

In border states and near-border states, the increase is even higher at upwards of 10 percent and 15 percent growth. In Nevada, the increase in population growth of school-aged children is even higher, at 26 percent.

Not a bad business model, if you can get it.

Think it couldn’t happen?

In politics, one needs only to “follow the money” to see why a national pro-abortion organization is so interested in a local school board recall election.

...Perhaps the most important question of all is, if Planned Parenthood succeeds in the battleground state of Colorado, which state’s schoolchildren will they attempt to influence next?

Read more here.

"It is often from the weakest among us that we learn wisdom."

Steven Ertelt wrote this on September 9 at Life News:

Abortion survivor Gianna Jessen led off a Congressional hearing today looking into evidence that the Planned Parenthood abortion business sells aborted babies and their body parts. During the hearing, Jessen shared her story of surviving a saline abortion.

Jessen shared her very moving and compelling story of surviving an abortion:

My biological mother was seven and a half months pregnant when she went to Planned Parenthood, who advised her to have a late-term saline abortion. This method of abortion burns the baby inside and out, blinding and suffocating the child, who is then born dead, usually within 24 hours.

Instead of dying, after 18 hours of being burned in my mother’s womb, I was delivered alive in an abortion clinic in Los Angeles on April the 6th, 1977. (See photo of my medical records.) My medical records state: “Born alive during saline abortion” at 6 am. Thankfully, the abortionist was not at work yet. Had he been there, he would have ended my life with strangulation, suffocation, or leaving me there to die. Instead, a nurse called an ambulance, and I was rushed to a hospital. Doctors did not expect me to live.

I did. I was later diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy, which was caused by a lack of oxygen to my brain while surviving the abortion. I was never supposed to hold my head up or walk. I do. And Cerebral Palsy is a great gift to me. I was eventually placed in foster care and later adopted. I forgive my biological mother. Within the first year after my birth , I was used as an expert witness in a case where an abortionist had been caught strangling a child to death after being born alive.

Since I am typing this on an outdated computer at the library, I cannot post the video of Gianna Jessen's powerful testimony before Congress, but you can find it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHnaQiOxGfg

...The expose’ videos catching Planned Parenthood officials selling the body parts of aborted babies have shocked the nation. Here is a list of all nine:

In the first video: Dr. Deborah Nucatola of Planned Parenthood commented on baby-crushing: “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.”
In the second video: Planned Parenthood’s Dr. Mary Gatter joked, “I want a Lamborghini” as she negotiated the best price for baby parts.
In the third video: Holly O’Donnell, a former Stem Express employee who worked inside a Planned Parenthood clinic, detailed first-hand the unspeakable atrocities and how she fainted in horror over handling baby legs.
In the fourth video: Planned Parenthood’s Dr. Savita Ginde stated, “We don’t want to do just a flat-fee (per baby) of like, $200. A per-item thing works a little better, just because we can see how much we can get out of it.” She also laughed while looking at a plate of fetal kidneys that were “good to go.”
In the fifth video: Melissa Farrell of Planned Parenthood-Gulf Coast in Houston boasted of Planned Parenthood’s skill in obtaining “intact fetal cadavers” and how her “research” department “contributes so much to the bottom line of our organization here, you know we’re one of the largest affiliates, our Research Department is the largest in the United States.”
In the sixth video: Holly O’Donnell described technicians taking fetal parts without patient consent: “There were times when they would just take what they wanted. And these mothers don’t know. And there’s no way they would know.”
In the seventh and perhaps most disturbing video: Holly O’Donnell described the harvesting, or “procurement,” of organs from a nearly intact late-term fetus aborted at Planned Parenthood Mar Monte’s Alameda clinic in San Jose, CA. “‘You want to see something kind of cool,’” O’Donnell says her supervisor asked her. “And she just taps the heart, and it starts beating. 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.”
In the eighth video: StemExpress CEO Cate Dyer admits Planned Parenthood sells “a lot of” fully intact aborted babies.
The ninth video: catches a Planned Parenthood medical director discussing how the abortion company sells fully intact aborted babies — including one who “just fell out” of the womb.

Read more here.

Distortions

Jonah Goldberg writes at National Review about Planned Parenthood and the Left's attack on Carly Fiorina.

Many of the media outlets that even bother to cover the videos have referred to the transferring of “fetal tissue,” not “organs” — the correct term for livers, hearts and brains. (“Tissue” is less suggestive of a human being than, say, “heart.”)

We’re also often informed that the videos weren’t merely “edited” but “highly edited.” Left out of such caveats is that the news reports passing along these descriptions come via highly edited newspapers, radio, and TV programs.

Most Americans are morally appalled by late-term abortions. Planned Parenthood and its allies know this, which is why they refer to “uterine contents,” “clumps of cells,” “tissue” and even “goop,” when a more apt descriptor would be “fetus” or even “baby.”

In other words, the people horrified by these videos aren’t out of the mainstream — they are the mainstream. The people trying to dismiss the videos are the extremists, and the media give them cover.

For instance, Hillary Clinton, who once described the videos as “disturbing” — before Planned Parenthood yanked her leash — recited the usual talking points Sunday on Face the Nation about how the videos were “misleadingly edited.” It seems she’s more troubled by diabolical video editing than anything on the videos themselves.

Indeed, when host John Dickerson asked if she’d support any federal restrictions at “any stage of pregnancy” — conceivably right until the moment before birth — Clinton said she wouldn’t, because such abortions only take place for “medical necessity.”

That is a far greater distortion of the truth than anything Fiorina said. I won’t lose sleep waiting for the nitpickers to care.

read more here.

Leftovers

Adrienne writes at Adrienne's Corner about the Planned Parenthood videos.

hat there are people who continue to defend this leaves me both outraged and sad. I even have "Catholic" relatives who think this is just fine, since it would be silly and wasteful to just throw away all these little baby parts instead of using them for something "good." The "good" part, of course, refers to medical research that would possibly enhance their lives at the expense of the willful murder of another human.

People who think like this have neither morals or any firm grasp of ethics.

Let me help them out.

The reason these people are able to shrug their shoulders and say, "So what?", after seeing these videos is they don't believe that the act of abortion is wrong. They view it only as a "woman's choice and right" to kill her child. Therefore, the marketing of these aborted baby parts is viewed as a good thing since, well, what the heck - they're going to kill the kid anyway, so let's use the leftovers for research.

If, as the abortion cheerleaders like to say, "It's just a clump of cells", why are these people talking about livers, brains, and intact fetuses? Last I checked, these parts belong to humans. And certainly, an intact fetus equipped with all these parts is not a "clump of cells."

read more here.

Congressional Dems launch investigation into the group that exposed Planned Parenthood's atrocities ..But not Planned Parenthood itself.

Robert Laurie writes at Caintv.com,

Congressional Democrats are outraged by the recent spate of seven horrific undercover Planned Parenthood videos. Sadly, they're not the least bit concerned with what's on the tapes. Baby mutilation is, apparently, no big deal. Instead, they're worried that the organization which perpetrated the undercover sting, The Center for Medical Progress, may have broken some laws in the process.

So, in a manner befitting their left-wing Bizarro-world, they've launched an investigation.

From the Washington Times:

Congressional Democrats have opened their own investigation into the Planned Parenthood videos — but into the group that took the footage in which officials haggle over the prices of organs and discuss keeping a baby alive so his brain can be harvested.

The Center for Medical Progress may have broken federal laws in setting up a false-front company to secretly record Planned Parenthood employees talking about these and other practices, the Democrats say.

That's right. Democrats don't have a problem with Mengele-esque vivisection, or with medical techs cutting through a baby's face to extract its brain, but they think a "false front company" is a bridge too far.

If you're wondering what kind of monstrous human being thinks like this, you need look no further than Barack Obama's favorite lapdog, Elijah Cummings.

Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, also said it’s possible some of his colleagues in Congress knew about CMP’s activities and didn’t flag them for potential illegal behavior.

“These disturbing actions raise questions about whether the Center for Medical Progress has broken federal or state laws, and whether some members of Congress may have been aware of these potentially illegal activities before they were made public earlier this year,”

Again, please note: The "disturbing" part is the method employed to make the tapes, not the ghoulish behavior they captured.

Read more here.

There were protests today at 300 Planned Parenthood abortion mills across America

You probably didn't know that there were massive Planned Parenthood protests all across America today, because there was very little coverage by the media. As Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds says,

The point of journalism, in today’s America, is to make sure that Americans don’t know things that might cause them to vote Republican.

Blinding ourselves to murder

Defund and prosecute!

Ted Cruz writes in his USA Today column,

While the sheer candor of these Planned Parenthood officials has shocked most, what is more disturbing is the admission that these barbaric actions are standard practice in some abortion clinics. Worse still, Americans are currently forced to fund the organization that commits these acts. This must end. An organization that generates a large part of its revenue from terminating innocent human life should not receive one penny of taxpayer money and those who engage in what may be criminal activity must be held to account.

...For far too long, Planned Parenthood has hidden behind the well-crafted charade that that it exists to protect women’s health. In reality, it is in the business of killing unborn children on an industrial scale. Despite what Planned Parenthood contends, abortion procedures, not women’s health, are its lifeblood. Hundreds of thousands of annual abortions generate nearly 40% of Planned Parenthood’s clinic revenues. Simply put, Planned Parenthood is the nation’s largest abortion profiteer. For every woman who gets prenatal care at Planned Parenthood, the organization reports more than 15 abortions. For every woman who is referred for adoption assistance, there are more than 150 abortions.

Despite Planned Parenthood's propaganda, ending taxpayer funding of abortion providers will have little impact on a woman’s access to healthcare. Community health centers, charities, state health departments and other government entities all provide women’s health services without also providing abortions. And as The Washington Post recently highlighted, community health centers outnumber Planned Parenthood facilities almost 14 to 1 across the country. Let's fund these women's health providers, not Planned Parenthood.

Read more here.

"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."

Debra Heine writes at PJ Media,

The Center for Medical Progress released video #7 this morning, and if you can get through the entire thing without crying and becoming nauseous, you are made of sterner stuff than most.

CMP’s Project Lead David Daleiden issued the following statement:

Today’s video contains heartrending admissions about the absolute barbarism of Planned Parenthood’s abortion practice and baby parts sales in which fetuses are sometimes delivered intact and alive. Planned Parenthood is a criminal organization from the top down and should be immediately stripped of taxpayer funding and prosecuted for their atrocities against humanity.

Today’s video continues the interview with former StemExpress procurement technician Holly O’Donnell, who describes an instance when she saw her supervisor tap the chest of “the most gestated fetus and closest thing to a baby I’ve seen,” and the heart started beating.

O’Donnell said:

I’m sitting here and I’m looking at this — fetus — and it’s 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.

Next, O’Donnell describes how her StemExpress supervisor instructed her to cut through the face of the fetus in order to get to the brain:

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.
Read more here.

Kudos to Bobby Jindal

Kudos to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. Sarah Ferris writes at The Hill,

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal will try to counter a pro-Planned Parenthood rally scheduled to take place outside his mansion on Thursday by running a loop of the secretly recorded videos that they plan to protest.

Jindal announced Thursday that he is setting up an outdoor movie screen and speakers outside the governor’s mansion to show the controversial videos, which he said too many of Planned Parenthood’s supporters have refused to watch.

The showing will take place at the exact time of a scheduled protest by Planned Parenthood supporters.

“Planned Parenthood has a right to protest today, but Governor Jindal’s office will ensure that anyone who shows up will have to witness first-hand the offensive actions of the organization they are supporting,” Jindal, who is also a Republican presidential candidate, wrote in a statement.

“We hope the protesters will take a minute to watch them so they'll have an opportunity to see first-hand our concerns with Planned Parenthood’s practices,” he added.

Read more here.

Planned Parenthood: when will a criminal investigation begin?

John Hinderaker writes at Power Line,

The Center for Medical Progress released another Planned Parenthood video today. It once again features Holly O’Donnell, a former technician for StemExpress, one of the buyers of baby parts from Planned Parenthood. The video consists mostly of Miss O’Donnell describing an incident in which a baby’s heart was still beating, and she was instructed to cut through the baby’s face so that his brain–the baby was a boy–could be removed for sale. It is utterly appalling.

There have been multiple hints in the CMP videos that some babies are born alive and then killed by Planned Parenthood. That appears to have been true in this case, and there is another such suggestion from a different witness. I would think that at a minimum, a criminal investigation is warranted.

Read more and view the video here.

Mutual human flourishing

Ann Voskamp adds her thoughts on abortion:

...In 2012, New York City had more black babies killed by abortions (31,328) than there were born (24,758). Sit with that. That number of black babies accounted for almost half of all abortions in New York City. More blacks aborted than were born. Three American university researchers discovered that Planned Parenthood’s “primary consideration in placement of centres is not poverty but the percentage of blacks in the area.” Do we really believe #BlackLivesMatter?

Then human black lives in the womb matter.

And when we say that Human Life in the Womb Matters — it doesn’t mean then that the lives of Women in hard places don’t matter.

When we say that Womb Lives Matter — it doesn’t for one iota of a moment mean that women’s lives don’t count, don’t have a voice, don’t matter. When we say that Womb Lives Matter, we aren’t saying that only pre-born people matter and women don’t —- we are saying that pre-born people matter equally too.

It’s part of the DNA of true social justice: Humanity believes in mutual human flourishing — in the flourishing of all human beings.

History, genocides, Nazism, racism, haven’t they all proved at the very least this to humanity: It’s when we dehumanize anyone, that we can legitimize anything.

“If we alter our process, and we are able to obtain intact fetal cadavers, we can make it part of the budget” to cover “dissections” and “splitting the specimens into different shipments,” the director of research for Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, Melissa Farrell, says. “It’s all just a matter of line items.”

Line items?

...But even now, after 5 released undercover videos exposing the dissecting of human bodies for financial gains by Planned Parenthood, 53 percent of respondents said they had not heard about the Planned Parenthood story at all.

...“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil… Not to speak is to speak. Not to act, is to act.” [Bonhoeffer]

Read more here.

Facilitation of barbarism

Mark Steyn writes,

The fifth in an apparent series of twelve Planned Parenthood undercover videos shows Melissa Farrell, director of research for Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, discussing how to manipulate the abortion procedure in order to ensure the "fetus" is delivered "intact" and thus able to be cannibalized for body parts. As Ms Farrell puts it, if a client "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. So we deviate from our standard in order to do that."

In other words, their priority is not a "woman's health needs" but a cleanly delivered "fetus" with the relevant "portion of the products of conception" intact - the leg, the liver, the heart, the lung, whatever it is the client has had "baked" into the contract. This is in itself a crime: You're not supposed to manipulate the abortion - and potentially cause more pain and discomfort to the woman - in order to get clean, sellable baby parts.

But, as Ms Farrell makes plain, at Planned Parenthood they see the woman less as a patient than as a supplier whose truck needs a bit of maneuvering to align at the loading dock.

Lovely. But it gets better. For the parts to be useful to the customer, you can't employ the customary pharmaceutical aids to abortion - the stuff that kills the "fetus" - because, if you do, all the parts you want to sell will be poisoned and valueless.

It would seem to me, therefore, that the risk of a live birth in which the baby has to be killed outside the womb is substantially greater. One wonders what the next seven videos will hold - and what it will take for American newspapers even to cover the story.

Senator Harry Reid and taxpayer-funded baby-parts mogul Cecile Richards.

...After the Senate vote, Harry Reid, who still looks as if whoever worked him over could have used a "less crunchy" procedure, Tweeted the above picture of himself with baby-parts zillionaire Cecile Richards, and a gloating message:

Today we fought to protect women's access to critical health services—and we won. #StandwithPP

What this evil toad "fought to protect" was Cecile Richards' access to critical women and their "products of conception". This is a uniquely American depravity - a billion-dollar abortion-industrial complex, unknown to the abortion regimes of France, Sweden, the Netherlands. Presumably all those Continental social democrats with their restrictions on "women's access to critical health services" are also part of the "war on women". The very fact that the Democrats' leader in the Senate is willing to advertise his facilitation of barbarism is a sign of his confidence in the people's indifference.

Read more here.

Humans as just a bundle of parts

Are we humans just a "bundle of parts?" Dr. Bob Godwin doesn't think so.

Even the abortionist can see it’s a baby. So what’s wrong with the Democratic Party?

Kirsten Powers writes at USA Today,

...Pope Francis has correctly described the unborn as “the most defenseless and innocent among us.” But in the sordid tale of strategic crushing of the unborn to better harvest their hearts, lungs and livers, many Democrats have incredibly cast an organization with a roughly $1.3 billion annual budget in the role of the innocent and defenseless. Hillary Clinton emerged as Planned Parenthood’s highest profile protector Monday, decrying the “assault” against her allegedly helpless campaign donors.

The Democratic Party shilling for barbarism — whether by politicians, liberal media outlets, union officials or unrestricted abortion advocates — is not likely to be viewed favorably by future generations. These Democrats will be remembered for demonizing the activists who lifted the veil on a previously sanitized process and for seeking restraining orders to silence truth tellers. They will be remembered for publishing dehumanizing decrees — as The New Republic did — that people stop criticizing Planned Parenthood because as a medical matter, “The term baby … doesn’t apply until birth” (that thing on your sonogram is nothing more than a “product[] of conception.”) And they will be remembered for demanding investigations into citizen journalists for meticulously exposing atrocities in our midst.

Read more here.