An undercover video shot last summer by a new pro-life organization called Center for Medical Progress purports to show the chief medical officer of Planned Parenthood of America talking on camera about how to abort a child intact so the child’s body parts can be transferred for medical and scientific research.
The video was shot by a team led by David Daleiden of the Center for Medical Progress posing as representatives of a start up biotech firm in the business of buying fetal body parts for medical and scientific research. Daleiden told Breitbart News, “It as remarkably easy to make contact with Planned Parenthood” to discuss procurement of fetal tissue.
The video purports to show, between bites of lunch and sips of wine, Dr. Deborah Nucatola saying, “A lot of people want intact hearts these days, because they are looking for specific nodes.”
She adds: “Yesterday was the first time she said people wanted lungs. And then, like I said, always as many intact livers as possible. People just want…some people want lower extremities, too. I mean that’s easy. I don’t know what they’re doing with it, I guess they want muscle.”
In the 8-minute edited video released today by the Center for Medical Progress, Nucatola can be seen and heard discussing her ongoing relationship with another company called StemExpress that works as a middleman in the buying and selling of fetal tissue, a process that is legal so long as any moneys exchanged are strictly for expenses and not for profit.
The video also shows what is purported to be an actual online order form from Stem Express complete with a pull-down menu for “brain, heart, heart (veins and arteries attached), lungs, liver, liver and thymus, spleen, large intestine” and so on. The order form also specifies the “gestational range” from 4 weeks upwards.
According to Daleiden, the nearly three-hour video was shot without Nucatola’s knowledge in a California restaurant on July 25 last summer. The full, unedited video of the encounter published by the Center for Medical Progress, can be seen here.
In the video Nucatola can be heard saying, “Every provider had patients who want to donate their tissue, and they absolutely want to accommodate them. They just want to do it in a way that is not perceived as ‘this clinic is selling tissue, this clinic is making money off of this.’”
She talks about pricing. “You know, I would throw a number out, and I would say it’s probably anywhere from $30 to $100 [per specimen] depending on the facility and what’s involved.”
In the video, Nucatola goes into great detail about ordering specific body parts and how the abortionist goes about ensuring those parts are not damaged in the abortion. She says the abortionist uses “ultrasound guidance, so they’ll know where they’re putting their forceps.”
And then she talks about the baby’s head. “The kind of rate-limiting step is procedure is calvarium. Calvarium — the head — is basically the biggest part. Most of the other stuff can come out intact.”
Nucatola says the doctor has to be “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 going to basically crush below, and I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.”
Nucatola explains how the position of the baby can be changed so that she can be extracted up to the head and then collapse the head so that all the other body parts can be extracted without damage.
Nucatola explains how to get around the federal ban on partial birth abortion. “The Federal [Partial Birth] Abortion Ban is a law, and laws are up to interpretation. So, if I say on day one, I do not intend to do this, what ultimately happens doesn’t matter.” Partial birth abortions are now a felony and punishable by up to 2 years in prison and a fine upwards of $250,000.
Nucatola talks about how the order for parts can change the way the abortions are done, “For example, so I had 8 cases yesterday. And I knew exactly what we needed, and I kinda looked at the list and said okay, this 17-weeker has 8 lams, and this one — so I knew which were the cases that were more probably likely to yield what we needed, and I made my decisions according to that, too, so its worth having a huddle at the beginning of the day and that’s what I do.”
Nucatola explains that in order to limit liability Planned Parenthood’s “litigation and law department…really doesn’t want us to be the middle people for this issue right now. Because, actually we were approached by StemExpress to do the same thing” but “it’s too touchy an issue for us to be an official middleman.”
The video ends with the investigator approaching what the video claims is Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards at Planned Parenthood’s national meeting in Washington DC last year. He identifies himself as doing “fetal tissue collection” and says, “Dr. Nucatola has been very helpful this past year.” Richards says, “Okay, great. Thank you. She’s amazing.”
Breitbart News called Planned Parenthood several times for a comment, as well as Stem Express. Neither returned calls. Nucatola’s Twitter feed was taken down this morning. And at least for a while Planned Parenthood’s media phone number was “out of service.”
According to the US Criminal Code, the buying or selling human body parts is a federal felony. The commercial traffic of body parts from an aborted baby is punishable by up to 10 years in prison and/or a fine of up to $500,000.
Daleiden promises more revelations in the days to come. He is no stranger to undercover investigations of Planned Parenthood. For five years he was director of research for Live Action, the group headed by Lila Rose that has investigated Planned Parenthood for many years.
Follow Austin Ruse on Twitter @austinruse
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