In a recent op-ed in the Hartford Courant, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) defended Planned Parenthood amid the stream of gruesome investigative videos in which top medical personnel of the abortion giant are shown discussing how to harvest the body parts of aborted babies for potential sale to biomedical companies. Simultaneously, he is co-sponsoring a bill that would make it a federal felony to maim animals, according to CNSNews.com.

The bill, dubbed the Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture Act (PACT), would make the act of “crushing” animals a federal offense, punishable by seven years in prison.

“Crushing,” according to the measure, refers to the “actual conduct in which 1 or more living non-human mammals, birds, reptiles, or amphibians is intentionally crushed, burned, drowned, suffocated, impaled, or otherwise subjected to serious bodily injury.”

As Connecticut station WFSB reports, Blumenthal observed that while Congress passed legislation in 2010 that criminalized the distribution of animal “crushing,” “it unfortunately allowed the people who actually inflict barbaric harm on animals to walk free.”

“This bipartisan bill – the first to outlaw animal cruelty at the federal level – states emphatically that these heinous acts are inhumane, illegal and intolerable in a civilized society,” he said.

In his op-ed in defense of Planned Parenthood, Blumenthal writes, “Women’s health care is under attack. Again. There is no other way to describe the concerted effort in recent weeks to strip Planned Parenthood of its federal funding – an effort that has been defeated by Congress eight times since 2007.”

“To be clear, defunding Planned Parenthood would create an urgent, destructive public health crisis,” he added.

In the first undercover video produced by the Center for Medical Progress, Planned Parenthood medical director Dr. Deborah Nucatola explained the abortionist must 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 also explained the way in which the position of the baby can be changed so that he or she can be extracted up to the head and then the head collapsed to allow the other body parts to be extracted without damage.

“The Federal [Partial Birth] Abortion Ban is a law, and laws are up to interpretation,” Nucatola added. “So, if I say on day one, I do not intend to do this, what ultimately happens doesn’t matter.”

Partial birth abortions are a felony and punishable by up to two years in prison and a fine upwards of $250,000.

On July 29, however, on the floor of the Senate, Blumenthal said Planned Parenthood is “under siege from a sensationalistic and disingenuous kind of publicity that are based on undercover videos.”

“People are offended by them, and Planned Parenthood has in fact spoken to the merits of them,” he added. “I encourage Planned Parenthood to continue speaking to those videos.”

“Planned Parenthood needs no defense from us because the American people support it,” he said.