The pro-life group Center for Medical Progress (CMP) is releasing a video on the first anniversary of its undercover exposé unmasking Planned Parenthood’s abortion business.
The series of videos last summer also exposed Planned Parenthood’s apparent practices of selling the body parts of babies it aborts on the open market and altering the position of babies during abortions in order to harvest their most intact organs.
The story of the abortion giant’s alleged practices and those of biomedical procurement company StemExpress went viral last summer with the American public, leading to congressional investigations into Planned Parenthood and the entire abortion industry.
The CMP video series changed the national debate about abortion by featuring discussions and negotiations with high-level Planned Parenthood medical directors and executives, who eat lunch and drink wine while haggling over prices for fetal organs.
“As more details and evidence continue to emerge in the ongoing investigation of Planned Parenthood’s aborted baby parts business, it’s clear Planned Parenthood is guilty of far more wrongdoing in their fetal harvesting scheme than anyone initially realized,” notes David Daleiden, CMP project lead, in a statement.
He added:
Planned Parenthood has claimed for one year that they made no money from baby body parts, but faced with an ever-growing body of evidence to the contrary, they have yet to produce anything other than press releases to back up their lies to the public.
The rule of law means that there cannot be one special set of rules for Planned Parenthood, and another for everybody else. Planned Parenthood is not above the law and must be held accountable for their callous and careless treatment of vulnerable patients and their barbaric profiteering on baby body parts.
In the past year since the videos were released, 24 states have attempted to eliminate Planned Parenthood’s taxpayer funding and/or redirect it to federally qualified health care centers that do not perform abortions.
On defense and out of favor with many Americans who previously knew little about its abortion business, Planned Parenthood has had to turn to the courts, which have been packed with progressive judicial activists. President Barack Obama himself has vowed to support Planned Parenthood at every turn.
Under the guise of “women’s reproductive freedom,” the defiant organization has said it will also work to repeal state laws that have been passed which could further decrease its profit margins when it comes to performing abortions.
Carol Tobias, president of the National Right to Life Committee, however, has said she anticipates Planned Parenthood’s repeal efforts would not gain momentum with state lawmakers.
“The only way the abortion industry has been able to advance the abortion cause is through the courts,” she said. “They will have to judge-shop and find which judges were appointed by pro-abortion presidents.”
A Gallup survey released earlier in June shows Americans’ view of the abortion giant has soured substantially since 1993 when a full 81 percent of the country thought highly of Planned Parenthood. This year, 59 percent of Americans were found to think similarly.
A recent Marist College Institute for Public Opinion poll found a full 81 percent of Americans favor some restrictions on abortion — including limiting the procedure after the first three months — and a continued ban on public funding of abortion.
In the survey of 1,700 Americans, even 66 percent of respondents who identify themselves as pro-choice say, “Abortion should be allowed, at most, in the first trimester, in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother, or never permitted.”
“Tragically, one year later, Planned Parenthood’s barbaric baby parts trade is allowed to continue, and taxpayers are still forced to subsidize the abortion chain with more than a half billion dollars each year,” said Live Action president Lila Rose in a statement. “Of the billions of dollars Planned Parenthood has received from taxpayers, it has given back millions in campaign contributions to politicians who protect it from the laws that everyone else has to follow.”
After the release of the videos, under suspicion of bias, Harris County, Texas District Attorney Devon Anderson convened a grand jury that cleared Planned Parenthood of any wrongdoing in the exposé and, instead, indicted Daleiden and his colleague Sandra Merritt. Two pro-choice law professors wrote the indictment of the two journalists amounted to “a stunning act of legal jujitsu” and was a “deeply disturbing” outcome both for the First Amendment and undercover citizen journalists attempting to expose corruption.
Though Planned Parenthood has denied any wrongdoing in its sale of baby body parts, the abortion business also released a statement in October announcing it will no longer accept payments for aborted fetal tissue. The organization and its leftwing media supporters continue to insist the videos produced by CMP were “deceptively edited.”
However, a Democrat opposition research firm named Fusion – hired by Planned Parenthood itself to review the videos – said that while their analysts observed the videos had been edited – as most videos are – “the analysis did not reveal widespread evidence of substantive video manipulation.”
Additionally, Fusion noted, “[A]nalysts found no evidence that CMP inserted dialogue not spoken by Planned Parenthood staff.”
Another analysis by Coalfire, a third-party forensics company hired by Alliance Defending Freedom, found that the videos were “not manipulated” and that they are “authentic.”
On this one-year anniversary of the release of the undercover videos, the House’s Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives has released an interim report that details its findings thus far, and validates the claims made by CMP.
During a press conference Thursday, Select Panel chairman Rep. Marsha Blackburn said, “The information we are presenting to the House leadership today offers a snapshot of what the Panel has uncovered so far – documentation that shows abortion clinics and middlemen who are exploiting women and selling baby body parts as part of a business plan to make more money.”
Blackburn said the information gleaned from the undercover video series “should disgust us all,” and stressed that profiting from the sale of human fetal tissue is a felony. Motivation for such illegal profit, she said, “could contaminate collateral activities,” such as influencing the treatment of women facing a decision to abort their babies.
The chairman added that, rather than participate in uncovering potential corruption, Democrats have instead “publicly advocated that the Panel be disbanded” and have “privately attempted to obstruct the Panel’s fact-finding mission.”
Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, said, given the Select Panel’s findings, “Not only should Planned Parenthood be defunded immediately of all taxpayer dollars, but it’s time for law enforcement to step in and enforce the law.”
“Criminals deserve to be in jail, not sitting behind a desk and making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on the backs of women and their babies,” she added. “Women have been systematically and purposely betrayed by the abortion industry. Their vulnerability translated into dollars, their children torn apart and sold piece-by-piece to the highest bidder.”
Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony List, praised the work of the Select Panel, Daleiden and CMP.
“Over the last six months, the Select Panel has found evidence the abortion industry sells baby hearts, livers, brains, hands and other organs procured by a middleman company inside their facilities at no cost or effort to the facilities themselves,” she explained.
“The baby organs – sometimes harvested by illegally changing the abortion procedure – are sold at different prices depending on the child’s age and other characteristics,” Dannenfelser added, noting the Panel also found that the abortion clinics and biomedical companies “systematically compromised patient privacy by targeting women with babies of a certain developmental age and giving the organ harvesting tech – who can get incentive payments for certain organs – access to private records in violation of privacy laws.”
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