While the latest government spending bill maintained funding for Planned Parenthood, at least through December 11, the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) continues to highlight just why taxpayer funding of the notorious abortion giant should be stopped. The organization has released an 11th undercover video, which captures Planned Parenthood doctors selling the heads of aborted babies for research.
The video features Planned Parenthood abortion doctor Amna Dermish describing a partial-birth abortion, and the efforts by which the doctors attempt to maintain intact fetal heads for brain harvesting. According to Dermish, she was trained for this process by Dr. Deborah Nucatola, the senior director of medical services at Planned Parenthood Federation of America who appears in the first undercover video CMP released.
Dermish is caught on video speaking to actors posing as officials from a fetal tissue procurement company. During their conversation, Dermish says, “My aim is usually to get the specimens out pretty intact.” She describes some of her challenges in doing so, and admits that she will use ultrasound guidance when necessary to convert a second trimester baby to a feet-first breech presentation. “Especially the 20-weekers are a lot harder versus the 18-weekers, so at that point I’ll switch to breech,” she explains.
LifeNews observes that the process to which Dermish refers when talking about extracting an unborn baby feet-first is the “hallmark of the illegal partial birth abortion procedure that Congress banned years ago.”
In the video, Dermish appears to have the same cavalier attitude toward the barbaric practice of harvesting organs as many of the other officials who have been captured in previous CMP undercover videos. In response to a question about harvesting a fetal brain, she laughs and says, “I haven’t been able to do that yet. This will give me something to strive for!”
Dermish is also captured in the video confirming that the cost for fetal body parts varies from $50 to $60, even as the sale of human fetal tissue is a federal felony.
Planned Parenthood has adamantly defended its participation in programs in which the organization provides post-abortion fetal tissue for research in exchange for money, stating that the organization has not sought any payments beyond what was legally permissible. But the abortion giant’s president recently announced that it would no longer accept any funding for its donated tissue in an effort to take away the “smokescreens” of the “extremists” — i.e, those who have exposed them.
In a letter sent by Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards to congressional leaders earlier this month, she wrote,
In order to completely debunk the disingenuous argument that our opponents have been using — and to reveal the true political purpose of these attacks — our federation has decided, going forward, that any Planned Parenthood health center that is involved in donating tissue after an abortion for medical research will follow the model already in place at one of our two affiliates currently facilitating donations for fetal tissue research.
The pro-life Live Action News contends that Richards’ letter amounts to nothing more than a masked effort to provoke Congress to cease all investigations of the organization, though it appears to be too late for that. The CMP videos have already prompted investigations by four congressional committees and the creation of a special investigative panel armed with its own staff and budget.
CMP’s undercover tapes have proven to be powerful tools for exposing Planned Parenthood’s barbaric and potentially illegal organ harvesting practices. The released videos have included secretly recorded comments from executives of Planned Parenthood and StemExpress, a California-based company that partnered with Planned Parenthood to supply human blood, cells, and tissue products to biomedical researchers. Videos have featured undercover footage from clinics — including footage of fetal tissue being handled by workers, footage of fetal tissue from aborted pregnancies, and on-camera interviews with Holly O’Donnell, a former StemExpress procurement technician who admitted in one of the videos that she has encountered “fetuses” that still had beating hearts.
The damning videos featured Planned Parenthood officials admitting to altering abortion procedures to procure fetal tissue, as well as selling fetal tissue for profit. Another video also revealed that StemExpress did not always obtain consent from mothers to use their fetal tissue, a practice that Fox News noted would be “a serious ethical breach.”
Click here for a full list of the released videos and a description of their content.
According to David Daleiden, founder of the Center for Medical Progress, his intention was to release the videos one at a time to maintain the political firestorm that has resulted from what they exposed. He asserts that releasing them in this manner also allowed the public the proper amount of time to absorb and analyze the content of each video. “For a topic this complex and multilayered, it’s important that each piece of evidence have a chance to be examined individually and so the current presentation format is geared towards that,” he told Politico.
Daleiden is hopeful that the videos will force Planned Parenthood to be held accountable for their actions. “Congress’s new select committee must pursue a deep and comprehensive accounting of Planned Parenthood’s atrocities against humanity,” he declared.
Planned Parenthood, which is responsible for hundreds of thousands of abortions each year, has received federal funding since 1970, when President Richard Nixon signed the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act. Constitutionalists have long observed that the federal government has no authority in the U.S. Constitution to fund any of Planned Parenthood’s activities; however, recent efforts by congressional Republicans to defund the organization have so far been unsuccessful.
