Quotes of the day

In the newly released video, which was obtained by the Center for Medical Progress, another top official with Planned Parenthood is caught on camera haggling over the prices of aborted baby parts and admitting that she’ll alter the method of abortion used in order to harvest organs for eventual sale…

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“But you know, the money is not the important thing for me,” Gatter says after agreeing to a price of $100. “But it has to be big enough that it makes it worthwhile for me.”

“Let me just figure out what others are getting, and if this is in the ballpark, then it’s fine,” Gatter says. “If it’s still low, then we can bump it.”

“I want a Lamborghini,” Gatter concludes.

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A portion of the new video shows Gatter discussing the ethics of altering an abortion procedure for the purpose of preserving fetal tissues

A clinic that did choose to perform one procedure over another with the express purpose of increasing the likelihood of preserving an intact specimen would be committing a “classic violation” of a long-held, industry-wide standard for abortion providers in the United States, Arthur Caplan, director of New York University’s Division of Medical Ethics, said after reviewing the video.

“They have a standard informed consent form that says, ‘We’re going to do this procedure, and we’re not going to change anything about it,’” Caplan explained in a telephone interview. He added that “it’s ethically very dangerous” to change a procedure for the purpose of fetal tissue collection. “You’re starting to put the mom’s health secondary,” he said.

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Troy Newman, President of Operation Rescue, who was also involved in putting the investigative expose’ video together told LifeNews that the refutes Cecile Richards’ claim that there is no profit for Planned Parenthood and raises further questions about the unethical altering of procedures to one “less crunchy.”

“The statements in the Gatter video prove that Cecile Richards flat-out lied when she said that Planned Parenthood does not profit in any way from the sale of aborted baby parts. It takes a lot of baby livers to buy a Lamborghini,” said Troy Newman, President of Operation Rescue. “And now it also appears that Planned Parenthood is also lying to women, altering their procedures in order to get body parts that can be sold for profit. These represent serious legal and ethical breeches for which Planned Parenthood must be held accountable.”

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Planned Parenthood has said it does not participate in illegal activity; it merely facilitates the donation of tissue when a patient requests it. The group said the video released Tuesday, just like last week’s video, was subject to “extremely heavy editing.”

“This morning, another very heavily edited video was released by activists who have been widely discredited and who edited a video last week to twist its meaning completely and support false claims,” said Eric Ferrero, vice president of communications at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “What we see on this tape is a woman who says ‘we’re not in it for the money,’ and that any money must be related to reimbursement for costs.”

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Planned Parenthood told Congress Monday that a secretly recorded video released last week by an anti-abortion group is fraudulent and part of a years-long pattern of illegal harassment aimed at prohibiting abortion.

In a letter to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Planned Parenthood said it fell victim to a fake company called Biomax Procurement Services that posed as a buyer of human tissues. It was actually created by David Daleiden, an official of the group that released the video, and was engaged in “a campaign of corporate espionage” targeting Planned Parenthood, the letter said.

“A group of extremists who have intimidated women and doctors for years — in their agenda to ban abortion completely — are not ‘documenting’ misdeeds; they are trying to create them, quite unsuccessfully,” Planned Parenthood wrote to lawmakers.

In a show of defiance — at least for now — Planned Parenthood also told the House committee that it has not yet decided whether it will honor lawmakers’ request for a briefing by Dr. Deborah Nucatola, who speaks at length in the video about obtaining fetal tissue for research. Nucatola is the organization’s senior director of medical services.

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“I lived that life,” said Ms. Johnson in an interview. “I worked at Planned Parenthood for eight years at an abortion facility, and I ran the facility, and that was very common for us after a long day of work — after a long day of performing abortions, the staff going out to eat, having drinks, talking about the day.”…

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Based on her experience, Ms. Johnson says she saw nothing in the video to indicate that Planned Parenthood is breaking the law. At the same time, she said the video exposes a loophole that gives clinics and processing companies enormous latitude in setting reimbursement charges for fetal hearts, lungs and other organs.

“The law currently states that there can be moneys exchanged as long as they fit under certain categories like preservation, collection, storage, transport, etc.,” Ms. Johnson said. “And the law says there is not a maximum amount that can be charged or a minimum amount but that costs cannot be prohibitive. And that’s very subjective.”…

“They [clinics] could say, ‘Well, it’s more difficult for me to harvest a brain than it is for me to harvest a kidney, so that collection fee is going to be $1,000 for a brain, whereas it’s only going to be $400 for a kidney,’” Ms. Johnson said. “And the problem is that it’s so subjective, the amount of money that can be charged. That’s really where we need reform.”

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David Daleiden, Executive Director and Project Manager of the Center for Medical Progress, joins the Federalist Radio Hour to discuss the undercover videos that expose Planned Parenthood’s sale of aborted baby parts. His organization shot thousands of hours during their investigation and he says he has more disturbing footage, “close to a dozen videos” worth.

“They’re all about the money,” Daleiden says of Planned Parenthood, and they’re “not treating the patient as an autonomous individual, or as a woman anymore. They’re treating her as a harvesting plant to pull this tissue from.”

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Planned Parenthood, under fire for a heavily-edited video suggesting the organization violated federal law in facilitating the donation of fetal tissue, says it believes future videos may make racially-charged claims. The health provider and advocacy group also says the anti-abortion group posing as a medical research procurement company may have had access to the inside of its clinics, jeopardizing “our patients’ privacy and dignity.”

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The new information was disclosed in a letter from Planned Parenthood’s senior counsel, Roger Evans, in response to a request from a congressional committee that the doctor depicted in the video appear there for questioning. The Center for Medical Progress, a group that appears to have been formed for the sole purpose of secretly recording Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers, has said it plans to release a video a week.

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Deborah Nucatola—the Planned Parenthood doc with the stone-cold heart and the lucrative skill of “crushing” babies in just the right spot—has been advising the Obama administration on family planning policy since 2010.

From April 2010 through April 2014, Nucatola was one of several experts the U.S. Health and Human Services Office of Population Affairs (OPA) and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Division of Reproductive Health tasked with creating federal guidelines for “quality family planning services.”…

What’s the goal of those government recommendations? To help “clients…achieve their desired number and spacing of children and increase the likelihood that those children are born healthy.”

Leave it to the Obama administration to tap an abortionist for “expert” advice on ensuring that children are “born healthy”—an abortionist, mind you, who relishes butchering a “17-weeker” and bagging up a tiny infant’s  “heart, lung, liver” to sell for a few extra bucks.

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CNN has had 493 mentions of the Confederate flag since June 17 (only 188 of these even mention alleged church shooter Dylann Roof), and managed 167 in the first six days. In the first six days of the Planned Parenthood scandal, they managed 7 mentions, less than 5 percent what you’d expect if you considered those stories only of equal importance.

The Washington Post mentioned the Confederate flag 624 times in the last month (only 135 of these mention Roof), and 126 times in the first six days. The Washington Post has 28 stories mentioning the Planned Parenthood video in the first six days, just over 22 percent of what you’d expect if you considered the harvesting of organs from aborted babies to be merely as important as the Confederate flag topic.

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The New York Times has run stories and essays on the Confederate flag 149 times since June 17 (and only 39 of those mention Roof), 41 of those in the first six days. That compares to three stories on Planned Parenthood during the same window, just 7 percent of what you’d expect if the New York Times considered those stories merely of equal importance.

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Some of the research using these “products of conception” is, ironically, for ailments common to the elderly — such as Alzheimer’s and dementia. We seem to have traded “Soylent Green” wafers — food made from the remains of old folks forced into premature termination in the 1973 film — for gestational organs. There is a certain hideous symmetry to this dispensation of human products — those too young or too old to be useful except when un-alive — but I’m not sure this is how the cycle of life was intended to unfold…

Eventually, profits will be made — perhaps with medications enabled by research on a 24-week-old fetus’s brain stem. Just think: No unwanted baby; no burden to society; plus treatment for someone’s dementia — a perfect trifecta, made in hell.

And tone isn’t the issue. The issue is that we’re commodifying human fetuses and harvesting parts for distribution in the marketplace, using rationalizations that can justify anything.

The dead may cost nothing, but the livers of terminated fetuses are selling like hotcakes.

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The legality and the ethics of what Planned Parenthood is doing certainly merit serious scrutiny and a national debate. But the more important conversation that we likely won’t have is about the morality of abortion in general, and whether the explicit nature of this video will make us question our embrace of such a grotesque institution.

Along those lines, Planned Parenthood offers a telling defense, insisting now that the donation of fetal tissue is valuable and “lifesaving.” That may be true. But if it’s such a noble cause then why doesn’t Planned Parenthood advertise fetal tissue collection on its website to lure potential abortion customers and brag about its philanthropic contributions?

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It likely doesn’t openly discuss fetal tissue collection because when people make the connection that the life that’s being ended is in fact valuable to someone else they might be less comfortable aborting it. When they are told their unborn child will be crushed and then sold for parts, it makes abortion less a sterile-sounding procedure and more a viscerally violent and morally questionable execution. When a medical doctor discusses the destruction of a baby without even a modicum of respect for its life or the solemnity with which many women opt for an abortion, it would likely scare some away…

We are all implicated in growing the abortion-industrial complex. Planned Parenthood denies that your taxes fund abortions — and it performs hundreds of thousands of them every year — but they receive hundreds of millions every year in taxpayer grants and reimbursements. That any of your money supports an organization that treats human life, and specifically the most vulnerable among us, with such little regard should disgust us all.

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It is possible for human life to be reduced to a very, very low level. Survivors of famines and totalitarian prison camps tell of doing things and seeing things done that they would never have imagined civilized people, themselves included, capable of. “If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin,” T. S. Eliot wrote. Horrible things happen to people — no, that isn’t quite right: Horrible things are done to people. Detroit is not the Jiabiangou Labor Camp, and lunch in sunny Los Angeles is not the Arduous March. These are free people in the most prosperous and peaceful nation this world has ever known, and these butchers might have chosen anything.

This is what they chose.

Human beings are not lumps of labor. They are not capital, consumer goods, taxpayers, commodities — or meat. The philosophy of Planned Parenthood (and Eros is a jealous god) is the philosophy of men-as-meat, and that philosophy is not long compatible with liberty and human dignity. When Erich Fromm wrote his famous book on the dream of religion without deity, he titled it “You Shall Be as Gods.” The truth is that without an understanding of the uniqueness of human beings and the consequent value of every human life, you will not be as gods — you will be as meat.

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And meat gets butchered, packaged, and sold. It gets stuffed in the freezer.

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We should not be paying this vile organization one dime of taxpayer’s money, and in any administration but this one, an investigation would be launched to determine if any criminal laws have been violated…

There is a remedy: Planned Parenthood should be broken up into discrete pieces in the same way ATT was once dismembered. The new organization could be strictly prohibited from providing abortion services with a wall of separation between old and new with regard to finances, leadership, etc. That new entity would still be eligible for funding.

The existing organization could continue aborting without our dollars. I am sure it would be bounteously funded from those of a certain ideological persuasion.

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“It doesn’t matter whether you think you’re pro-choice or pro-life,” Fiorina says. “Every woman, every man has to look at these videos and think, what has gone wrong in our nation?”

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Ed Morrissey 12:40 PM | December 16, 2024
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