Live Action today features another exposé of Planned Parenthood, but this time it’s not just one clinic violating state laws on reporting or practices. The Center for Medical Progress conducted an undercover investigation into PP’s operations in sales of fetal body parts, a practice prohibited by federal law, and they went to the executive management of the abortion-mill chain to uncover it. Senior Director of Medical Services Dr. Deborah Nucatola happily discussed the profit off of these sales — over a meal:

Nucatola is seen in the video having lunch with actors posing as buyers who are interested in purchasing the body parts of babies how have been aborted. The Planned Parenthood senior staffer notes how abortion procedures are modified to ensure that requested body parts can be collected. She says:

“We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.”

Nucatola also describes how Planned Parenthood abortionists move the preborn child into a breech delivery position so that the body can be preserved while the brains of the child are removed. This account is an almost exact medical description of partial-birth abortions which are illegal in the United States.

Planned Parenthood, though, appears to be concerned internally about the legality of their own behavior, as Nucatola notes how, “At the national office, we have a Litigation and Law Department which just really doesn’t want us to be the middle people for this issue right now.”

The price that the so-called “products of conception” fetch can run from $30 to $100 per specimen, according to Nucatola. That means that Planned Parenthood profits from killing babies by charging the patients, and then from harvesting their corpses by selling them. “A lot of people want liver,” Nucatola tells the undercover investigator, so Planned Parenthood trains its people to use the forceps to leave the abdomen intact. They even maneuver the baby into the breech position, using ultrasound, in order to facilitate their gruesome harvest.

Remind me again why the federal government funds these ghouls? And be sure to wake me when the Obama administration orders an investigation into Planned Parenthood’s systemic and organized criminal conduct. Nucatola even describes how they subvert the law and use the kind of “buffers” one usually sees in organized crime to keep the bosses safe. In any other administration, this would prompt a RICO investigation — and it should.

Update: This tweet from our good friend at Popehat is worth noting:

@JazzShaw "RICO" doesn't mean "wrong" or "bad" or "criminal" or "evil."

— IncitementToResurrectionHat (@Popehat) July 14, 2015

Certainly, that’s true. There are lots of criminal and evil acts that don’t fall under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization law, which allows the government to prosecute higher-ups in an organized effort to commit crimes even when one cannot directly link the leaders to the acts. This case, however, seems to fit pretty neatly into RICO (at least as used by the government in other contexts), considering the efforts of top officials to use affiliates as buffers to hide the parent organization’s involvement in federal felonies. In fact, the scheme Nucatola describes seems like a classic RICO construct. I’d be interested in hearing how RICO wouldn’t apply, and of course I’d be happy to post that information, too.

Update: My opening lead left the impression that Live Action took part in this investigation, but they are just featuring and promoting CMP’s work. I’ve adjusted the language to make that a little more clear. Also, some are noting that the video starts off with footage from a 2000 CBS News story, but this video just went up this morning. The domain name for the website shown in the video, Stemexpress.com, was first registered in 2010 to StemExpress in Placerville, California. It was updated in June to extend the registration through the end of 2020 through GoDaddy.