Planned Parenthood: Killing Fetuses and Selling Their Body Parts | Eastern North Carolina Now

STEP ASIDE DR. MENGELE... There's a new monster in town.

    "It's another boy!", exclaims the Planned Parenthood "lab technician" who has just finished sifting through a glass pie pan filled with the remains of a second trimester baby's body parts. "There's an eyeball... and there's a leg" is clearly heard and shown for the whole world to see. Those who will not watch these videos from the Center For Medical Progress are either (a) guilty of promoting, participating and condoning these murders, passed off as "choices" and wish to maintain "plausible deniability" or (b) do not want to confirm that there ARE TENS OF MILLIONS of Americans in group (a) and would rather just go back to the good ol' days of welcoming Caitlyn Jenner to un-mutilated society.

    Unless you have an emotional and/or financial interest in killing babies, you're not buying Planned Parenthood's excuses for the utterly devastating videos that have put abortion enthusiasts on defense. No, it's not about "donating fetal tissue." It's not about "protecting women's health." It's about killing people who can't defend themselves, selling their organs, and lying about it. [From the Mike Church Show].

    A series of four undercover videos from a pro-life group have rocked Planned Parenthood - and the national debate over abortion. The tapes, which are dated April 7, 2015, show staff from Planned Parenthood's Rocky Mountains affiliate, located in Denver, Colorado, engaging in negotiations over human fetal body parts. In all of the videos, officials from the nation's largest abortion provider discuss compensation for extracting organs from aborted fetuses, including, in one case, over wine and salad at lunch. The sale of fetal body parts is illegal under federal law. The punishment for such an act includes hefty fines and/or up to 10 years in prison. Much of the debate stemming from these videos, from a legal point of view, has been over whether the conduct of Planned Parenthood constitutes "sales" or "compensation." The fourth video, in particular, shows the actual harvesting of fetus body parts.

    Let's put the "sale or compensation" question aside. The much larger issues concern how abortion has been sold, and what it truly is and what are the underlying social values that have given rise to this modern-day House of Horrors.

    In his article on the subject, "How the Planned Parenthood Videos Expose Abortion For What It Truly Is," Edward Morrissey explains this latest scandal:

    The conversations clandestinely captured by the activist group Center for Medical Progress would sound familiar to anyone who has held negotiations with vendors and buyers over pricing. The level of compensation changes depending on the organs involved and how cleanly they can be separated. One executive claims that all Planned Parenthood clinics want is reasonable compensation, but if they "come out a little ahead," they're "happy to do it." Another jokes that she wants a Lamborghini and doesn't want to name a figure first for fear of getting "lowballed."

    In the latest video, which depicts an actual dissection of aborted material as a technician identifies the human organs for transfer, a vice president of a regional chapter of Planned Parenthood discusses the benefits of pricing the individual parts over a flat rate for each specimen. As the technician points out intact kidneys and a spinal column in a pie dish of the torn-apart remains of a first-trimester fetus, Dr. Savita Ginde tells the undercover reporter posing as a buyer that she prefers to transact as a "per-item thing." That "works a little better," Ginde says on hidden camera, "just because we can see how much we can get out of it."

    To many people, these conversations sound very much like Planned Parenthood is selling tissue based on market value. Even if the prices seem rather low on a "per-item thing," the transfers reduce the costs for disposal, turning a cost into a revenue-producing action, as John McCormack notes at The Weekly Standard. If the transactions of human flesh don't count as profit, they at least reduce cost.

    Selling human organs and tissue for profit violates federal law. However, the law also allows for compensation for the costs to produce the tissue, a point that Planned Parenthood and its defenders have raised repeatedly since the videos started emerging. Does this fit within the law, or do Planned Parenthood and its buyers cross the line? The New York Times calls this "a gray zone, legally," but does concede that the videos raise questions about "what the law allows."

    Certainly, Congress should look into how its exceptions for tissue donation have been exploited. But this isn't the main issue seen in these videos.

    Planned Parenthood wants to keep the debate on these points to deflect from the real debate - the nature of abortion itself, and the deliberate minimization in language that has allowed it. Abortion defenders claim that the procedure does not terminate life, and that it has no more moral meaning than excising a tumor or a cyst, a "clump of cells" in the most common construction. On Twitter, a young actor in Hollywood offered a more crude assessment this week. "A pile of goop should not have more rights than a human being," Lucas Neff tweeted, "period."

    Now, though, we see that the same abortion clinics that argue for the "pile of goop" status see things very, very differently when it comes time to benefit from the results of their services. They adjust their techniques to extract and market human organs for buyers to meet demand, with the clear value attached on the basis of both their humanity and specificity. Clinic executives like Dr. Ginde want to negotiate those markets on a per-item basis because of the value that humanity and specificity provides to both parties, "just because we can see how much we can get out of it."

    The true danger to Planned Parenthood and the entire industry is the exposure of their hypocrisy. The two positions of "clumps of cells" and negotiating over human organs from abortions are mutually exclusive. One cannot extract human organs from "a pile of goop," or from tumors or undifferentiated "clumps of cells." Human organs come from human beings, and the only way to harvest them from unborn human beings is to kill them first. The videos cut through all of the misdirection, all of the antiseptic generalities used in defense of abortion, to expose its true nature - and that's what has Planned Parenthood panicked over the videos.

    For those who oppose abortion, the debate over sales of human organs and tissue is very tempting, and certainly should be engaged. However, the focus should be on the admitted humanity of those whose lives come to an end in those clinics rather than the legal technicalities of compensation and sales for the "products" that result from them. Expose the lie, and let's finally have the conversation about the value of human life in all its stages that we have spent the last 42 years avoiding. [Reference: Edward Morrissey, "How the Planned Parenthood Videos Expose Abortion For What It Truly Is," The Week, July 29, 2015.]

    CONTENT WARNING: The remainder of this post contains content material and video footage that is offensive and shocks the conscience. The videos show Planned Parenthood staff sorting body parts such as kidney and heart from an 11-week human fetus. It includes admissions that some of the aborted fetuses are not yet dead but that they are subsequently terminated and then harvested for organs and tissue.

    On July 30, the fourth video was released by The Center for Medical Progress. The video opens with a negotiation between Vice President and Medical Director of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains Dr. Savita Ginde and a potential buyer for fetal body parts. Ginde is seen saying, "I know I've seen livers, I've seen stomachs, I've seen plenty of neural tissue. Usually you can see the whole brain usually come out."

    To preserve the organs, Ginde says that "we'd have to do a little bit of training" to ensure staff "didn't crush" the parts that were wanted. Ginde warned about legal risks saying "if you have someone in a really anti [abortion] state that's going to be doing this for you, they're probably going to get caught." She continued that they told their lawyer that, "we don't want to get called on selling fetal parts across states."

    Live Action News, on July 30, reported and summarized the video as follows:     The video then cuts to the laboratory where a Planned Parenthood technician can be seen sorting through parts of aborted babies. Dr. Ginde tells the prospective buyer that they would likely structure the arrangement on a "per item," rather than a flat fee: "I think a per-item thing works a little better, just because we can see how much we can get out of it."

The video (the fourth to be released) is below:


    During the parts-sorting process of child terminated in the first trimester, Ginde notes, "Here's a stomach, kidney, heart." She further explains that the second trimester babies are "so big" that they won't "be as war-torn." An unnamed technician later exclaims, "and another boy!" after finding a body section with legs.

    Live Action President Lila Rose issued a strong statement blasting the unethical and improper behavior of Planned Parenthood: "Even as more tapes emerge of top-level Planned Parenthood executives bartering and negotiating over the parts of aborted children, our nation will fund Planned Parenthood with over 1.4 million dollars today alone. As the outrage only continues to grow, Congress and the President must act immediately to stop the forced taxpayer funding of these horrific and barbaric facilities."

    In the first shocking video, which has been viewed almost 3 million times, Planned Parenthood Senior Medical Director Dr. Deborah Nucatola discusses the potential sale of fetal body parts. This first video is shown below:

    [Reference: Live Action News, July 30, 2015. http://liveactionnews.org/planned-parenthood-baby-parts-scandal-grows-as-new-tape-released/ ]

    The second shocking video that was released shows a Planned Parenthood official haggling over the price of aborted baby tissue and body parts. During the gruesome conversation, Medical Directors' Council President, Dr. Mary Gatter, even 'jokes' that she wishes to buy a Lamborghini with the profits:



    Congress is conducting an investigation into the scandal, while President Obama remains silent on the matter. A measure has been introduced in the U.S. Senate by Joni Ernst, Rand Paul, and James Lankford to defund Planned Parenthood of taxpayer support. Senator Lankford remarked that, "It is time for federal taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood to end and let community health centers use that funding to provide health care services for those in greatest need."

    The states themselves are conducting investigations as well. To date, Planned Parenthood has refused to appear and testify.

    The full-length video exposing Planned Parenthood's use of partial birth abortions to harvest and sell baby parts is over two hours and is shown below:



    On February 26, 2015, former director of Planned Parenthood who became a pro-life advocate, Abby Johnson, appeared on the Mike Huckabee Show. In the interview, she went into great detail on the horror that she saw during an abortion procedure and described how she watched an unborn baby fight for its life.



    We cannot meaningfully address the moral blight of our time - abortion (equating it with a woman's right of equality and choice) WITHOUT discussing its prevention: (1) shifting our social and cultural norms such that sex is not as pervasive, expressive, and cavalier as it has become; (2) making birth control mandatory OR emphasizing/teaching abstinence; (3) teaching in our schools what exactly happens to a fetus when a woman aborts it; and (4) empowering religious institutions in our communities to help raise our children with values that promote life, health, and dignity, and which further a culture of morality which our country is so sorely lacking.

    National sins bring national calamities. We saw that with our first national sin - slavery. In 1773, probably one of our most prophetic Founding Fathers, George Mason, wrote: "Slavery is that slow Poison, which is daily contaminating the Minds & Morals of our People. Every Gentlemen [sic] here is born a petty Tyrant. Practiced in Acts of Despotism & Cruelty, we become callous to the Dictates of Humanity, & all the finer feelings of the Soul. Taught to regard a part of our own Species in the most abject & contemptible Degree below us, we lose that Idea of the Dignity of Man, which the Hand of Nature had implanted in us, for great & useful purposes. Habituated from our Infancy to trample upon the Rights of Human Nature, every generous, every liberal Sentiment, if not extinguished, is enfeebled in our Minds." At the Philadelphia Convention in 1787, he warned that the newly-organized Union of states MUST abolish slavery or face the wrath of our Creator: ""Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of Heaven on a country. As nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world, they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects, Providence punishes national sins by national calamities."

    Mason speaks to the universal truth bespeaks the universal truth that civilizations go through a repeatable cycle which transitions from slavery to freedom and back to slavery (or other form of bondage). This is perhaps true because of the very predicable nature of man himself. It follows from the duality of human nature that man is capable both of moral greatness as well as moral degeneracy. That duality is tempered by the fact that the desire for freedom is universal in all human beings, whether they live moral lives or not, and eventually then those same human beings become complacent in that freedom and allow themselves to become too degenerate to preserve that freedom.

    When a segment of society can be sacrificed for the benefit of another, then we have to question our notions of freedom and equality, and moreover, we have to fear the wrath that only a universal judge can exact.

    Publisher's note: Contributor Diane Rufino also serves of co-publisher for Pitt County NOW.

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