Alexandra DeSanctis:
It has been one year since the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) released its first undercover video, revealing compelling evidence that Planned Parenthood has been illegally selling the body parts of aborted babies to the fetal-tissue industry.
In January, President Obama vetoed a bill that would have forbidden taxpayer funding from Planned Parenthood. But the House Select Investigative Panel — formed last October in response to CMP’s videos — has been conducting extensive investigations into the organization’s practices.
Yesterday, the panel released an interim report confirming, with extensive evidence, the CMP video footage, and finding that Planned Parenthood and its affiliates have broken several federal laws — including the NIH Revitalization Act of 1993, a federal statute prohibiting the acquisition, reception, or transfer of fetal tissue for monetary considerations. The panel report provides nearly incontrovertible proof that the organization consistently engaged in this very type of fetal-tissue trafficking.
Furthermore, the investigation shows that “financial interests are increasingly driving management and clinical practice decisions” at Planned Parenthood. Because abortions are the most lucrative of its services, the organization consistently emphasizes the importance of keeping abortion numbers up. In one case, “Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains gave an award to the Planned Parenthood of Aurora, Colorado, ‘for exceeding abortion visits in the first half of FY12 compared to first half of FY13.’”
From the panel’s report:
Furthermore, in 2010, affiliates were asked to ensure that at least one of their clinics perform abortions. According to a Planned Parenthood fact sheet, for every adoption referral they make, they perform about 340 abortions. Similarly, abortion represented 97% of pregnancy-related services in 2009, despite the frequent claim that abortion is only 3% of its services. Based on PPFA’s own numbers, abortion accounts for about 30% of its annual income.
The panel also discovered evidence that Planned Parenthood outfits across the country committed Medicaid fraud, filing claims under the umbrella term “family planning services,” which was frequently used to cover abortion.
Investigation into StemExpress — the primary biotech firm that purchased fetal tissue from Planned Parenthood and resold it to researchers — found that the organization functioned as a middleman between abortion clinics and medical researchers, screening clinics and recruiting those that were most likely to perform abortions that would produce saleable tissue. The firm’s website, for a time, even had a drop-down menu that allowed researchers to select the different fetal body parts they wished to purchase.
In order to accelerate this process, StemExpress would hire tissue technicians and embed them inside abortion clinics. The report provides the following typical daily schedule of such a technician:
At the beginning of the day, the tissue technician received an email from StemExpress including the day’s orders for certain baby body parts and the gestation period, letting her know what she needed to harvest that day, and where she would be assigned. Once she arrived at the clinic, the tissue technician checked in with the Abortion Clinic Assistant Manager and informed the staff what she would procure that day.
Then the technician reviewed the private medical files of the patients for that day to learn their names and the gestational ages of their babies. She recorded the gestations on the gestation tracking log provided by StemExpress.
Next the technician met with the patients waiting to be prepped for their abortions, after receiving their names from clinic staff. Then she convinced them to consent to donate by saying that the donation will help cure diabetes, Parkinson’s, and heart disease.
After an abortion, the technician collected the baby’s remains and procured the body parts that were ordered, using her own supplies. The technician then packed the tissues or body parts, and shipped them directly to the customer via a courier or FedEx.
She received an hourly wage and a bonus for each tissue.
Tissue-procurement technicians were shown to have e-mailed researchers about possible tissue sales at the same time that the abortions in question were taking place, and in many cases the employees promised to procure the requested tissues.
An example of such an e-mail conversation is provided in the report: