Alexandra DeSanctis:
House speaker Paul Ryan announced yesterday that, as part of the Republican Congress’s effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the majority party will also aim to defund Planned Parenthood. This news has caused immediate backlash from pro-abortion activists and politicians, many of whom continue to assert that the organization does “so much more” than simply offer abortion services.
But this latest news about the defunding effort comes just one day after the House Select Panel on Infant Lives released its final report, revealing in damning detail the immense amount of illegal activity Planned Parenthood carried out in order to profit further from its abortion business and the remains of aborted children.
Congress created the House panel in the fall of 2015 after a series of undercover videos filmed by the Center for Medical Progress revealed footage of Planned Parenthood officials callously haggling over the prices of fetal tissue and discussing the practices used to obtain particular organs that would bring the most profit to the organization.
After a year and a half of investigation into the organization’s practices, the panel has unveiled extensive evidence showing that Planned Parenthood profited illegally from transferring the fetal tissue of aborted babies to other groups for research purposes, violating several federal and state laws in the process.
Despite the fact that Planned Parenthood and its political allies expended millions of dollars in a campaign to deny wrongdoing and portray the investigation as a political witch hunt, the panel has compiled 418 pages of compelling evidence that the group committed extensive wrongdoing.
Here are four of the most alarming pieces of evidence from the report:
First, Planned Parenthood affiliates illegally profited from the transfer of fetal tissue, as they repeatedly received compensation despite the fact that their clinicians never participated in harvesting or packaging the tissue in question. In practice, a tissue-procurement organization (TPO) such as StemExpress would partner with Planned Parenthood to obtain fetal tissue to then “donate” to researchers. (In reality, StemExpress, too, broke the law; it has been referred for criminal charges in multiple states for profiting from the sale of fetal tissue.)
StemExpress hired its own clinicians to work within Planned Parenthood centers, and these StemExpress employees conducted all of the work related to harvesting, preparing, and shipping the fetal tissue. However, internal StemExpress documents reveal that Planned Parenthood accepted compensation for costs its clinics supposedly incurred in the procurement of this tissue. Thus, it is evident that Planned Parenthood received monetary compensation for work it did not do; in other words, the group profited from fetal-tissue transfer, which is illegal. In fact, these TPOs explicitly marketed themselves to Planned Parenthood affiliates as potential partners that would increase the clinics’ bottom lines.
Second, Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers modified abortion procedures in order to procure intact fetuses and obtain higher profits from selling those fetal organs to researchers. Abortion procedures modified in this way greatly increase the chance of an infant’s being born alive, and it is unclear what happens to infants in these circumstances. Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards, when testifying before Congress last year, insisted that she had never heard of any such events occurring. However, Planned Parenthood clinic workers testified before the panel that such procedures do take place and that, scientifically speaking, they have a much higher likelihood of causing an infant to be born alive.