Since mid-July, the American public has been given a front-row seat to Planned Parenthood’s many awful offenses. Morally, ethically, and humanely speaking, the harvesting, bartering over, and sale of human baby body parts is despicable. Moreover, the baby part scandal has caused Americans to reexamine their views on abortion.
Without abortion, there would not be these excess, bloody baby parts, dripping and being pulled from a pie pan. How did we come to equate constitutional rights with the intentional killing of innocent children? How did we ever reach the point of seeing value in human body parts, but not in the human herself?
Beyond these questions, there is the matter of the law. Let’s delve into an overview of the many laws and regulations Planned Parenthood is breaking or blatantly disregarding.
1) Killing babies who survive abortion attempts.
(Detailed explanation of the law involved here.)
Instead of providing appropriate care or stocking their clinics with equipment to save the lives of tiny babies who survive abortions, Planned Parenthood hands them over to its business partners who then finish killing the baby and harvest his parts. Best case scenario, the baby is left alone until he dies – in complete contradiction to the laws.
Yes, it really is that grim and barbaric.
As a letter (sent by Live Action and Alliance Defending Freedom) to the California government explains:
The Born-Alive Protections Act of 2002 grants equal human rights to any child born alive, at any stage of pregnancy – whether the birth was natural or induced by an attempted abortion. Under federal law, therefore, if the child has a heartbeat – as this baby boy in the San Jose Planned Parenthood clinic depicted in this CMP video did have – he had been born alive, and was entitled to all the protections of the law that any other human person is entitled to receive.
Allowing Planned Parenthood to perform abortions has allowed them to kill living, born babies like the San Jose boy.
2) Selling baby body parts for profit.
(Details on how this is illegal here.)
As Live Action President Lila Rose and CMP’s David Daleiden pointed out on the Glenn Beck program, Planned Parenthood still has yet to show how receiving $55-$60 per baby body part is anything but a profit. They can claim over and over that it’s a reimbursement, but logic and statements on tape show otherwise.
Exactly what extra work has Planned Parenthood done to deserve what may add up to over $500 per baby? According to Mary Gatter, the extra work is exactly nothing.
Gatter explained that at Planned Parenthood Los Angeles, “we didn’t have to do anything. There was compensation for this.” Getting compensation for doing nothing is called profit, not reimbursement. This really isn’t a difficult legal concept.
And according to Melissa Farrell, Director of Research at Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, the fees for baby parts are really secret charges for a change in abortion procedure:
PP: Yeah, we can work it out in the context of — obviously, the procedure is more complicated. So that anything that we integrate into that procedure, without having you cover the procedural cost, is going to be higher. So anything of a higher gestational age, there’s more opportunity for complication, there’s more administrative time involved,
PP: Sometimes the procedures are longer. So then, anything that we piggy-back onto that for collection purposes, obviously, would have to, that additional time, cost, administrative burden.
Buyer: Right. So our compensation to you…could be built into that.
PP: Yeah.
Which leads us to the next violation.
3) Changing the abortion procedure for the purpose of collecting body parts
On tape, Planned Parenthood officials admit to altering abortions without women’s consent, so that various baby organs and parts can be harvested. (More details are here.)
Gatter even later goes on to admit that she knows this is wrong, when she rejects extra payment specifically designated for the change in procedure: “you’re shading into the area of you’re paying me to do something that’s not right.”
Did you catch that? Something that’s not right. Yes, by the admission of it’s own top officials, Planned Parenthood has concluded that the change in abortion procedure to collect baby parts – and the act of ignoring a woman’s consent – is “not right.”
4) Knowing that a particular baby who is being aborted is also being harvested for organs and parts
I reported here (where there are additional details) on the relevant HHS provision:
The decision to terminate a pregnancy and procedures of abortion should be kept independent from the retrieval and use of fetal tissue.
This means that the doctor performing the abortion should not even know that this particular baby’s mother has consented to give the body parts to research.
CNN quoted Insoo Hyun, associate professor of bioethics at Case Western Reserve University, to drive this point home (emphasis mine):
When fetal tissue is used in research, it is often sent from the hospital or clinic that performs the abortion to an affiliated research center, Hyun said. Another safeguard in the Health and Human Services guidelines is that a clinical team that performs the abortion cannot know that the fetus will be donated, to help ensure that they do not change how they perform the abortion, or jeopardize the safety of the woman, Hyun said.
And yet, again and again in the Planned Parenthood tapes, the officials discuss how their abortionists are very aware that the baby they are aborting will also be harvested for his organs. They admit their grand willingness to specifically make sure a particular baby is ‘ripe’ for harvesting by doing the abortion differently.
5) Committing illegal partial-birth abortions
Planned Parenthood top medical official, Dr. Deborah Nucatola, and Texas Planned Parenthood abortionist, Dr. Amna Dermish (who was trained by Nucatola), both describe performing abortions that sound almost exactly like partial-birth abortions.
As this article explains, Nucatola tries to reason away the law:
Partial-birth abortion. It’s not a medical term, it doesn’t exist in reality. … [N]umber 1, the Federal Abortion Ban is a law, and laws are up to interpretation. So there are people who interpret it as intent. So if I say on Day 1 I do not intend to do this, what ultimately happens doesn’t matter. Because I didn’t intend to do this on Day 1 so I’m complying with the law.
Federal law says that it is illegal to “deliberately and intentionally” perform a partial-birth abortion. There are no “technicalities of intent” here. When a man commits rape, does it matter what his intent the day before was? Or does his intent in the moment of his deliberate action count, for legal purposes?
I don’t think that answer is difficult to come by.
6) Breaking state laws on abortion limits and health regulations
Stained equipment in an abortion clinic right next to an examination table.
A number of states have launched investigations into Planned Parenthood in the wake of the undercover videos. Florida and South Carolina both found Planned Parenthood to be in flagrant violation of law.
Florida Planned Parenthoods have been committing illegal second-trimester abortions (FL government had to ask Planned Parenthood’s attorney to stop PP from lying to the media about the violations), and one Planned Parenthood in South Carolina was cited with 21 legal and health violations.
7) Criminal conspiracy
The explanation for this potential crime must be explained thoroughly, and an entire article is dedicated to it here.
8) Other questions of law
Planned Parenthood is so deeply corrupt that few are certain of the extent of all the crimes the abortion giant and its officials have committed. Other current questions include:
- Did Cecile Richards lie under oath to Congress?
- What is the consequence of Planned Parenthood’s flagrant Medicaid fraud?
- Has Planned Parenthood illegally passed off money to its political and lobbying arm, in an abuse of taxpayer funds?
- Why are states not suspending Planned Parenthood’s funding based on its failure to obey reporting laws regarding raped and abused minor girls?
Due to Planned Parenthood’s deep corruption, many abusive scandals, and constant human rights violations, the abortion giant’s funding should be stripped and redirected to the more than 13,000 comprehensive, effective health centers around the nation. You can read a memo from Lila Rose to Congress here, and tune in to the next Congressional hearing on Planned Parenthood tomorrow.
