During the Planned Parenthood v The Center for Medical Progress (CMP) civil trial on Wednesday, David Daleiden, lead investigator and CEO of CMP took the stand for the third time. He testified about the events leading up to the formation of CMP and the undercover work, including the heartbreaking details that motivated him to investigate fetal body part trafficking in the abortion industry. One of the abortion industry professionals who met with CMP’s undercover company “BioMax” was Ruth Arick of Choice Pursuits, a consultant for abortion facilities who advised the investigators to find abortionists who don’t ensure fetal demise before delivery and who are willing to over-dilate women.
According to Terrisa Bukovinac, executive director of Pro-Life San Francisco, Daleiden testified that the CMP team met Arick at the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals conference in September 2013. Daleiden said, “There was no screening or vetting” for the conference. They simply registered and paid online to attend and walked in “off the street.”
Sandra Merritt was working as an undercover investigator at the conference along with Brianna Baxter. Merritt was using the name Susan Tennebaum, who was starting a tissue procurement company called BioMax and was looking to get in touch with abortion facility medical directors. Merritt and Baxter met Arick there, who advised them to find doctors who were willing to over-dilate abortion patients, which she also admitted was a risk to the patients’ health.
READ: Planned Parenthood trial judge allows 20/20 aborted baby parts trafficking video to be shown
An audio clip of their conversation proved this shocking detail, along with other disturbing information. Arick can be heard telling the undercover journalists that they should locate abortion clinics that weren’t in the practice of using digoxin to kill the babies before they were delivered, mentioning the Feminist Women’s Health Center and the Feminist Abortion Network site specifically. She refers to preborn children as “baby” and talks about when they’re going to “die.” She refers to the mothers as “selfish.”
Arick can be heard saying that with digoxin, she “knows when the baby’s gonna die.” Without digoxin, babies could easily be born alive. She also can be heard in the recording mentioning Dr. David Gluck and his method of abortion which she described as: “clamp-the-cord and just waits a minute or two and you’ll have fetal demise right then.” She also said they would be able to find facilities that commit abortion up to 24 weeks and don’t use digoxin to ensure fetal death before live birth. She referred to procuring aborted baby body parts for research “a game:”
Yeah. Now, a lot of places, not a lot, some researchers are looking for whole fetuses, in the earlier stages, so you over-dilate, you try to be able to extract an entire fetus through your cannula, but then again, the over-dilation can be a risk to the woman, so you know, it’s a game.
Listen to the audio clip played in court here.
During this same conference, Merritt and Baxter learned that plaintiffs in the case, Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest (PPPSW), were in renegotiations with Advanced Biosciences Resources (ABR) on tissue procurement.
“If there was a negotiation, it wouldn’t make sense if you were only covering costs,” Daleiden testified. ABR and PPPSW had been working together for a decade at that point, including doing fetal tissue procurement for the government.
It was also at this conference that the CMP investigators met two National Abortion Federation employees who gave them information about a conference in San Fransisco and invited them to join the group purchasing program, opening the door to future undercover work for CMP.
Editor’s Note: The original version of this article incorrectly stated that CMP investigators didn’t need to register for the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals conference. The article has been changed to fix this error. Additional information from the audio clip was also added.
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