Planned Parenthood still inexplicably receives hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funding, despite numerous scandals, criminal activities, and continual lies. And starting a decade ago, undercover journalists from the Center for Medical Progress sought to expose one of the most gruesome aspects of this corporation: its partnerships with fetal tissue harvesters.
In the Human Capital Project, the Center for Medical Progress (CMP)’s pro-life investigators, David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, went undercover for two years to expose Planned Parenthood’s trafficking in the body parts of aborted children. They found that, even as Planned Parenthood denied the humanity of the preborn children it killed, it often sought to profit from the sales of the babies’ body parts.
Lying about heartbeats and prenatal development
One of the biggest criticisms leveled against Planned Parenthood is that it has a history of lying about prenatal development. Staffers have been caught calling preborn babies in the first trimester “undeveloped blobs,” with one staffer specifically saying that organs aren’t present in the first trimester.
One staffer was caught lying about a 1o-week preborn child in a Live Action undercover investigation, saying, “[A]t this point, there’s nothing developed at all. There’s no legs, no arms, no brain, no heart,” At this point, it’s just the embryo itself” (emphasis added). Yet preborn children have remarkable development in the first trimester:
Planned Parenthood previously admitted that preborn children in the first trimester have heartbeats, but erased that information from their website. As late as 2022, the corporation’s website stated that at six weeks gestation (four weeks after fertilization), “A very basic beating heart and circulatory system develop.”
As of a few months ago, Planned Parenthood’s website said that “a very basic beating heart” develops by 6 weeks of pregnancy.https://t.co/UC16XqJvBS
1/2https://t.co/MmwwOh8LLA pic.twitter.com/TcPiFvbOmL
— John McCormack (@McCormackJohn) September 22, 2022
But by August of that same year, the website had been edited to read, “A part of the embryo starts to show cardiac activity. It sounds like a heartbeat on an ultrasound, but it’s not a fully-formed heart — it’s the earliest stage of the heart developing.”
At six weeks gestation, the heart is functioning, and has two chambers which develop into four chambers by seven weeks after fertilization (nine weeks gestation). But the heart does not exhibit meaningless “cardiac activity” — it is pumping blood throughout the body, as this video from the Endowment for Human Development (EHD) shows:
Yet even as Planned Parenthood denies the reality of fetal development, even saying there is no heart, its staffers have been found sorting through aborted remains to specifically find organs they can harvest.
‘Five-star’ kidneys
Among many horrifying CMP videos, some showed how callous Planned Parenthood staffers could be, and how eager they were to cash in. In one video, released in 2015, Vice President and Medical Director of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains (PPRM) Dr. Savita Ginde (who still commits abortions in Colorado) was seen discussing how the affiliate preferred to be paid on a “per-item” or per-organ basis. “I think a per-item thing works a little better, just because we can see how much we can get out of it,” she said, referring to the remains of an aborted child.
Ginde also laughed about being able to find kidneys still intact. “If I looked at that, I’d be like, that’s good to go,” she said, laughing, while an unidentified Planned Parenthood assistant added that the quality of the kidneys was “five stars.”
Former Stem Express procurement technician Holly O’Donnell, now deceased, also discussed her experiences with CMP on video, describing how she and her trainer visited Planned Parenthood facilities to obtain body parts. “The main nurse [at Planned Parenthood] was always trying to make sure that we got our specimens,” O’Donnell said. “No one else really cared. but the main nurse did, because she knew that Planned Parenthood was getting compensated….”
“I remember my first day, I was at the Concord [Planned Parenthood in California]… I walk in, I meet the staff, and I look over in the corner, and there’s a little light tray with pie dishes on it,” O’Donnell added. “And then I see someone come in with a bottle of something and there was blood in it… and they emptied it out on a strainer and put it on the pie dish and lit it up… and my trainer comes over and she puts on gloves, and she picks up some tweezers…. And I’ve never had anxiety before this at all, and… I had no idea this was gonna be happening…. She’s like, ‘okay, well this is a head, this is an arm, and this is a leg’…”
The trainer then asked O’Donnell to take the tweezers and identify some of the parts she just showed her.
11.6 week preborn child harvested at Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains (screenshot: Center for Medical Progress)
O’Donnell said, “I grabbed the tweezers… and I remember grabbing a leg, and I said ‘this is a leg,’ and the moment i picked it up, I could just feel, like, death and pain shoot up through my body….” O’Donnell fainted, her first day on the job as a procurement technician looking at the tiny but identifiable body parts of aborted children.
“I woke up in the recovery room… I was really embarrassed…” and some Planned Parenthood employees reportedly told her not to feel embarrassed, because “some of us never get over it.”
“We were asked to procure certain tissues like brain, liver, thymus, panaceas, heart, lungs, and pretty much anything on the fetus,” O’Donnell noted.
O’Donnell said procurement often took place without the consent of the woman who had undergone the abortion. “It’s stealing; it’s stealing baby parts,” she said.
American taxpayer dollars should not be funding Planned Parenthood.
