Andrea Grimes and Sharona Coutts are senior figures at RH Reality Check, both having worked on various projects there. Grimes is famous for promoting the site’s Beer, Tacos, and Abortions fundraiser. As she explained last summer, “The Taco or Beer Challenge couldn’t be simpler: You eat a taco and/or drink a beer, and you donate to an abortion fund.”
Because if anything’s gonna give you an appetite, it’s this.
A couple of years back, the pair took on another endeavor: mythbusting. They wrote an article called “Disproven: The Myth of Infants ‘Born Alive’ After Abortions,” and it addresses “the anti-choice bogeyman of the soulless abortion doctor, slaughtering newborns in clinics across the country with nary a second thought.”
Curiously, the authors never explain why it’s “soulless” to kill a child at one end of the birth canal but not at the other. Still, they contend that stories of infants being born alive following botched abortions are just examples of “myth-making and fear-mongering.”
Grimes and Coutts may want to revise that theory; two of those myths just testified on Capitol Hill.
Gianna Jessen and Melissa Ohden appeared before the House Judiciary Committee last Friday. The committee is investigating a number of claims concerning Planned Parenthood, America’s largest abortion chain. One of the allegations is that children are being born alive in failed abortions.
That’s a subject Jessen and Ohden have some experience with.
Gianna Jessen’s mother went to Planned Parenthood for a saline abortion seven and a half months into her pregnancy; things didn’t go according to plan. Instead of dying, Gianna was born alive and believes she only stayed that way because the abortionist hadn’t arrived at the clinic yet.
Meanwhile, Melissa Ohden was delivered at an Iowa hospital following an attempted abortion. On Friday, Ohden stated her conviction that she “would not be here today” if her mother had gone to Planned Parenthood instead. New evidence supports her suspicion.
Beginning in July, the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) began to release a series of undercover videos. Shot on hidden cameras, they record meetings between figures associated with Planned Parenthood and people claiming to be fetal organ buyers.
One of those meetings was with Dr. Savita Ginde, Vice President of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains. On CMP’s fourth video (see above), Ginde acknowledges that even second-trimester abortions sometimes result in infants being delivered intact. That’s the same video in which Ginde looks down at a dead fetus and declares, “It’s a baby.”
The ninth video featured Perrin Larton, a procurement manager with Advanced Bioscience Resources, Inc. (ABR). ABR is a firm that harvests tissue from aborted children, and it has a longstanding relationship with Planned Parenthood.
The company’s procurement technicians often wait right outside Planned Parenthood operating rooms while abortions are performed. And as Larton admits, they don’t always have to wait very long:
I literally have had women come in and they’ll go in the O.R. and they’re back out in 3 minutes, and I’m going, “What’s going on?” Oh yeah, the fetus was already in the vaginal canal whenever we put her in the stirrups, it just fell out.
Ginde and Larton don’t say whether these children are being delivered alive, but records from other countries show that live births aren’t exactly rare. The Canadian government has acknowledged that between 2000 and 2009, 491 newborns were delivered alive as a result of failed abortions. In Britain, the same thing happened to 66 infants in 2005; none of them were provided with medical care.
Live Action found evidence of similar behavior in the U.S. Pregnant volunteers from the group took hidden cameras to various clinics in 2013. Pretending to want late-term abortions, the volunteers asked what happens when a baby survives. In multiple cases, the volunteers were told that surviving infants are either killed or left to die.
According to Holly O’Donnell, that’s happening at Planned Parenthood, too.
O’Donnell is a former procurement technician with StemExpress, a company that supplies human tissue to researchers. Part of her job involved visiting Planned Parenthood clinics and collecting organs from aborted children. In the video above, she describes being shown an aborted fetus whose heart was still beating, something O’Donnell’s supervisor thought was “kinda cool, kinda neat.” O’Donnell was then told to open the head up – through the baby’s face – and begin harvesting brain matter.
There’s definitely some myths surrounding the abortion debate, like the one about mammograms being offered at Planned Parenthood (they aren’t). But as Gianna Jessen’s story proves, the claim that live births have happened there isn’t one of them. You know what else isn’t a myth? The fact that Planned Parenthood is getting your money.
Every year, Planned Parenthood receives over half a billion dollars from taxpayers. When Senate pro-lifers tried redirecting that money to the over 9,000 community health centers nationwide, they were opposed by President Obama and nearly all of the Democratic caucus. If you want that to change, then sign Live Action’s petition and pass the message on to your elected officials.
As for Andrea Grimes and Sharona Coutts, they should probably do a little more fact checking before trying to expose another “myth.” Or they could just stick to subjects they’re knowledgeable about. Like beer and tacos.
