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Planned Parenthood may finally have sown the seeds for its own destruction.
A viral undercover video that shows the organization’s senior medical director sipping wine and taking bites of salad while glibly discussing the harvesting and sale of body parts from aborted babies has struck a nerve—even among those who support at least some access to legal abortion.
And the organization has said that more such videos may surface.
Congress is right to begin hearings into whether any federal laws have been broken, and should take it one step further by immediately suspending the half-billion dollars a year in government funding that Planned Parenthood programs and services enjoy.
We’d also like to see even more states join the four who already have launched investigations of their own.
The video, recorded a year ago during a lengthy business lunch with Planned Parenthood’s Dr. Deborah Nucatola and actors posing as medical researchers, seems to show that the organization is selling fetal tissue for research, which is illegal, and may also be performing the banned partial birth abortion procedure in order that the desired body parts remain intact.
In a particularly sickening segment of the video, Dr. Nucatola casually remarks that Planned Parenthood doctors have become adept at using ultrasound as guides to preserving the organs they want. “We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver because we know that, I’m not going to crush that part.”
Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards wasted no time in denouncing the “secretly recorded, heavily edited” video, made by the pro-life Center for Medical Progress, which she said makes “outrageous claims.”
Ms. Richards and other Planned Parenthood officials asserted that the organization does not profit from fetal tissue or body parts —which is a felony under federal law, as is the sale of any body parts—but charges only for the cost of preparing and shipping materials to the research facilities.
And the officials said that women must sign off on the tissue donation beforehand, and sometimes they bring up the topic themselves.
That may very well be true.
But whether or not the letter of the law has been followed does not change the gruesome picture that’s been painted, raising even more questions about Planned Parenthood’s overall operations.
We know, for instance, that the organization claims that its centers are sometimes the only place that women can get specialized health care including gynecological exams and breast cancer screenings.
But we wonder if that indeed is the case in today’s world— with Medicaid, widespread private health insurance and the Affordable Care Act expanding health care to virtually all segments of the population.
We wonder, too, given that fetal tissue is no longer in much demand in the research community, why Planned Parenthood is so ghoulishly involved in its trafficking—whether for profit or not.
But there’s one thing we don’t wonder about. The fact that a top official at Planned Parenthood has demonstrated a flippant, irreverent attitude about ending a human life that is far out of touch with American values no matter how one feels about abortion.
It’s time we cut them loose.
