Earlier today, Katie Yoder at NewsBusters posted and described the latest video from the Center for Medical Progress on Planned Parenthood's late-term abortion business and its related ghoulish work in harvesting fetal tissue from abortions for research.
Yoder's work and that CMP video caused me to remember how the Associated Press wrote up Planned Parenthood's announcement that it would cease taking compensation for fetal tissue harvesting on October 13.
That day, the AP's David Crary wrote that PP would "maintain programs at some of its clinics that make fetal tissue available for research, but will no longer accept any reimbursement to cover the costs of those programs." Crary also relayed PP's claim that "its fetal tissue programs currently take place in only two states — California and Washington — at about a half-dozen of the 700 health centers run by the organization nationwide."
This claim is consistent with PP President Cecile Richards' shaky claim in her late September congressional testimony that, in the AP's words, "the group has nearly 700 clinics but obtains fetal tissue in less than 1 percent of them."
In a post reacting to Richards' claim, I noted that what she said could only be true if PP had recently suspended such efforts at abortion facilities which had until recently been harvesting baby body parts, because:
- An early September report at US News indicated that the number of facilities involved in the practice in California alone was recently six.
- Other evidence indicated that there was at least one involved facility in Colorado, Missouri and Texas, bringing the total, including California, to at least nine, and busting Richards' "less than 1 percent" claim.
- David Crary's October 13 AP report identified a state I had not included, namely Washington, bringing the total to at least 10.
That brings us to today's CMP video, the Texas portion of which was filmed in October 2014. Katie Yoder has recounted the horrors contained therein. I'm going to concentrate on how the video confirms how widespread Planned Parenthood's fetal tissue harvesting efforts have really been:
Points:
- At 1:26, the person posing as a representative of "Biomax" tells Dr. Amna Dermish that his company does "fetal tissue procurement, like for stem cell researchers." Dr. Dermish responds by saying "Oh," as if that's a very familiar line of work to her. The "Biomax" rep also notes that he was referred to Dr. Dermish by a PP official in Los Angeles involved in fetal tissue research (Dr. Nucatola) because Texas facilities would be "good to partner with." That's because the number of abortions at the Texas abortion clinics, "at least the few clinics which remain" after legislation passed recently, "is just skyrocketing."
- At the 7:50 mark, Dr. Dermish, as Yoder noted, said that she hadnt't provided, in Yoder's words, "specimens for research during her time at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Texas." That does make one wonder why, as Yoder noted, "she focused on keeping aborted baby parts intact." Setting that aside there is still the question of why Dr. Nucatola in LA would have suggested speaking with Dr. Dermish. There are only two possible answers. The first is that harvesting was already going on, and Dr. Dermish was simply reluctant to directly own up to it in front of a relative stranger. The second, seemingly more likely and hardly less damning, is that PP-Austin was planning to enter the organ harvesting business shortly — and perhaps did so by the time the first CMP videos were released several months ago.
- But right after that, the "Biomax" rep says that "I've been told that Gulf Coast (Planned Parenthood in Texas) does provide specimens, out of their own research department apparently." That doesn't seem to surprise Dr. Dermish — and it shouldn't. That's because, as I noted in late September:
Abby Johnson, currently a profile activist but formerly a Planned Parenthood director in the Lone Star State, testified in July that when she was there ... "Employees Received Bonuses for Harvesting Organs."
This is more proof that, contrary to what Cecile Richards implied in her congressional testimony and what PP said in its AP-relayed statement announcing that it would no longer take money for fetal tissue, the organization's harvesting enterprise was recently far more than a two-state operation involving six or fewer of its clinics. It was far more likely an important multi-state compensation stream which has (if we're to believe them, which is always a dicey proposition with this bunch) gone away.
If so, that's good news — and we can thank CMP Director David Daleiden at the very least for making PP's day-to-day preborn baby-killing operations a bit more difficult, even if cowardly and craven state and federal legislators mostly seem unable to muster the integrity and courage to de-fund it.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
