I noticed an article which tried to explain away the fact that Planned Parenthood (PP) sells dead baby body parts. I had several poorly written excuses from which to choose, but I chose one from somebody named Sarah who wrote it for Addicting Info. I chose it becuase someone posted it on their Facebook page as some sort of proof that PP is not harvesting and selling dead baby body parts. But it looks like PP actually does sell dead baby body parts, so I felt compelled to respond to the misinformed Facebook friend. That will likely end our cyber friendship, but truth is more important than Facebook friendships. 

Sarah (last name unknown) who writes frequent fictional stories for Addicting Info, wants you to believe that PP is not the villain in all of this. The best way to address Sarah’s Addicting Info article (A.K.A. Propaganda) is to respond to her foolish attempt to defend the horrific PP, line by line. My comments are in bold. Sarah’s headline reads:

Planned Parenthood Bites Back With FACTS About Conservative Media’s Latest Smear Attempt

Putting the word FACTS in all caps is very persuasive. Sarah’s fictional story goes like this:

Now that conservatives have lost any and all hope of dismantling Obamacare or preventing nationwide marriage equality, they’ve gone back to their tried-and-true old faithful wedge issue — abortion. It’s pretty much all they have left.

Actually we have a lot left Sarah. People said the same thing after the Supreme Court’s idodic ruling in Roe v. Wade in 1973. Since then, abortion has come to be recognized as a serious evil by the majority of Americans and the Pro-Life movement is growing daily while the abortion advocates are aging, dying off or switching to the Pro-Life side.

It comes as no surprise that conservatives and conservative media are trying their best to again make Planned Parenthood look like the devil — “They kill babies!”

Nobody is making PP look like anything they are not. PP spends enormous funds on their marketing and their message in an effort to look like something other than Satan. But the fact remains, they do kill babies, lots of them and then they sit around and chat about it over a salad and a glass of Chianti as though they were talking about gardening or the latest fashion. People who can do that are dead behind the eyes. And people who try to defend it are dead above the neck.

Actually, they perform medically safe and often necessary abortions to female patients who seek them.

Medically safe is a fairly vague term. Nearly every child dies (those who survive are left to die as medical professionals stand around, acting like they don’t see the child struggling to survive). Sometimes the mother dies, is seriously harmed resulting in infertility and other complications and much of the time, the mother suffers horrible regret and depression. Medically safe? I don’t think so. Lucrative? Maybe that’s what you mean.

But even more importantly, let’s talk about “necessary”. You claim that the abortions are “often necessary”. Well, the statistics disagree. Around 97% of all abortions are performed because the mother is concerned about her ability to raise her child the way she believes the child should be raised or because she herself does not yet feel “ready” to be a mother. Only about 3% of abortions are sought because of rape, incest or a serious medical condition. If you want to say that 3% of abortions are “necessary”, I’ll still disagree with you and we can debate that, but there is no way in hell that you can claim that PP’s abortions are “often necessary”.

A service that makes up only three percent of what Planned Parenthood offers the communities they work within.

When states like Texas and Wisconsin tightened safety regulations on abortion clinics, PP did not bring the clinics within compliance, nor did they stop doing abortions in those clinics so they could continue to provide other services to women. Instead, PP just shut their clinics down. This proves that abortion is the primary money maker for PP, otherwise, they would not have closed entire clinics. Nice try Sarah Whoeveryouare.

Now, conservative media is spreading the fallacy that “Planned Parenthood sells dead baby body parts.”

I suppose that is because a PP executive is no tape, talking about how they sell dead baby body parts.

They apparently have an “undercover video” that was filmed by the “Center for Medical Progress” that shows the senior medical director of medical services excited to sell off baby parts.

There is no “apparent” about it. They have videos and they have lots of them. I hear more are coming out soon. I suspect even dillusional writers like you will grow silent as more evidence comes out. I can’t wait to hear about investigations by Congress and verious states.

This is an old fable from an old video that is now being recycled, because it’s all conservatives have left to rile up their base. Besides, its election season, so we should expect no less.

Or it is because people, even abortion supporters, are horrified by Dr. Nucatola’s casual manner of explaining how she crushes only certain parts of the baby’s body in order to harvest the organs desired by purchasers. Or maybe it is because this is a new and repulsive act in a long line of repulsive acts by abortionists. Many people are aware that PP has failed to report incidents in which child molesters have brought their victims into PP clinics to procure abortions or when PP was shown to be shipping dead bodies to puplic power plants so the bodies could be burned to create energy in a “waste-to-energy” program. Then there is the horrific story of Dr. Kermit Gosnell. He wasn’t a PP doctor, but he was an abortionist who is now serving a long prison term for murdering babies after they were born. Oh, and we can’t forget that Obamacare funnels money to PP. There’s more, but I’ll leave that for another time.

Well, now Planned Parenthood is biting back with actual FACTS about the issue at hand.

The capitalization of FACTS in Sarah’s article is quite the marketing ploy, isn’t it?

In a statement released by Planned Parenthood on July 15, they call out the lies:

“These outrageous claims are flat-out untrue, but that doesn’t matter to politicians with a longstanding political agenda to ban abortion and defund Planned Parenthood. Women and families who make the decision to donate fetal tissue for lifesaving scientific research should be honored, not attacked and demeaned. Our medical practices and guidelines in this area are clear, and we do this important work just like other high-quality health care providers — with full, appropriate consent from patients, under the highest ethical and legal standards, and with no financial benefit for the patient or Planned Parenthood.”

Have you ever had an argument with your sibling in which it devolved to simply shouoting, “Yeah?”, at each other? No facts necessary, just a denial. But Nucatola’s own statements show that PP is lying. In the recently released conversation Nucatola says, 

I don’t think it’s a reservations issue so much as a perception issue, because I think every provider has had patients who want to donate their tissue, and they absolutely want to accommodate them. They just want to do it in a way that is not perceived as, ‘This clinic is selling tissue, this clinic is making money off of this.’ I know in the Planned Parenthood world they’re very very sensitive to that. And before an affiliate is gonna do that, they need to, obviously, they’re not—some might do it for free—but they want to come to a number that doesn’t look like they’re making money. They want to come to a number that looks like it is a reasonable number for the effort that is allotted on their part. I think with private providers, private clinics, they’ll have much less of a problem with that.

So, PP does not want to be perceived as making money. But Nucatola also says,

You know, I would throw a number out, I would say it’s probably anywhere from $30 to $100 [per specimen], depending on the facility and what’s involved. It just has to do with space issues, are you sending someone there who’s going to be doing everything, is there shipping involved, is somebody gonna have to take it out. You know, I think everybody just wants, it’s really just about if anyone were ever to ask them, “What do you do for this $60? How can you justify that? Or are you basically just doing something completely egregious, that you should be doing for free.” So it just needs to be justifiable. And, look, we have 67 affiliates. They all have different practice environments, different staff, and so that number…

The price has to be “justifiable”. In order to understand what she means by that, we hear her say,

…at the end of the day, they’re a non-profit, they just don’t want to—they want to break even. And if they can do a little better than break even, and do so in a way that seems reasonable, they’re happy to do that.

I suppose that it is known that doing a little better than breaking even means profit. At least that is the way I understand “better than break even”. In other words, Nucatola admits that PP wants to profit off of of selling dead baby body parts.

Nucatola does seem to catch herself here and recovers a bit by explaining that the income is used to pay for losses in other areas, so PP still “breaks even”, but I think an investigation will show profit. Nucatola slipped up, made an admission and then tried to reel it back in. But I think the truth is that PP makes money and uses it for salaries, marketing and things totally unrelated to medical care.

Nucatola goes on to get more specific about how they charge for the “dead baby parts” (Sarah’s description, not mine). Nucatola says staff time matters, how the organs are processed, packaged and shipped and whether the buyer uses a portion of the abortion clinic facility, which seems to suggest that some buyers have people on-site in order to harvest the organs.

In reading Nucatola’s transcript, you can see why the Catholic Church has been so concerned about stem cell research for so long. It is an area, ripe for atrocity. Yet Nucatola nonchalontly munches on her green salad as she talks about packaging and shipping dead baby parts.

They also list 5 FACTS to coincide with the statement and the ongoing accusations:

These FACTS must be good since it is capitalized.

1. Nowhere does anyone from Planned Parenthood discuss “selling” fetal tissue.

Again, it appears Sarah Lastnameunknown has not watched any video nor has she read the transcript. I mean, why bother when you don’t have any interest in the truth anyway. Is Addicting Info going to pay for an article that supports the Pro-Life position? 

Even the heavily edited video from extreme anti-abortion activists doesn’t show this or make this accusation. It simply doesn’t happen.

Just so you know, the video was edited to cut out a lot of idle chatter. It was not edited to implicate Nucatola or PP and more than the longer version does. Most people do not want to watch a fairly blurry and black and white video of a conversation about dismembered babies for over two hours. Therefore, The Center For Medical Progress (TCFMP), just released the most relevant portions. Edited? Yes. Edited in an effort to manipulate what was said? No. 

Sarah also falls back on the tried and true method of labeling the Pro-Life advocates as “extreme”. As if chopping up babies in order to sell them for scientific experimentation is not extreme. Comparing PP to TCFMP, I’d say PP is way more extreme.

Third, Nucatola’s description of the entire abominable process does indicate that PP sells dead baby parts.

On the video, the Planned Parenthood staff member talks about standard reimbursement fees for costs associated with tissue donation programs, which every health care provider has and which the federal law provides for.

Actually, the law allows reasonable cost reimbursement, but Nucatola describes something more than just breaking even at one point and that means profit. 

2. Planned Parenthood helps patients who wish to donate fetal tissue, just like other health care providers do.
Some Planned Parenthood affiliates have programs for women and families who want to donate tissue to leading research institutions that will use it to help find treatment and cures for diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

Kind of like their offer of mammograms and other women’s health procedures. But in the end, it is about profit, receipt of tax dollars and adopting an image that is something a lot warmer and a lot fuzzier than tearing babies apart and selling the pieces to medical researchers.

These programs are just like any other high-quality health care provider’s — they follow all ethics and laws, patients consent fully, and nobody benefits financially.

There are a lot of words here that don’t belong in the same sentence as PP or any other abortion provider: High-quality, health care and ethics don’t mean the same thing to PP as they do to the general public.

3. The people who launched this campaign have a track record of making totally false claims.

A journalist would now list the claims that have been proven false. Sarah Whoeversheis does not do so because she isn’t a journalist, she is an advocate and advocates don’t need facts, they just need claims.

The person leading this campaign used to be a senior staff member at Live Action, which for seven years has made false claims that have been widely discredited by journalists and independent organizations; Forbes Magazine noted that their claims about Planned Parenthood “fall apart upon close inspection.”

References and citations would be quite valuable here. But alas Sarah the anonymous skips over that opportunity to continue her storytelling.

4. The fact that far-right, anti-abortion politicians are latching onto this doesn’t make it any more credible or real.

I am actually stunned. Sarah has stated something true. Let me pause for a moment to gather myself. 

GOP politicians remain in a race to prove who can be the worst on women’s health, and this story is no exception.

I’m not really sure that is an official race. Do politicians specifically want to be the “worst on women’s health”, (whatever that means)? Politicians spend a lot of time being foolish and ill-informed on many things. I suspect many are highly uninformed about women’s health, but then again, so is PP.

Whether it’s Carly Fiorina’s social media page or Bobby Jindal’s sham “investigation,” none of the partisan attempts to make this a real story change the fact that it’s a highly edited video from anti-abortion activists who have made false charges for years, now making claims with no basis in reality and no evidence to back them up.

Is this a news article or part of President Obama’s address to Planned Parenthood a few years ago when he pledged to support PP every step of the way and blessed them?

5. The full, 2.5-hour video shows selective editing that twists and distorts what was said on the tape.

By “twists and distorts”, Sara Howmuch actually means, “says things that I don’t like to hear because these facts suggest that I could be wrong about the line between right and wrong”. 

Late in the day, the Live Action-offshoot group released a longer video. It shows that the Planned Parenthood staffer was talking in the context of stem cell research, and was talking about standard reimbursement rates for costs associated with tissue donation — all of which was edited to change the meaning.

No, actually, it was just the full video that contains the same discussion of using the sale of dead baby parts to cover other costs so that the clinic has a chance to do a little better than break even. It just contains all the boring conversation that sheds no light on the horrible activity of PP.

The 2.5-hour video also shows that the Planned Parenthood staffer’s discussion of brain stem tissue that can help researchers study brain tumors and spinal chord injuries was distorted by editing to make it appear that she was talking about trafficking body parts, which she clearly wasn’t.”

The 2.5 hour video may have discussion about such research, but I have not been able to find it in there in the context Sarah suggests. Also, I’ve seen no distortion. Nucatola says what she says in the video whithout any manipulation or distortion. It sounds like the trafficking of body parts in the shorter clip as well as the longer clip. 

And that’s the truth of it.

Actually, that’s the propaganda of it Sarah. You have tried to put lipstick on a pig and pass it off as a beauty queen, but you have failed. 

So share these facts far and wide and disrupt the constant stream of misinformation that plagues our social media platforms.

Please do.

Planned Parenthood is vital for women and family health.

No it isn’t. Women can get all the services PP offers, except abortion, at many free or subsidized clinics and facilities from coast to coast. PP is exclusively necessary for abortion, which is never necessary as a direct procedure.

Let’s not let lies take away something so crucial from communities across this nation.

Let’s let the truth take care of things.