Not that Planned Parenthood has done anything illegal, says president Cecile Richards, but they’re going to stop taking money for baby body parts.
So she wrote in a two-page letter to the director of the National Institutes of Health.
Let’s look at what she says. More important, let’s look at what she doesn’t say.
She extols the virtues of her organization. She even squeezes in a nod to Ronald Reagan. But she downplays the baby body parts business. “In fact,” she wrote, “just 1% of our health centers currently facilitate donation for fetal tissue research.”
One percent sounds tiny, doesn’t it? One percent of “nearly 700” Planned Parenthood sites is about seven.
But not all Planned Parenthood locations do abortions. Of those that do, some do only chemical abortions, which yield no parts to sell. Planned Parenthood had 668 locations as of November 2014. Of those, 173 did surgical abortions. Their glossy annual report doesn’t say how many run a body parts business on the side, but if we use Cecile’s number of seven, that’s not one percent; it’s four percent.
But one percent or four percent, it doesn’t really matter. There’s no magic number at which divvying up dead babies becomes OK.
Then Cecile channels Chicken Little; women will lose “access to basic health care” if Planned Parenthood can’t pull over half a billion dollars out of your pocket every year. Maybe she’s been too busy to hear about the 13,000-plus taxpayer-funded clinics that outnumber Planned Parenthood 20 to 1 and offer far more medical services.
She’s undaunted, though. To fight “categorically false” accusations against her abortion chain, she climbs Mount Self-Righteous and declares that now, by refusing payment for abortion leftovers, Planned Parenthood will keep “pushing forward with our important work on behalf of millions of women, men, and young people.” Well, certainly not for the youngest of young people.
She also wants to be “completely clear” about this: “Planned Parenthood’s policies on fetal tissue donation already exceed the legal requirements.”
[tweetthis] For seven years, 2005 to 2011, Planned Parenthood didn’t even monitor affiliates’ tissue donation programs.[/tweetthis]
And what policies would those be, exactly? In the very first exposé video, Senior Medical Director Deb Nucatola specifically said Planned Parenthood had no national policy, “and that’s by choice.” For seven years, 2005 to 2011, the home office didn’t even monitor affiliates’ tissue donation programs.
As for that huff-and-puff about legal requirements, in the 10th video Deb Van Derhei, director of Planned Parenthood’s Consortium of Abortion Providers, clearly differentiates between affiliates that accept only reimbursement and those that seek remuneration. When an affiliate administrator says a money-for-tissue arrangement is a “valuable exchange” and wants advice on setting one up, Van Derhei specifically steers her toward three affiliates that run programs for remuneration: Northern California, Mar Monte and Los Angeles.
In her letter, Cecile twice uses the phrase “going forward.” “Going forward” she’s going to have a policy. “Going forward” all locations will follow that policy “even if it means they will not recover reimbursements.”
“Even if”? You can bet this letter was vetted six ways to Sunday by a horde of lawyers. The letter mentions not one word about giving up “remuneration.” But there’s that “if”: two fully loaded little letters. And “going forward” doesn’t erase past illegalities in any case.
In the wake of Cecile’s “announcement,” it’s not likely that Americans, including Congress, will forget the illegalities her letter doesn’t address—such as abortionist Nucatola describing how she alters her abortion technique and crushes only specific areas of the baby to secure more intact tissue. And when the head is delivered last it likely results in the banned partial-birth abortion procedure.
As for facilitating body part “donations,” procurement tech Holly O’Donnell blew that whistle when she revealed consent wasn’t always obtained.
Cecile makes a big deal about blowing away what she calls the “smokescreen” of the exposé. But she can’t blow away congressional investigations. She can’t blow away what people on the fence about abortion have now seen. She can’t blow away your access to social media.
And she can’t blow away your vote. Right now the most pro-abortion president in history will veto any attempt not to fund his beloved Planned Parenthood. That means you and I have to elect a pro-life president in 2016, so the only thing “going forward” is the pro-life movement.
Check out our website for more things you can do to counter Planned Parenthood’s killing machine.
Leave a Reply