Planned Parenthood executives joked about decapitated fetuses, admitted to altering abortion procedures to preserve fetal organs and said clinics have a financial incentive to sell human tissue in a new undercover video released Thursday.
The three-minute video was recorded at an annual National Abortion Federation meeting by pro-life investigators with the Center for Medical Progress. The advocacy group said it’s just a preview of never-before-seen content that has been sealed for almost two years due to legal fights.
In the video, Deborah Nucatola, senior director of medical services at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, admits to altering abortion procedures to preserve fetal organs.
“You know, sometimes she’ll tell me she wants brain, and we’ll, you know, leave the calvarium till last, and then try to basically take it or, actually, you know, catch everything, and even keep it separate from the rest of the tissue so it doesn’t get lost,” Ms. Nucatola says.
Also, Deb VanDerhei, national director of Planned Parenthood’s Consortium of Abortion Providers, admits that some clinics are motivated to sell fetal tissue for profit.
“But the truth is that some might want to do it for — to increase their revenues. And we can’t stop them,” she says in the video.
Paul Blumenthal, medical director emeritus at Planned Parenthood of Maryland, says he’s aware that “Planned Parenthood sells a lot of stuff to people.”
Ann Schutt-Aine, director of abortion services at Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, says she’ll hold a fetus in place with forceps to prevent partial-birth abortions.
“If I’m doing a procedure, and I’m seeing that I’m in fear that it’s about to come to the umbilicus, I might ask for a second set of forceps to hold the body at the cervix, and pull off a leg or two, so it’s not [partial-birth abortion],” she says.
Other top Planned Parenthood executives make gruesome remarks about abortion in the video.
Lisa Harris, medical director at Planned Parenthood of Michigan, says pro-choice proponents should just admit that abortion is murder.
“Let’s just give them all the violence,” she says. “It’s a person. It’s killing. Let’s just give them all that.”
She also jokes about trying to pull a decapitated head out of a patient.
“Our stories don’t really have a place in a lot of pro-choice discourse and rhetoric, right?” Ms. Harris says. “The heads that get stuck that we can’t get out. The hemorrhages that we manage.
“You know, those are all parts of our experience,” she says. “But there’s no real good place for us to share those.”
The release of the video comes as David Daleiden, lead investigator at the Center for Medical Progress, has been charged with 15 felonies by the California attorney general’s office.
Defense attorney Brentford J. Ferreira called the charges a “witch hunt.”
“The First Amendment must apply equally, whether you are pro-choice or pro-life,” Mr. Ferreira said in a statement.
Congressional Republicans have promised to defund Planned Parenthood in the legislation repealing and replacing Obamacare.
• Bradford Richardson can be reached at brichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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