The Center for Medical Progress (CMP) is out with a new video that the pro-life group says demonstrates the use of a fraudulent “consent” form allegedly used by Planned Parenthood to obtain permission from women to harvest the body parts of their aborted babies.
CMP uses video footage of the first hearing of the House’s Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives – convened to investigate the bioethics of fetal tissue harvesting and research – that includes a review of a patient consent form used by Planned Parenthood.
According to CMP:
The Planned Parenthood form promises pregnant women considering abortion that aborted fetal tissue “has been used to treat and find a cure for such diseases as diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, and AIDS.” No cures for these diseases are currently available, and no current therapies for them use aborted fetal tissue.
The Democrat minority of the panel called as a witness Dr. Lawrence Goldstein, a scientist from the University of California at San Diego and a longtime donor to Planned Parenthood that state. Goldstein uses the brains and other body parts of aborted fetuses from his local Planned Parenthood abortion clinic for his research.
During the March 2 hearing, Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ) asked Goldstein the following question as the consent form authored by Planned Parenthood Federation of America and provided to its affiliates was exhibited:
Do you believe that anything on that form is creating an undue hardship or intimidation or misrepresentation to women who are being asked to consider whether they will donate this tissue?
Goldstein’s response:
If it’s the form that says, therapies for diseases such as Alzheimer’s and all the rest have already been found, I agree, that’s an inappropriate statement that should not have been made on that form. I don’t know who wrote it, that would not have made it past my IRB [Institutional Review Board] either.
“Planned Parenthood’s baby parts trafficking scheme cannot stand up to independent scrutiny,” says David Daleiden, the project lead at CMP, in a statement.
He continued:
When a Planned Parenthood supporter and baby parts customer admits under oath that Planned Parenthood has been fraudulently inducing patient consent, it discredits all of Planned Parenthood’s assurances that their baby parts scheme has operated legally and above-board. Law enforcement in Planned Parenthood-friendly jurisdictions should stop wasting taxpayer resources to assist Planned Parenthood in harassing citizen journalists, and should stop ignoring the evidence of real fraud, baby body parts trafficking, and criminal abortion practices right in their own backyard.
Daleiden’s statement is particularly timely since Troy Newman – a CMP board member, reported Tuesday that officials from California Attorney General Kamala Harris’ office – a longtime financial supporter of Planned Parenthood – ordered a search of Daleiden’s apartment. Daleiden made the following statement regarding the search:
Today, the California Attorney General’s office of Kamala Harris, who was elected with tens of thousands of dollars from taxpayer-funded Planned Parenthood, seized all video footage showing Planned Parenthood’s criminal trade in aborted baby parts, in addition to my personal information. Ironically, while seizing my First Amendment work product, they ignored documents showing the illicit scheme between StemExpress and Planned Parenthood. This is no surprise–Planned Parenthood’s bought-and-paid-for AG has steadfastly refused to enforce the law against the baby body parts traffickers in our state, or even investigate them–while at the same time doing their bidding to harass and intimidate citizen journalists. We will pursue all remedies to vindicate our First Amendment rights.
CMP produced the series of videos exposing Planned Parenthood’s apparent practices of harvesting the body parts of aborted babies for sale on the open market, and altering the positions of babies during abortion in order to harvest the most intact body parts.
Though Planned Parenthood has denied any wrongdoing in its sale of body parts, the abortion business also released a statement in October announcing it will no longer accept payments for aborted fetal tissue. The organization and its leftwing media supporters continue to insist the videos, produced by CMP, were “deceptively edited.”
However, a Democrat opposition research firm named Fusion – hired by Planned Parenthood itself to review the videos – said while their analysts observed the videos had been edited, “the analysis did not reveal widespread evidence of substantive video manipulation.”
Additionally, Fusion noted, “[A]nalysts found no evidence that CMP inserted dialogue not spoken by Planned Parenthood staff.”
An analysis by Coalfire, a third-party forensics company hired by Alliance Defending Freedom, found that the videos were “not manipulated” and that they are “authentic.”
Nevertheless, under suspicion of bias, Harris County, Texas District Attorney Devon Anderson convened a grand jury that cleared Planned Parenthood of any wrongdoing in the video exposé and, instead, indicted Daleiden and his colleague Sandra Merrit. The grand jury, it was reported, did not even vote on Planned Parenthood’s case.
Subsequently, two pro-choice law professors wrote the indictment of Daleiden and Merrit amounted to “a stunning act of legal jujitsu” and was a “deeply disturbing” outcome both for the First Amendment and undercover citizen journalists attempting to expose corruption.
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