The Washington Post appears to be struggling a bit to cover today’s blockbuster story about the undercover video of Planned Parenthood harvesting and selling organs from aborted fetuses. First, they changed the headline to something that’s far more friendly to Planned Parenthood without noting the change.
Second, the story is substantively wrong. Here’s what the Post wrote:
This passage is incorrect in multiple ways. The video does absolutely show Planned Parenthood’s senior director of medical research Deborah Nucatola “explicitly talking about selling organs” and it’s hard to fathom what hairsplitting is involved to say otherwise. You can read the transcript, but she specifically talks at length about about performing abortions in a certain way so as not to damage the valuable organs taken from the fetuses. She even says at one point, “a lot of people want intact hearts these days, they’re looking for specific nodes. AV nodes, yesterday I was like wow, I didn’t even know, good for them. Yesterday was the first time she said people wanted lungs. And then, like I said, always as many intact livers as possible.”
The other way the Post has mishandled this story is the issue of profiting off of these sales. Saying the “the organization is ‘very, very sensitive’ about being perceived as illegally profiting from organ sales and charges only for the cost, for instance, of shipping the tissue” makes it sound like Planned Parenthood and their affiliates aren’t profiting off of harvesting organs. Earlier today, the Center for Medical Progress — the pro-life group that released the video — also released a copy of a flyer from StemExpress, a major purchaser of Planned Parenthood’s aborted fetal tissue. As the Center for Medical Progress notes, “This flyer advertises 4 different times the financial benefit that Planned Parenthood clinics can receive from supplying fetal tissue, with the words: ‘Financially Profitable,’ ‘Financial Profits,’ ‘financial benefit to your clinic,’ ‘fiscal growth of your own clinic.’ The advertisement carries an endorsement from Planned Parenthood Medical Director Dr. Dorothy Furgerson.”
Finally, Nucatola herself says that the clinics hope to profit off of the sales, regardless of whether they are sensitive to appearing ghoulish for doing so. If you watch the video and/or read the transcript, here’s what Nucatola says in context [emphasis added]:
And shortly after that, Nucatola says this:
There can be no doubt, based on what Planned Parenthood’s own represenative said, that there is indeed a profit motive for abortion clinics to harvest organs. The Washington Post needs to meaningfully correct its story to reflect what Planned Parenthood’s representative said on camera. Right now the story reads as if it is in denial about basic fact. And it is revealing that all of the ways in which the story is being misreported benefit Planned Parenthood.
