In an unprecedented hearing in California this week featuring Planned Parenthood executives and the undercover videos made by the Center for Medical Progress, abortion doctors revealed uncomfortable truths about the industry. In one such testimony, Forrest Smith, an obstetrician-gynecologist who performed abortions in California, testified not only that Planned Parenthood and other abortion clinics were selling aborted baby parts for profit, but babies were often born alive, then murdered, in order to ensure the organs to be sold were more fresh and intact.
Smith, who said he had done at least 50,000 abortions, testified that based on what he saw in the videos and what he knows about the abortion industry, he believes doctors performed abortion procedures so that babies would be born alive, even though it puts the mother at greater risk.
Smith testified that he came to this conclusion after reviewing video footage of a presentation Alisa Goldberg gave at a 2014 Planned Parenthood conference and in another Center for Medical Progress video where a procurement manager for Advanced Bioscience Research talks about a “fetus falling out.”
In her presentation, Goldberg suggested using large doses of misoprostol so a second-trimester induced abortion procedure could be completed in one day. According to Smith, large doses of that drug would trigger “tumultuous labor” and suggested the baby is often delivered so quickly, it needs no “assistance from the abortion doctor, no instrumentation,” or in another words appears to “fall out” of the mother and is born alive. Smith also testified that “very few people in abortion, outside of Planned Parenthood, do that.”
In a “normal” abortion scenario, the baby’s heart would be stopped with a lethal dose of potassium chloride while still inside the mother’s womb, and then expelled. Of course, this testimony flies in the face of what Planned Parenthood has always said about the Center for Medical Progress videos which is that, at best, they were simply donating organs to science for research and at worst, they were not compromising the healthcare of mom or baby during the process.
In a statement, the Center for Medical Progress said, “Planned Parenthood, StemExpress, and David Daleiden’s sworn courtroom testimony the past two weeks has demonstrated the only people who committed crimes in connection with the undercover videos are the Planned Parenthood leaders who sold baby parts, not CMP’s successful undercover journalists. There was never any legal reason to prosecute CMP investigators for recording public conversations. This sham case was launched by dirty political dealings between Planned Parenthood and Kamala Harris and must be thrown out so the justice system can finally focus on the real criminals who sold baby body parts.”
The Center for Medical Progress made waves starting in 2014 when they unveiled a series of undercover videos showing Planned Parenthood executives haggling over the prices of aborted baby organs and tissue to prospective undercover buyers, David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, who were doing a sting operation. Daleiden and Merritt were charged with 14 felony counts of recording confidential information without consent in connection with the videos, which is what this week’s hearing centered around.
The preliminary hearing served to determine if any of the charges could proceed to a trial. Judge Christopher Hite will issue his ruling on the hearing soon.
Nicole Russell (@russell_nm) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota.
