In 2013, the criminal trial of Kermit Gosnell and his abortion “house of horrors” shocked the nation. For years, state inspectors had overlooked numerous egregious violations at Gosnell’s Philadelphia facility — it was a sanitary disaster, he was killing already-delivered babies and it was also a fire-trap from which patients could not be safely extracted in case of emergencies resulting from his quackery. Worst of all, at least two women had died from botched abortions there, and countless others had been maimed.
That case showed the perils of ideologically motivated under-regulation and under-enforcement in a medical field that, to put it mildly, doesn’t always attract the best, brightest or most scrupulous of medical practitioners.
This week’s revelation about the nation’s largest abortion business contains softer but much broader echoes of a similar Wild West mentality. In a hidden camera video obtained by the Center for Medical Progress, Planned Parenthood’s senior director of medical services, Deborah Nucatola, describes Planned Parenthood’s role in obtaining and preserving fetal body parts that are subsequently used for medical experiments. (Both the full version and an edited version are available on YouTube.)
RELATED ARTICLE: GOP calls Planned Parenthood video ‘disgusting’
In the video, speaking with people posing as representatives of a biologics company, Nucatola discusses the cost per specimen for various organs. Planned Parenthood maintains that the costs she was describing are reimbursement for clinics’ expenses — after all, the sale of human fetal body parts is against federal law — although not every expert to be shown the tape agrees.
Even accepting the organization’s explanation of this at face value, the more obvious problem comes in something else Nucatola discusses in greater detail on the tape: Planned Parenthood providers, she says quite unambiguously, perform abortions differently than they would otherwise in order to preserve fetal organs. This is both a violation of federal laws on fetal tissue donations (to protect patients, the law forbids “alteration of the timing, method, or procedures used to terminate the pregnancy … solely for the purposes of obtaining the tissue”) and a violation of the consent forms that Planned Parenthood gives its patients and doctors to sign whenever a donation is agreed upon.
RELATED ARTICLE: Boehner launches congressional probe of Planned Parenthood
“We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver,” Nucatola says on tape, “because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.” Nucatola also talks about how doctors use ultrasounds to guide their work and get organs intact — even how they turn fetuses around before killing them, because a feet-first delivery allows them to obtain intact heads. The editorial comment added by the makers of the video is that this is “identical to the illegal partial-birth abortion procedure.”
RELATED ARTICLE: Rep. in tears: Babies are being brutally killed and their organs harvested for profit
Whatever is to be taken from this sting operation, it seems clear that more attention must be paid to whether abortion clinics are obeying federal law — especially clinics whose parent organization receives more than half a billion dollars in annual subsidies from governments at all levels.
Abortion is a controversial procedure, because the science of human life and the technology of ultrasound make it increasingly obvious that it takes a human life every time. By doing so, abortion violates the most fundamental principles of health care and medical ethics. But one need not believe this to reject a medical culture that subordinates patients’ well-being to the value of human parts as a commodity — even if this commodity is purportedly in the service of science.
