At an April 14 MSNBC town hall, Ted Cruz was asked about abortion. The senator and presidential candidate made a point of mentioning last year’s Center for Medical Progress undercover investigation showing Planned Parenthood striking illegal deals to sell fetal body parts for profit. “I will say virtually none of the network news would show the videos on air,” Cruz said. “These videos showed Planned Parenthood officials essentially admitting to what appeared to be a pattern of federal felonies.” MSNBC’s Chuck Todd immediately pushed back. “A lot of controversy around how those videos were made,” he told Cruz. “Some of the video was made up. Reenactments.”
To be clear, there are absolutely no “reenactments” in the Center for Medical Progress’s videos, and there is no evidence any of the horrifying footage was “made up.” In fact, a few days after the town hall, the House Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives, chaired by Rep. Marsha Blackburn, held a hearing on the matter of whether abortion clinics were illegally selling fetal body parts. That hearing dramatically reinforced the veracity of the Center for Medical Progress’s reports.
The evidence produced at the hearing, which Democratic House members fought to keep from being released, was damning. There was an abundance of marketing materials from fetal tissue brokers targeted at abortion clinics, advising them that harvesting and selling the organs of the unborn was “financially profitable” and “a financial benefit to your clinic.” One fetal tissue procurement company even had a ghoulish e-commerce website with a menu of fetal body parts, such as hearts, tongues, and even scalps, that could be ordered. The unborn organ trade was undeniably lucrative—a single fetal brain could fetch more than $3,000.
The Democrats’ star witness at the hearing was Fay Clayton, a Chicago lawyer with a lengthy history working for pro-abortion groups. Her testimony was not effective, to put it mildly. She claimed the evidence showing a market in fetal tissue was altered. Then she said it referred to adult tissue; she was publicly corrected by Rep. Sean Duffy, who pointed out the materials in question specifically mentioned fetal DNA.
Duffy also called attention to the fact that Clayton and her husband have given Rep. Jan Schakowsky, the ranking Democratic member on the panel, over $10,000 in campaign contributions. Not only that, as journalist Mollie Hemingway (full disclosure: my wife) has reported, Clayton is at the center of a host of revealing conflicts of interest.
In 2005, Clayton held a fundraiser at her home for Schakowsky’s husband, Chicago community organizer Robert Creamer, who was heading off to a stint in federal penitentiary for tax fraud and a multimillion-dollar check kiting scheme. These days, Creamer is out of prison and a partner at the political messaging firm Democracy Partners. Among Democracy Partners’s clients are Planned Parenthood, EMILY’s List, the Guttmacher Institute, NARAL, National Organization for Women, and Voters for Choice. One of Creamer’s colleagues at Democracy Partners happens to be Christine Pelosi, daughter of Democratic House minority leader Nancy Pelosi.
It’s clear that—like traffickers in fetal tissue—Democratic politicians regard the abortion industry as a lucrative source of income. So they can’t be trusted to regulate it adequately. In addition to unseemly revelations about this organ trade, the circumstances surrounding the conviction of abortionist Kermit Gosnell (who had a fondness for collecting fetal parts in jars he kept in his house) for killing infants born alive suggest that, for political reasons, abortion has been for decades all but immune from the regulatory scrutiny given to every other major medical procedure.
Further, while it’s fair to credit Chuck Todd for asking Hillary Clinton a genuinely tough question recently about whether the unborn should have rights, abortion coverage remains startlingly one-sided—when it’s covered at all. The House Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives hearing received almost no major media coverage. We suspect the media were conspicuously silent because they know coverage would discredit the firehose of ink spilled last fall trying and failing to undermine both the Center for Medical Progress and former presidential candidate Carly Fiorina’s impassioned attempts to draw attention to their discomfiting revelations.
Planned Parenthood already issued a tacit acknowledgment of guilt when it announced last fall it would stop accepting money in exchange for fetal parts. But its defensive rhetoric remains fundamentally dishonest and will be so long as the media remain uninterested in the facts. House investigators still need to audit abortion clinics before they can definitively say the law against selling fetal parts has been broken, but they have more than enough justification to do so. Unfortunately, so long as abortion is given blanket sanction, it remains impossible for lawmakers to uphold the most basic standard of decency: to stop the wanton killing of others for the sake of profit and convenience.
