An attempt by Planned Parenthood to discredit recent undercover videos that suggest it is profiting off the sale of fetal tissue and organs is “a complete failure,” said the man behind those videos.
David Daleiden, project lead for the Center for Medical Progress, which is publishing videos from a stealth campaign, said Thursday that Planned Parenthood is involved in a “desperate, 11th-hour attempt to pay their hand-picked ‘experts’ to distract from the crimes documented on video.”
The largest abortion provider in the nation gave congressional leaders and a committee that is investigating allegations of criminality at its clinics an analysis it commissioned concluding that “manipulation” of the undercover videos make those recordings unreliable for any official inquiry, the New York Times reported.
But Daleiden said any “manipulation” of the videos was merely a cutting out of “bathroom breaks and waiting periods between meetings.”
He went even further, by pointing out that Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards admitted in a letter to Congress: that her organization’s doctors alter their abortion procedures to get higher-quality body parts and that Planned Parenthood gets paid $60 per baby body part harvested.
“Both of these admissions speak to Planned Parenthood’s financial benefit and profit motive for supplying fetal tissue, and both are the points CMP’s videos have documented and illustrated from the very beginning,” he said. “When a Tissue Procurement Organization handles all dissection, packaging, and shipping of fetal organs, and all Planned Parenthood does is spend 10 minutes consenting a patient, the $60 per body part harvested quickly adds up to illegal baby parts profit for Planned Parenthood. And when a Planned Parenthood doctor manipulates the abortion to get higher-quality baby parts, they are prizing Planned Parenthood’s financial interests ahead of women’s health.”
“A thorough review of these videos in consultation with qualified experts found that they do not present a complete or accurate record of the events they purport to depict,” said the analysis of a private research company Planned Parenthood hired.
Richards wrote to Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John A. Boehner, both Republicans, and to Senator Harry Reid and Representative Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leaders.
With Boehner’s urging, Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee in July opened an investigation of Planned Parenthood after the Center for Medical Progress began posting its videos online.
Planned Parenthood has said from the beginning that the videos were deceptively and misleadingly edited.
Analysis by Fusion GPS, a Washington-based research and corporate intelligence company, and its co-founder Glenn Simpson, a former investigative reporter for The Wall Street Journal, would seem to back up that claim.
A transcription service was hired to transcribe the videos, without being told that Planned Parenthood was the client, to compare with transcripts publicized by the anti-abortion group. That comparison, the analysis said, showed “substantive omissions” from the group’s version. Mr. Simpson was assisted in the analysis by several others including a video forensics expert, Grant Fredericks, and a television producer, Scott Goldie. According to the investigation, the reviewers could not determine “the extent to which C.M.P.s undisclosed edits and cuts distort the meaning of the encounters the videos purport to document.” But, it said, “the manipulation of the videos does mean they have no evidentiary value in a legal context and cannot be relied upon for any official inquiries” unless C.M.P. provides investigators with its original material, and that material is independently authenticated as unaltered. For example, Mr. Fredericks said recordings in Houston and Denver were each missing about 30 minutes of video, judging from time stamps and frame counters on the recordings. The analysis also supported Planned Parenthood’s objection to two allegations that have elicited some of the most outrage from anti-abortion forces, disputing that Planned Parenthood staffers at one point say of fetal remains, “It’s a baby,” and in a second instance, “another boy.”
But Daleiden said that Planned Parenthood’s experts found “no evidence of audio manipulation” in the recordings.
“It is telling that Planned Parenthood is trying so hard to pretend that their staff did not refer to a dismembered fetus as ‘a baby’ and ‘another boy,'” he said. “Planned Parenthood’s abortion providers are far more honest about the brutal reality of their work than the paid political consultants at the national office. If Planned Parenthood really wants to disprove the now-overwhelming body of evidence that their affiliates traffick [sic] in baby body parts, they should release their fetal tissue contracts with the for-profit company StemExpress for law enforcement, Congress, and all the world to see.”
StemExpress is a California firm that procures fetal and human tissue for research. It has collaborated with Planned Parenthood clinics in that procurement and has been the subject of several of CMP’s videos.
