Late last week, the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) submitted evidence to a federal judge in Oakland, Calif., to back up a new accusation Planned Parenthood and partners may have doctored records about their revenues from aborted fetal body parts and lied to Congress about them during 2015 testimony.
Could this new evidence, along with the fact that the organization is still under FBI investigation, finally push the GOP to end the organization’s massive taxpayer-funded subsidies?
Is Planned Parenthood Trying To Cover Its Tracks?
In 2016, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley referred Planned Parenthood to the FBI for investigation following PP’s testimony in front of Congress. CMP asserts the reason for that might be that Planned Parenthood fabricated key information it submitted to Congress.
After years of footwork and lawsuits, CMP has asked the judge in California to force Planned Parenthood and their suspect business partner, Advanced Bioscience Resources (ABR), to produce the original records from their baby body parts harvesting programs. As a result of CMP’s undercover work, ABR is also now also under federal investigation for working with Planned Parenthood to procure aborted baby body parts, which the company sold to government-funded researchers.
In the last few weeks, CMP has helped make public the fact that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) had a hefty contract with ABR. As a result, in late September, HHS announced that it had terminated the contract because they were “not sufficiently assured that the contract included the appropriate protections applicable to fetal tissue research or met all other procurement requirements.”
Still, all of these inappropriate business relationships led CMP to continue digging. What they found was disturbing, to say the least. ABR is currently under CMP’s filing with the court. Based on sealed documents reflecting Planned Parenthood’s invoices for payment for aborted baby parts, both ABR and Planned Parenthood produced what purported to be the same set of invoices, “but they produced different versions of the same invoice,” CMP states.
Additionally, “the revenue totals and procurement totals” for fetal body parts “do not match” the totals that Planned Parenthood reported to congressional investigations years ago. The filing asks the court “to verify that [Planned Parenthood] are not producing fabricated evidence.” In a statement, CMP’s project lead David Daleiden said,
The glaring discrepancies in Planned Parenthood’s alleged documentation of their baby body parts revenues call into question every statement Planned Parenthood has ever made in defense of their abortion harvesting programs. This would not be the first time Planned Parenthood has apparently doctored critical evidence about their own wrongdoing … It is imperative for prosecutors to seize the original financial records from Planned Parenthood and their accomplices immediately, so these depraved enterprises cannot continue to cover up their criminal sale of baby body parts.
Planned Parenthood’s Ugly History
This newest request for Planned Parenthood to come clean is only the latest in a long line of Planned Parenthood cover-ups and distortions. The public first became aware of Planned Parenthood’s baby part harvesting scheme in 2015 when CMP methodically unveiled the series of powerful undercover videos.
The videos, taken inside Planned Parenthood clinics and at events with high-level executives, showed everything from casual talk about aborting babies to haggling over the price of aborted baby parts. One executive joked she had to make sure she charged enough on aborted fetal tissue to ensure she could purchase a Lamborghini.
The videos’ heinously laissez-faire portrayal of abortions and frankness about how much certain procured parts would amass in price sparked national, mainstream news coverage about what Planned Parenthood had been doing all these years — in addition to aborting babies.
Planned Parenthood’s nightmare didn’t end with a mountain of negative press. CMP’s undercover videos garnered enough coverage that Congress took note and investigated. In 2015, spearheaded by Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz, the House Oversight Committee dug into Planned Parenthood’s finances and found they did not need federal funding to exist.
From there, staff at the Senate Judiciary Committee reviewed Planned Parenthood’s activities. After analyzing more than 20,000 pages of documents, Grassley referred Planned Parenthood to the FBI and the Department of Justice in 2016 for “investigation and possible persecution.”
“The seeming disregard for the law by these entities has been fueled by decades of utter failure by the Justice Department to enforce it,” he said in a statement on the referral. “And, unless there is a renewed commitment by everyone involved against commercializing the trade in aborted fetal body parts for profit, then the problem is likely to continue.”
Can’t Keep Tax Dollars From a Body Parts Trafficker?
Despite this rather unprecedented event, the mainstream media hardly mentioned the FBI investigation, and Congress continues to fund the behemoth organization. In the meantime, a judge in California placed CMP under a gag order, preventing them from unveiling additional videos. In order to move forward, and continue showing the public how Planned Parenthood really conducts its “business” with taxpayer dollars, CMP has had to spend time and resources fighting the gag order.
What will it take to get Congress to defund Planned Parenthood? Illegal activity? Lying to Congress? The organization has been shown to procure and sell aborted baby parts. The organization has been shown to operate just fine without federal funds. The organization has been referred to the FBI and DOJ for investigation — after multiple committee investigations — and now it looks like they might have lied about their profits during their original congressional testimony.
No one would support any other private company operating this way. If this were an animal humane society, patrons would be outraged, demand a boycott, and ensure that the free market squelch their business until it failed. Yet not only does much of the mainstream media and the public ignore Planned Parenthood’s shenanigans, Congress — despite a GOP majority — refuses to prevent them from receiving public funds.
It’s time for Planned Parenthood to stop abortions. It’s time for Planned Parenthood to stop selling and profiting from aborted fetal tissue. Until these two things happen, it’s time for a GOP-majority Congress to strip them of their taxpayer-funded subsidies. It need not be tucked into a piece of legislation, as if Republicans are hiding their efforts, as they have in years past.
Congressional Republicans should defund Planned Parenthood with verve and confidence: The organization aborts babies while claiming they provide “medical care,” they are an organization that sold harvested baby parts while possibly illegally profiting, and now we have a new charge they lied to the people trying to hold them accountable. Republicans should put aside cowardice and defund Planned Parenthood with pride.
