“It’s not enough for Planned Parenthood to be the leading abortion provider in the USA; now we are hearing that they are selling aborted baby parts“, said Ritze. Governors and lawmakers in some Republican-governed states, including Georgia, Indiana and Ohio, have launched their own probes into their state’s Planned Parenthood chapters.
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Nucatola is heard in the video referring to fetal hearts, lungs and livers and to efforts to retrieve these organs intact rather than crush them during an abortion procedure.
Planned Parenthood Federation of America president Cecile Richards says in a recorded statement, “The allegation that Planned Parenthood profits in any way from tissue donation is not true”.
Earlier Tuesday, Rep. Martha Roby (R-Ala.) said during a speech on the House floor that she found the way in which fetuses were talked about in such a “casual, callous” way in the video is “simply horrifying”. According to Planned Parenthood, the monetary sums mentioned by Nucatola were for reimbursement of the clinics’ costs in handling the tissue donations.
Planned Parenthood also said that “the promotional video” by a longtime antiabortion activist mischaracterizes the group’s mission, using “deceptive and unethical video editing”.
No Democrats signed the letter.
As a local Planned Parenthood official explains, the video is highly edited and nothing of the sort is going on.
Over the past few days, we have been disturbed to discover that Planned Parenthood operates in the sale of the parts of the babies they abort.
“We know [unborn] children are pain-capable and when a lot of these laws were written, we did not have the body of evidence about the pain-capable aspect of an unborn child, suffering excruciating pain from at least the 20th week on, post fertilization”, he said.
The controversy in the U.S. does not seem likely to disappear anytime soon, especially in Texas, where majority Republicans have worked in recent years to reduce abortions by forcing clinics to close and weakening Planned Parenthood – primarily by kicking the organization out of the state’s Women’s Health Program in 2011 – and from the state’s smaller Breast and Cervical Cancer Services program this year. “In the video, one of our staff members speaks in a way that does not reflect that compassion”, said Richards, whose statement did not name Nucatola. There is no financial benefit for tissue donation for either the patient or for Planned Parenthood.
In 2013 Planned Parenthood received $540.6 million in government grants.
Planned Parenthood has issued a statement saying that they do donate fetal tissue to medical companies, with the consent of their patients.
In the video, Nucatola says: “There are little changes they can make in their technique to increase your success”.
“Our top priority is the compassionate care that we provide”, Richards said.
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Richards said political attacks are nothing new for her organization, the country’s largest abortion provider.
