The organization has been the subject of negative attention in recent weeks following the release of highly edited sting videos recorded by an anti-abortion group alleging that Planned Parenthood illegally profits from its fetal tissue donation program.
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Cecile Richards, president/CEO of Planned Parenthood: “The eal goal of these extremists has nothing to do about our fetal tissue donation compliance process, but is instead to ban abortion in the USA and block women from getting any health care from Planned Parenthood”.
The Center for Medical Progress calls Planned Parenthood’s policy change, “an admission of guilt”. However, they were unsuccessful last month in their attempt to eliminate $521 million in federal funding that mostly covers cancer screenings, contraception and other nonabortion activities.
Under state law, abortion providers must send a “representative sample of tissue” taken at the time of an abortion and send that to a pathologist for examination.
In the first hearing on Planned Parenthood, James Bopp, the general counsel for the National Right to Life Committee, told the House Judiciary Committee that Planned Parenthood likely broke multiple federal laws in its sale of aborted babies and their body parts for research. “So many people said, ‘I don’t know why you continue to do this, you guys could just walk away from this, ‘ but this is in fact Planned Parenthood standing strong and saying, ‘we are going to continue to do this work.’…”
David Daleiden, who has led the campaign against Planned Parenthood, was quick to claim victory.
Planned Parenthood says it did nothing illegal and only accepted payments covering the costs of retrieving the tissue, which it provides to medical researchers.
Though the CNN moderators carefully sidestepped the Planned Parenthood issue, not mentioning the name even once, on its website the cable channel said that Planned Parenthood constituted one of the “7 memorable Democratic Debate moments”.
Professor Arthur Caplan, director of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center’s Department of Population Health, said Planned Parenthood’s move was strategically wise.
But there was no sign she would succeed as Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill said their investigations would go on and continued to denounce the practice of harvesting aborted fetal tissue as barbaric, whether done for profit or not. The law allowed entities supplying the tissue to recover the costs of running such programs. On Capitol Hill, Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz said today, “This is a good tangible result of the [[neglected]] collective efforts of the House in investigating Planned Parenthood”, adding “congressional scrutiny will continue”, something pro-life groups are happy to hear.
Planned Parenthood’s operations in California and Washington now help research facilities in fetal tissue donation, while its operations in Oregon focus on placenta tissue donation.
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The US Congress has begun an investigation into Planned Parenthood and several states have already voted to defund the organisation.
