Today, the House Energy & Commerce Committee’s Select Investigative Panel announced that they have referred Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast for criminal prosecution to the Texas Attorney General on account of its illegal sale of baby body parts. The Select Panel is the only official, comprehensive, nationwide investigation of Planned Parenthood’s harvesting and sale of aborted fetal organs, and their findings confirm the criminal activity at Planned Parenthood that CMP’s videosdocumented and show that the wrongdoing goes even deeper than anyone first suspected. The Panel has also criminally referred Planned Parenthood’s closest business partners in the sale of aborted baby parts to various state and local law enforcement. Law enforcement and elected representatives at all levels must now act quickly to bring Planned Parenthood to justice under the law and prevent any more taxpayer subsidies from flowing to Planned Parenthood’s barbaric criminal enterprise.
CMP’s videos on the entities referred by the Panel for criminal prosecution can be found at these links:
In the past year, CMP’s videos exposed Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry’s barbaric, taxpayer-sponsored criminal scheme to harvest and sell tiny baby hearts, lungs, livers, and brains for profit. Yesterday, the American people voted for change agents to respect and protect even the smallest and most forgotten among us, including our unborn brothers and sisters. We can all now unite around commonsense, consensus pro-life policies and leave behind the failed pro-abortion extremism of the past.
Planned Parenthood’s proxy group, the National Abortion Federation, continued their unprecedented and extreme attack on the First Amendment today as they argued to keep the undercover videotapes of NAF’s annual meetings secret. Planned Parenthood and NAF are trying to suppress the freedom of the citizen press and the public’s right to know, in order to keep clear evidence of their coordinated criminal sale of aborted baby body parts from being revealed. The House Energy & Commerce Committee’s Select Investigative Panel recently revealed that NAF and StemExpress negotiated an agreement to market StemExpress fetal tissue sales as a “value added service” to abortion clinics–and now StemExpress has gone into criminal contempt of Congress rather than produce its financial records in response to subpoenas. The justice system must cut the Gordian knot of the unconstitutional prior restraint blocking the release of the videos, and we will not stop until our First Amendment rights, and those of all Americans, are vindicated.
The Orange County, California District Attorney’s Office announced today they are prosecuting a criminal lawsuit against Planned Parenthood of Orange & San Bernardino Counties’ longtime baby body parts business partners, sister companies DaVinci Biosciences and DV Biologics.
For eight years, Planned Parenthood supplied aborted baby hearts, lungs, brains, and intestines to DV Biologics, which DV Biologics then resold for profit. In exchange for merely providing access to aborted baby body parts, Planned Parenthood received kickback contributions from DaVinci Biosciences over the course of their eight-year contract.
The wheels of justice are beginning to turn against Planned Parenthood and their corrupt business partners in the illicit trade in aborted baby body parts. Planned Parenthood is not above the law, and law enforcement and elected representatives everywhere must now hold Planned Parenthood accountable for their barbaric profiteering off of pregnant women and the body parts of their aborted children.
The House Energy & Commerce Committee’s Select Investigative Panel has already discovered probable cause that Planned Parenthood and StemExpress profited off of baby body parts together, used fraudulent and invalid consent forms to pressure patients to agree to body parts harvesting, and violated the HIPAA privacy rights of tens of thousands of pregnant women. Planned Parenthood’s political cronies on the Panel minority, whom Planned Parenthood funds with tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions, made clear today how terrified they and their abortion industry masters are of the full details being revealed about Planned Parenthood’s criminal partnership with StemExpress. They walked out of the hearing today because they can’t handle the truth about Planned Parenthood and StemExpress’ for-profit business partnership in baby body parts. Finding StemExpress in contempt of Congress is just the first criminal charge that the full details about the illicit body parts trade at Planned Parenthood will reveal.
Planned Parenthood and their allies have yet again stormed into federal court, this time demanding the suppression of public records about Planned Parenthood’s supply of aborted baby parts to the taxpayer-sponsored, NIH-funded fetal harvesting service at the University of Washington.
Last October, Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards hailed the partnership between Planned Parenthood Greater Washington & North Idaho and the University of Washington as the exemplary model of their new program for profit-neutral baby parts harvesting. Numerous headlines proclaimed Planned Parenthood’s new “policy change” purporting to stop receiving payment for fetal body parts, after CMP’s videos had revealed Planned Parenthood’s senior leadership callously negotiating the harvest and sale of tiny baby hearts, lungs, and brains for profit.
Over the past year, the American people have watched as Planned Parenthood has scrambled to distract the public and public authorities from the scandal—even while Planned Parenthood has failed the answer the most basic questions about their baby body parts program. What is Planned Parenthood hiding about their new model baby parts program at the University of Washington? The American people, whose tax dollars make this entire barbaric industry possible, deserve to know the truth.
The dismissal of the bogus, politically motivated charges against CMP project lead David Daleiden and investigator Sandra Merritt is a resounding vindication of the First Amendment rights of all citizen journalists, and also a clear warning to any of Planned Parenthood’s political cronies who would attack whistleblowers to protect Planned Parenthood from scrutiny. Planned Parenthood tried to collude with public officials to manipulate the legal process to their own benefit, and they failed. A year after the release of the undercover videos, the ongoing nationwide investigation of Planned Parenthood by the House Select Investigative Panel makes clear that Planned Parenthood is the guilty party in the harvesting and trafficking of baby body parts for profit.
PLANNED PARENTHOOD STILL #GUILTY OF SELLING BABY PARTS FOR PROFIT ONE YEAR AFTER VIDEOS #PPSELLSBABYPARTS Undercover Videos of Senior-Level Planned Parenthood Leadership Negotiating Harvest of Fetal Organs Prompted Outrage and Ongoing Investigations, Further Serious Wrongdoing Uncovered
LOS ANGELES, July 14–One year ago, The Center for Medical Progress released the first in its groundbreaking series of undercover videos catching senior-level Planned Parenthood leadership negotiating the sale and haggling over the price of aborted baby body parts. Today, Planned Parenthood remains under investigation by multiple states and the Select Investigative Panel in Congress, which has determined that Planned Parenthood profited from the sale of fetal body parts, exposed patients’ private medical records, and pressured patient consent with fraudulent paperwork.
Watch CMP’s new video overview of the past year of revelations from multiple sources about Planned Parenthood’s illicit baby body parts trafficking scheme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XY1ReU8hLVI
CMP’s undercover videos featured multiple top-level executives and medical directors at Planned Parenthood, including:
At a business lunch meeting with CMP investigators David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, Dr. Nucatola remarked over wine and salad: “We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.” Nucatola also said of Planned Parenthood affiliates’ payments for fetal organs: “If they can do a little better than break even, and do so in a way that, you know, seems reasonable, they’re happy to do that.”
Dr. Gatter haggled over the price per fetal specimen with the undercover investigators, insisting, “You know in negotiations the person who throws out the figure first is at a loss, right?” and laughing, “I want a Lamborghini.”
Dr. Ginde suggested ways to maximize payments for fetal tissue: “I think a per-item thing works a little better, just because we can see how much we can get out of it.” Melissa Farrell in Texas promised, “If we alter our process, and we are able to obtain intact fetal cadavers, we can make it part of the budget that any dissections are this, and splitting the specimens into different shipments is this. It’s all just a matter of line items.”
The first video, with Dr. Nucatola, Senior Director of Medical Services, received over 1 million views on YouTube in the 24 hours after it was posted. Two days later, PPFA president and CEO Cecile Richards posted her own video apologizing for Nucatola’s “tone and statements.” But to date, none of these representatives of Planned Parenthood have come forward to correct their remarks on the videos or disavow them. Planned Parenthood has not divulged whether or not these representatives continue to work in the same leadership capacities.
The CMP videos now have more than 12 million views on YouTube, including over 3.2 million views of the first video. The videos prompted several Congressional committees and state agencies to open preliminary inquiries, but the only dedicated, nationwide, and in-depth official investigation is the Energy & Commerce Committee’s Select Investigative Panel, chaired by Rep. Marsha Blackburn. Less than a week after the Panel was chartered, Planned Parenthood announced a “policy” change to no longer receive payments for supplying fetal tissue–after 3 months of insisting that these payments were completely legal and acceptable.
In the first half of 2016, the Panel has documented the for-profit business model for fetal body parts harvesting at some of the largest Planned Parenthood affiliates in the country and the company StemExpress. Last month, the Panel filed formal complaints with the Department of Health and Human Services on account of “systematic” HIPAA violations at multiple Planned Parenthood affiliates in their relationship with StemExpress, as well as the use of invalid consent forms with false representations to pregnant women.
“As more details and evidence continue to emerge in the ongoing investigation of Planned Parenthood’s aborted baby parts business, it’s clear Planned Parenthood is guilty of far more wrongdoing in their fetal harvesting scheme than anyone initially realized,” notes David Daleiden, CMP project lead. “Planned Parenthood has claimed for one year that they made no money from baby body parts, but faced with an ever-growing body of evidence to the contrary, they have yet to produce anything other than press releases to back up their lies to the public.”
Daleiden concludes, “The rule of law means that there cannot be one special set of rules for Planned Parenthood, and another for everybody else. Planned Parenthood is not above the law and must be held accountable for their callous and careless treatment of vulnerable patients and their barbaric profiteering on baby body parts.”
Today’s nearly incoherent abortion ruling at the Supreme Court is little more than a naked power grab that calls into question the Court’s continued adherence to the rule of law. So long as the people of the United States must live and litigate under one set of rules, while abortion doctors receive preferential treatment and may freely break them under another, corrupt and unaccountable organizations like Planned Parenthood will continue to put their profit margins ahead of women’s lives, safety, and that of unborn children. The Center for Medical Progress maintains undercover footage that could shed significant light on the issues in today’s Supreme Court case, yet we are prevented from releasing any of it by a gag-order from the federal court in San Francisco.
Judge Diane Bull’s swift dismissal of the bogus charge against CMP founder David Daleiden of trafficking human organs is the latest confirmation that the indictments from a runaway grand jury in Houston were a politically-motivated sham all along. In finding that the indictment was void on its face, Judge Bull’s ruling directly contradicts the District Attorney’s argument that the indictment was valid despite the DA’s collusion with Planned Parenthood. The dismissal of the first indictment today sends a strong message to Planned Parenthood and their political cronies that colluding to suppress the First Amendment rights of citizen journalists will never work. The Center for Medical Progress follows all applicable laws in the course of its investigative journalism work and as more details about Planned Parenthood’s contracts for aborted baby parts come to light, it’s clear that Planned Parenthood and their business partners like StemExpress are the ones who are guilty of trafficking in human body parts.
