Planned Parenthood (Photo: Twitter)
The state of California has belatedly jumped into the effort to protect Planned Parenthood by filing criminal charges against the two investigators who published undercover videos that exposed the abortion provider's trade in baby body parts.
And the video makers with the Center for Medical Progress have responded by releasing yet another video. In the latest, a former employee of Planned Parenthood explains how she tries to make sure babies are dismembered before removal because of the visual impact of the dead victim.
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"It's not a matter of how I felt about [the unborn infant] coming out intact, but I've got to worry about my staff, and you know, people's feelings about it, coming out looking like a baby," says DeShawn Taylor, a former medical operator for Planned Parenthood Arizona who now runs her own abortion business.
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra announced Tuesday he has filed 15 criminal charges against the pro-life investigators, David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, who released the videos through their Center for Medical Progress.
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The charges center on violations of California's privacy laws by recording someone without notification.
Becerra alleges that Daleiden and Merritt filmed 14 people without permission between October 2013 and July 2015 in Los Angeles, San Francisco and El Dorado counties. One felony count was filed for each person recorded. The 15th was for criminal conspiracy to invade privacy.
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The case comes months after a similar series of complaints that had been brought against the two in Texas were dropped.
One of the organizations whose activities were uncovered in the videos also sued the pair but walked away from the case without any satisfaction.
Planned Parenthood is America's biggest abortion industry player, doing some 320,000 abortions a year.
Naming baby 'so creepy'
In the new video, Taylor says that because "Arizona is so conservative," she resists sending an intact baby's body for disposal or cremation.
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Those who handle death certifications, she said, have told her to call the victim "Baby so-and-so."
"That's so creepy," she said.
In the video, Taylor believed she was speaking to procurement specialists who wanted to obtain undamaged and unadulterated baby tissue. She said the request was problematic because if there's any sign of life, Arizona law requires her to transport the baby to a hospital.
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That makes it "tricky," she said.
"You need to pay attention to who's in the room."
The new video:
'Laying bare the inhumanity'
The national pro-life group Susan B. Anthony List expressed shock at the "callousness" revealed in the video.
"The latest video from the Center for Medical Progress once again lays bare the inhumanity of abortion and Planned Parenthood’s disregard for the law," said SBA List President Marjorie Dannenfelser.
"The abortionist may laugh as she describes the force needed to dismember a 5-month-old unborn child struggling to survive, but even the staff are not immune to the terrible sight of aborted children and babies possibly born alive and left to die. At Planned Parenthood, these precious children are valued for the profit their organs can bring, but not their lives.
"We have seen enough," she said, noting Congress has already referred Planned Parenthood and its associates for criminal investigation.
"For the abortion giant to continue receiving more than $500 million in taxpayer funding is simply unconscionable," Dannenfelser continued. "Legislators must act immediately to redirect those funds to community health centers, which outnumber Planned Parenthood facilities by more than 20 to one nationwide and offer a full range of primary health care."
Planned Parenthood is now is a desperate fight in Congress to keep the $500 million annually it has been getting from taxpayers. President Trump and members of Congress have said that money would be better spent on community health centers that provide a full range of health services.
Videos 'put abortion providers at risk'
Abortion industry leaders praised California's criminal prosecution.
Vicki Saporta of the National Abortion Federation said: "As we’ve known all along, David Daleiden and his co-conspirators are the ones who broke the law, not abortion providers. In order to launch their smear campaign, Daleiden and Merritt engaged in a long-running illegal conspiracy. They should be held accountable for their actions, which have put abortion providers and others at risk."
Daleiden pointed out that pro-abortion groups filed the "same collusion with corrupt officials in Houston, Texas, and failed: both the charges and the DA were thrown out."
One of the companies that procures body parts, StemExpress, had sued the investigators but then moved to dismiss the case shortly after the company was referred to the Department of Justice for investigation and possible charges.
The Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund defended the CMP investigators in that case. The organization's chief counsel, Charles LiMandri, said at the time that the dismissal of the lawsuit, "on the eve of an important hearing and in the wake of criminal referrals, shows that StemExpress's time is up."
He said StemExpress chief Cate Dyer and StemExpress "would pay $55 for a fetal brain, and then turn around and sell it for $3,340."
"If you do that, you can hire a lot of attorneys to throw up propaganda lawsuits aimed – not at vindicating legal rights – but at influencing public opinion," LiMandri said.
"Propaganda lawsuits are expensive, and StemExpress decided this one was no longer worth the money. Hopefully, when Congress removes Planned Parenthood's $500 million annual tax revenue stream, we'll see Planned Parenthood rethink the merit of its own propaganda lawsuit against David Daleiden and CMP," he said.
See the StemExpress video:
Congressional probe
A U.S. House panel, headed by Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., issued a report on CMP's 11 videos "documenting the practices of local abortion clinics and groups affiliated with the fetal tissue procurement industry."
"Daleiden and his colleagues filmed hundreds of hours of meetings and conversations. … Multiple clips show abortion providers and executives admitting that their fetal tissue procurement agreements are profitable for clinics and help keep their bottom line healthy," the House panel said.
"Multiple clips show abortion providers and executives admitting that they sometimes changed the abortion procedure in order to obtain a more intact specimen, and some use the illegal partial birth abortion procedure," it said.
The congressional investigators found: "Planned Parenthood Federation of America also revealed that they intentionally had not set a policy about 'remuneration' for fetal tissue because 'the headlines would be a disaster.' While the organization's executive told affiliates to 'think, 'New York Times headline'' if this went badly, at the end of the day, they thought '[selling fetal tissue] is a good idea.'"
The panel used the videos not as evidence but as a complaint, the report said. It ended up referring for investigation and possible charges StemExpress, the University of New Mexico, an abortion clinic in Arkansas, DV Biologics, Advanced Bioscience Resources, an abortion clinic in Florida, Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast and a Texas abortionist.
The House panel's referral of individuals and organizations for investigation was joined by a referral from a Senate panel.
When the House panel voted on a contempt citation for StemExpress, Democrats on the committee walked out.
Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., stated, "We refuse to sanction or endorse this exercise by continuing to participate."
See Schakowsky's statement:
The fallout of the videos has included decisions by states to defund Planned Parenthood. Major donors also are backing out, with Macy's ending it support for the abortionists.
One of the videos showed an official admitting Planned Parenthood sells fully intact aborted babies.
Crushing babies
In the first undercover video released by CMP, Deborah Nucatola of Planned Parenthood commented on crushing babies.
"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," she said.
See the first video:
In the second video, Planned Parenthood's Mary Gatter discussed how her compensation for organs could rise when she said, "I want a Lamborghini."
See her comments:
The fifth video released shows Melissa Farrell of Planned Parenthood's Houston clinic discussing "intact fetal cadavers":
The seventh video has the testimony of a Planned Parenthood worker who tapped an aborted infant's heart and saw it start beating.
In Texas, a judge tossed a prosecutor's attempt at charging Daleiden and Merritt.
WND reported that talk radio host Rush Limbaugh described the Texas indictments as a "rogue" prosecutor working with a "pro-abortion" staffer inside his own office.
"So all that has to happen is that your rogue prosecutor, working in concert with your pro-abortion activist in the DA's office, get[s] in the grand jury room and start[s] explaining all this to the grand jury, which is made up of your average Hillary voter, for all we know," he said at the time. "And you start explaining what really went on here. Here we have this great organization, Planned Parenthood, that's trying to plan families and trying to protect women from the terrible, almost fatal disease of pregnancy, and here come these rogue agents disguised as journalists, but they don't have immunity, and they're the ones who've engaged in criminal activity," he said.
"Just as corruption was involved in the last attempt to falsely charge David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, I predict that corruption is at the heart of these California charges as well. It is despicable that the California attorney general charged innocent whistleblowers with felonies instead of the career criminals at Planned Parenthood. This is the ultimate abuse of power and tyranny. The Planned Parenthood butchers have committed tens of thousands of felonies by illegally selling baby's body parts for profit," said Troy Newman, president of Operation Rescue who also served as a founding member of the board for the Center for Medical Progress.
Cheryl Sullenger, senior vice president of OR, added, "We call on U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions to aggressively prosecute Planned Parenthood and their partners in the illegal aborted baby parts trade. We ask that Attorney General Sessions resist any intimidation by California authorities who are simply acting as Democratic operatives on a political agenda to thwart any prosecution of Planned Parenthood."
