Planned Parenthood has vehemently denied in public that it traffics in the body parts of unborn babies, but under oath in a lawsuit, officials tell a different story.
The group that exposed the unseemly trade in 2015 through its undercover videos, the Center for Medical Progress, has released a new video featuring the testimonies.
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"The time has come for federal consequences for Planned Parenthood," said David Daleiden, CMP's founder and the lead reporter who conducted the undercover investigation.
"Planned Parenthood lied to the public and to Congress, but now there is no longer any reasonable doubt that Planned Parenthood sold fetal body parts, commodifying living children in the womb and treating pregnant women like a cash crop. The U.S. Department of Justice must escalate the enforcement of laws against fetal trafficking to the highest level of priority."
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The undercover videos caught Planned Parenthood officials on a hidden camera discussing payments for the body parts of aborted children. One famously negotiated for higher prices because "I want a Lamborghini."
The "admissions" under oath about the sales, CMP said, came during testimony in a lawsuit by Planned Parenthood against CMP and the undercover reporters in which the abortion giant won a judgment that remains under appeal.
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"The video shows how Planned Parenthood Federation of America, while under investigation in 2015, told Congress that its Gulf Coast affiliate in Houston had 'rebuffed' an undercover proposal to sell fetal livers for $750 per liver and $1600 for liver/thymus pairs. But Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast's Senior Director of Abortion Access, Tram Nguyen, testified that she 'wanted to move forward with it,' as documented in contemporaneous emails between her and PPGC’s Regional Director Dyann Santos," CMP said.
See the new video:
The video includes the sworn testimony of Dorothy Furgerson, the longtime chief medical officer of Planned Parenthood Mar Monte in San Jose, California, PPMM, the largest Planned Parenthood affiliate in the country.
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Fergerson signed PPMM's contract to sell fetal body parts to StemExpress, the leading provider of biospecimens to researchers. Her endorsement appears on a StemExpress brochure handed out at National Abortion Federation meetings advertising "fiscal[] rewards" and "financial profits" to the abortion clinics that provided fetal tissue to StemExpress.
CMP says in the new video that unsealed invoices show PPMM making $25,000 in just three months from StemExpress.
Asked how much money an abortion clinic could make per year from selling fetal body parts, the founder and CEO of Planned Parenthood partner Advanced Bioscience Resources, Linda Tracy, was forbidden by her lawyer to answer, the video shows.
Planned Parenthood's Deborah Nucatola also admitted knowing the organization was receiving payments. And senior executive Mary Gatter established a relationship with the for-profit firm Novogenix.
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However, CMP points out, federal law broadly forbids the exchange of valuable consideration for fetal tissue.
House and Senate investigators made criminal referrals for Planned Parenthood and their business partners to the FBI and the DOJ.
The DOJ in 2017 confirmed an investigation was underway. At about the same time, two California companies admitted to selling body parts from Planned Parenthood and reached a $7.8 million settlement with prosecutors.
Last week, the Small Business Administration demanded 37 Planned Parenthood affiliates return $80 million in federal relief loans they fraudulently certified they were eligible to receive. And 27 senators called on Attorney General Bill Barr to broaden the DOJ investigation of the Planned Parenthood affiliates’ activities.
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Daleiden has sued Planned Parenthood, former California Attorney General Kamala Harris and current AG Xavier Becerra for prosecuting them for their undercover investigation.
CMP charged the defendants conspired to violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
Filed in federal court in Los Angeles, the complaint seeks "justice for a brazen, unprecedented, and ongoing conspiracy to selectively use California’s video recording laws as a political weapon to silence disfavored speech."
"David Daleiden became the first journalist ever to be criminally prosecuted under California’s recording law, not because of the method of video recording he utilized in his investigation—which is common in investigative journalism in this state—but because his investigation revealed and he published 'shock[ing]' content that California's attorney general and the private party co-conspirators wanted to cover up," the complaint says.
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The organization explained California's recording law bans secret videotaping of "confidential" conversations in which third parties cannot be expected to overhear the conversation. The lawsuit argues the attorney general never prosecuted incidents in which California news outlets recorded conversations that could not be overheard by others.
But Daleiden and CMP were targeted even though the recordings were made in public places – often restaurants – in which passersby easily could hear the conversations.
"The California attorney general first admitted that they are enforcing the video recording law solely based on how they feel about the message being published, and then further admitted they are not even trying to follow the text of the law as written," Daleiden noted. "CMP’s undercover reporting has been corroborated by the successful prosecution of fetal body parts sales we reported in southern California, multiple congressional investigations, and forensic video analysis. It is every reporter’s First Amendment right to underscore the gravity of their findings, especially when the politically powerful disagree with them."
The undercover videos remain online at this link.
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CMP previously announced a separate lawsuit against one of the abortionists caught in the videos. Savita Ginde, now a former Planned Parenthood abortion business operator, published a book and made speeches condemning the undercover videos as faked and dubbed.
But a federal court ruled that claim is false, and CMP is suing her for defamation.
The complaint was filed in Jefferson County District Court in Golden, Colorado, by the law firm of Andrew Contiguglia of Denver.
The case seeks damages and declaratory and injunctive relief.
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Here are two of the videos released by CMP:
See a CMP video about Planned Parenthood skirting federal law:
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The "Lamborghini" executive:
Paying attention to who's in the room when infants are born alive:
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Altering abortion procedures:
Selling body parts a "valid exchange":
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