Why Planned Parenthood is guilty, despite policy change on baby part sales

Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards informed the National Institutes of Health that the abortion giant would no longer “accept reimbursement” for baby body parts harvested during and after abortions.

Though she wrote that one basis of this decision was to “expose our opponents’ false charges about this limited but important work,” the decision itself demonstrates the charge is anything but false. An “ethical” organization need not change policy if it “adheres to the highest legal, medical, and ethical standards.” What is there to change?

As Representative Diane Black said:

It is curious that, while Planned Parenthood officials maintain there has been no wrongdoing, they still find it necessary to change their policy following the recent undercover videos. Clearly, this was a decision motivated by optics rather than the organization’s conscience. If Planned Parenthood truly wanted to confront its growing scandal, it would stop aborting more than 327,000 innocent lives each year and fully commit to true women’s health care…I suppose Doctor Mary Gatter will have to find another way to get her Lamborghini, but rest assured – this development does not change my conviction that Planned Parenthood should not be subsidized by American taxpayers.

Beyond the fact that this policy change is an admission of guilt, there are still ways Planned Parenthood could – and likely will – continue to profit from baby part sales.

“In-Kind ‘Reimbursements'”

As I wrote previously about Planned Parenthood’s Senior Director of Medical Services, Dr. Deborah Nucatola:

While Planned Parenthood deceptively claims it makes no profit, Nucatola is full of ideas and plans…to help the buyer make a good business based on helping abortion clinics profit from “excess” fetal tissue.

Getting rid of aborted babies and their parts is a problem for Planned Parenthood. Simply throwing them in the trash is illegal. Therefore, companies that actually want those dead babies can solve a potentially costly problem for Planned Parenthood.

At one point in the video, she [Nucatola] suggests payment in services in addition to monetary “reimbursement” for the tissue – a clear violation against the law that prohibits purchasing body parts.

“Say, ‘I’ll give it to you for the same price, AND I’ll do that’. … [T]hat would be a huge sell, a huge, huge sell.”

Even with the monetary “reimbursement” supposedly out of the way, Nucatola’s strategy may be one Planned Parenthood will follow. She explained that the abortion clinics have a hard time finding a company to dispose of all the “tissue.” Her idea? Get the company that wants certain baby body parts to take all the tissue – for far less than this gruesome ‘service’ is usually billed for.

In-kind profit is still a profit.

Payment for the Change in Abortion

This rather disgusting idea was proposed by Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast’s Director of Research, Melissa Farrell. Originally, her idea was to have the baby body parts companies pay for the unethical change in abortion procedure by paying extra for the body parts themselves. But since her goal is to have the extra time and complexity monetarily covered, it’s easy to see that Planned Parenthood could find a way to accomplish this.

PP: Yeah, we can work it out in the context of — obviously, the procedure is more complicated. So that anything that we integrate into that procedure, without having you cover the procedural cost, is going to be higher. So anything of a higher gestational age, there’s more opportunity for complication, there’s more administrative time involved,

PP: Sometimes the procedures are longer. So then, anything that we piggy-back onto that for collection purposes, obviously, would have to, that additional time, cost, administrative burden.

Buyer: Right. So our compensation to you…could be built into that.

PP: Yeah.

Planned Parenthood’s policy change also smacks of other desperate excuses, made in past investigations that evidenced the abortion giant’s lawbreaking, women-harming, deceptive actions.

When a 2011 Live Action sting found Planned Parenthood staff incredibly willing to work with sex traffickers to arrange abortions for the women and girls they victimize, Planned Parenthood announced it “would retrain thousands of staff members across the country on its rules for reporting possible dangers to minors, and would automatically fire anyone who violated them.”

Yet, if one is highly ethical and legal, what is there to “retrain”? Why would Planned Parenthood publicly announce it would fire employees in the future for doing exactly what its employees (including a clinic manager) were caught doing on tape? This is only one example; in other stings, Planned Parenthood staff were also “retrained” or fired. Yet the organization still asserts complete innocence in every case. When is that going to start failing to add up?

As Live Action President Lila Rose has stated, Planned Parenthood suffers from a “serious institutional crisis” of great magnitude. The crisis – one of constant lawbreaking and cover-up – is made worse by the retraining, firings, and policy changes that Planned Parenthood pretends is proof of innocence.

On the contrary, such changes mean nothing but guilt of wrongdoing.

Richards seems oblivious to the facts when she writes, in her letter, “We’re going even further in order to take away any basis for attacking Planned Parenthood…”

Has she conveniently forgotten that future actions are not all that matters here? What any organization does after being caught red-handed matters painfully little compared to what it was actually caught doing.

As evidenced by Planned Parenthood’s own conviction that its policies must change, much wrongdoing and lawbreaking has been committed and must be accounted for. It’s not quite so easy to get off the hook, Ms. Richards. Even if, “going forward,” you plan to cease profiting from your harvesting of baby parts, you and Planned Parenthood must still answer for the profiting that’s already been committed.

Fact-Checking Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards

In its official letters – to Congress and the NIH – Planned Parenthood has conveniently claimed that only “1%” of its clinics participate in the baby body parts business. Only if one pays great attention to detail can one uncover the sideways admission that a number of clinics stopped participating once the CMP videos were released. The “two clinic” figure Richards provides to the NIH is disingenuous at best.

Other issues unanswered by Richards’ letter include:

• PP admits it will still “donate” baby body parts and organs. Will it continue to modify abortion procedures – exposing women to more pain and additional harm, violating HHS regulation and medical ethics?

• Will PP continue to push women into a decision to “donate” their baby’s parts and obtain forced or inadequate consent?

• PP refuses to address its clinics’ treatment of babies who survive an abortion as well as babies who are delivered prior to an abortion being performed. This is a major area of lawbreaking.

• Why is the sale of baby body parts so heinous to us? Could it be because we know, deep down, that killing these innocent children and ripping apart their organs – no matter the purpose – is inherently wrong and inhumane, even according to those who have performed abortions?

Even if we believed Richards’ letter, it does absolutely nothing to account for all the ways Planned Parenthood has already broken the law and no doubt continues to do so every day.

Sadly for Richards, the future simply isn’t adequate to cover the guilty atrocities of the past.