The (pro-life) Center for Medical Progress caught a Planned Parenthood employee brokering the sales of aborted babies. If you read the transcript or watch the video, you’ll see Dr. Deborah Nucatola, senior director of medical services at Planned Parenthood, describe how their employees can carry out an abortion to minimize damage to the preborn child, in ways that sound like they increase the pain the child suffers and possible harm to woman undergoing an abortion. It also sounds very much like PP is carrying out partial-birth abortions which were outlawed more than a decade ago; Ovide Lamontagne, general counsel of Americans United for Life, says that selling body parts is also illegal as is using a specific abortion method in order to procure a tradable fetus. Louisiana and Texas will now investigate local PP centers to see if they are breaking state or federal organ sale law and Americans United for Life is calling for a federal investigation; John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, agrees. This seems necessary, regardless of which side of the abortion debate one might be on: are federal and state laws being broken in a grisly aborted baby parts trade or are abortions being done in a less safe way/more painful way to maximize the abortion mills’ profits for their ancillary business?

The AUL says, “The video raises many on-going questions”:

  • How much money is being exchanged for baby hearts, livers, lungs, and other body parts?
    Are interstate commerce laws being violated in the transportation of baby parts?
  • Are mothers fully informed, and do they give legal consent to the sale of their babies’ hearts, livers, and lungs?
  • Is the illegal Partial Birth Abortion procedure used in an effort to gain valuable later-term, more fully formed heads and hearts?
  • Is the Born Alive Infant Protection Act violated in in an effort to gain valuable later-term, more fully formed heads and hearts?
  • Are women encouraged to endure dangerous late-term abortion procedures by abortionists who know that body parts from more developed infants sell for more money?
  • Are federal funds used to subsidize any of the facilities or procedures used in “harvesting” fetal tissue after the abortion was performed?

National Review‘s Kevin Williamson reminds readers that this macabre trade is consistent with Planned Parenthood’s bloody business.

This story is nothing new. I wrote about “Baby body parts trade exposed” for The Interim back in December 1999.