The Center for Medical Progress's bogus hitjob on Planned Parenthood

This storyhasbeenreported-- carelesselywithoutregardforthetruthinanti-choiceactivistcircles--  asyetanotherwaytoattack Planned Parenthood... this time for allegedly "selling body parts." The offender is right-wing anti-choice front group The Center For Medical Progress.

The out-of-context edited video by right-wing anti-choice front group The Center For Medical Progress.

The full version, still without any context.

The truth, from Planned Parenthood VP of Communications Eric Ferrero:

“In health care, patients sometimes want to donate tissue to scientific research that can help lead to medical breakthroughs, such as treatments and cures for serious diseases. Women at Planned Parenthood who have abortions are no different. At several of our health centers, we help patients who want to donate tissue for scientific research, and we do this just like every other high-quality health care provider does -- with full, appropriate consent from patients and under the highest ethical and legal standards. There is no financial benefit for tissue donation for either the patient or for Planned Parenthood.  In some instances, actual costs, such as the cost to transport tissue to leading research centers, are reimbursed, which is standard across the medical field.

“A well funded group established for the purpose of damaging Planned Parenthood’s mission and services has promoted a heavily edited, secretly recorded videotape that falsely portrays Planned Parenthood’s participation in tissue donation programs that support lifesaving scientific research.  Similar false accusations have been put forth by opponents of abortion services for decades. These groups have been widely discredited and their claims fall apart on closer examination, just as they do in this case.”

Jessica Glenza at The Guardian:

Planned Parenthood’s US headquarters has denied that an eight-minute undercover video shows the abortion provider’s medical director offering to sell fetal body parts to a tissue procurement company, as a pro-life group has claimed.

“In health care, patients sometimes want to donate tissue to scientific research that can help lead to medical breakthroughs, such as treatments and cures for serious diseases. Women at Planned Parenthood who have abortions are no different,” Planned Parenthood’s vice president for communications, Eric Ferrero, said in a statement.

“There is no financial benefit for tissue donation for either the patient or for Planned Parenthood,” the statement said. “In some instances, actual costs, such as the cost to transport tissue to leading research centers, are reimbursed, which is standard across the medical field.”

In the video, which was taken via hidden camera by activist group the Center for Medical Progress, Planned Parenthood’s national senior director of medical services Deborah Nucatola can be seen eating a meal and discussing fetal tissue donation using medical terminology.

Snopes:

The Center for Medical Progress claimed that the video was part of a three-year investigation into Planned Parenthood’s practice of selling aborted fetus parts and captured a conversation that took place in July 2014 in which Dr. Nucatola discussed how organs were preserved during the abortion process with an eye towards later sale.

[...]

It’s unclear why the video was held for over a year before it was released, and it has some curious aspects to it. For starters, it opens with a news report and footage of Planned Parenthood president Gloria Feldt condemning “inappropriate behavior,” presented in a manner that made Feldt’s statement seem like she was commenting on the current issue even though the quote was actually more than a decade old.

[...]

The controversy has also raised some questions about the nature of the Center for Medical Progress. The organization’s Twitter and Facebook accounts are both only a few months old, and the only videos found on the group’s YouTube page are the two shown above, even though the organization has supposedly been engaged in a three-year long investigation. The group’s web site is also no longer viewable as of this writing.

Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs:

Well, there’s another bogus, heavily edited James O’Keefe-style propaganda video being frantically circulated all over the right wing media and blogs, attacking Planned Parenthood. Yes, again.

I’m not going to embed this deceptive video, but here’s a link to it at YouTube if you really think you need to see it. But the picture above shows the single most relevant and important part of it — this Planned Parenthood director was talking about standard tissue donations, the kind that are done every day throughout the medical profession. The “pro-life” groups circulating this bogus story are doing their best to portray this as something it’s not: selling body parts. They’re not selling body parts; this is a flat out lie.

Good tweet, from @GottaLaff:

When opponents resort to selective editing passing for fact, they prove own weakness.

#Choice#PlannedParenthoodhttps://t.co/...

— GottaLaff (@GottaLaff) July 14, 2015

Zack Ford hits it out of the park on this one:

Do these anti-Planned Parenthood campaigns actually move anybody, or just energize those who were already anti-choice?

— Zack Ford (@ZackFord) July 14, 2015