he Law: Planned Parenthood has been caught on undercover video admitting that it targets and harvests body parts of aborted fetuses for profit. This is illegal. Why are taxpayers still funding this group?
The family planning agency’s senior director of medical services, Deborah Nucatola, had no idea she was on hidden camera when in a chi-chi Los Angeles restaurant she told two undercover operatives from the medical-ethics activist Center for Medical Progress that Planned Parenthood’s regional offices generally drew $30 to $100 per aborted baby body for use in medical research.
Between bites of salad and sips of wine, she detailed which human body parts were in demand from her customers — livers, hearts, lungs — and explained that before the babies were aborted, their commercially desirable parts were protected from surgical destruction.
She further explained the national office allowed the act, but didn’t want to be associated with it on the grounds that it could be seen as selling body parts.
Now that the grotesque news is out, they call the transactions “expenses” for “humanitarian” research.
If that’s true, why didn’t they say so from the start?
It’s that kind of lack of transparency, whatever one’s views on abortion, that makes such groups so easily corrupted. It’s not the organization’s only outrageous act rooted in secrecy or “privacy” either.
The organization has been caught in recent years protecting child molesters and advising human traffickers of underage girls how to evade the law.
But based on that video, this was the same sort of casual, banal evil seen before only among ****s and Stalinists. Shocking doesn’t quite describe it.
We hold no illusions that anyone will be punished here for this obvious sale of body parts, which is illegal under U.S. law.
But some leaders have come up with the right idea for how to stop it: U.S. Republican presidential contenders Sen. Rand Paul and Dr. Ben Carson have both called for the organization — which took in $540.6 million in taxpayer funding in 2013 — to be defunded.
Both have put out petitions and are lending their voices to stopping the barbaric practices. Both are medical doctors who have spent parts of their careers — in Carson’s case, a particularly distinguished one — saving lives and like most Americans, neither could take it. Nor should taxpayers.