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Today’s video just might be the most horrifying of the seven videos released by the Center for Medical Progress exposing Planned Parenthood’s practice of harvesting and selling the body parts of aborted babies.
But then again it’s kind of hard to imagine what could be worse than previous videos: like the one showing technicians sorting through the dismembered arms and legs of a 20-week aborted twin, or the other one where a technician exclaims “It’s another boy!” while prodding at a “specimen” (So much for the lie that unborn babies are just “blobs of tissue”).
That said, here are the five most horrifying revelations from today’s video. Be warned, it takes a strong stomach to read this, and then to realize that this is actually happening.
1. StemExpress technicians working at a Planned Parenthood clinic harvested the brains of a baby whose heart was still beating.
Yes, you read that correctly.
In today’s video Holly O'Donnell, a former procurement technician at StemExpress, describes how at an abortion facility in Alameda, California, a co-worker named Jessica brought over the most fully developed baby she had ever seen.
“It had a face. It wasn't completely torn up,” she said. “Its nose was very pronounced.”
Then, recalls Holly, “[Jessica] has one of her instruments, and she taps the heart, and it starts beating.”
“I'm looking at this fetus, and its heart is beating,” O'Donnell said in astonishment.
O'Donnell said that after that, Jessica asked her to remove the brains “through the baby's face.”
“I can't even describe what that feels like,” O'Donnell said. “That was the moment I knew I couldn't work for the company anymore…even if it was the cure for some disease.”
2. There are other times when aborted babies are born with beating hearts before organ harvesting.
If only Holly O’Donnell’s experience was an anomaly.
Pro-life activists have long known, from first-hand testimonies by former nurses and abortion workers, that aborted babies are sometimes born alive after botched abortions. But now we have it from the horse’s mouth.
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As Dr. Ben Van Handel, Executive Director of Novogenix Laboratories, LLC, admits in today’s video: “So, you know, there are times when after the procedure is done that the heart is still beating.”
In other words: The baby is still alive.
Novogenix is one of the biomedical firms that Planned Parenthood works with to harvest fetal tissue, and then sell it to researchers.
3. Planned Parenthood changes the abortion procedure to obtain “fully intact” aborted babies.
This is totally illegal. But if you’re trying to get quality fetal tissue, you probably don’t want to be tearing the unborn baby apart in his mother’s womb. So Planned Parenthood instead makes adjustments to the abortion to get “fully intact” fetuses – in the process running the risk of babies being born alive.
As Melissa Farrell, Director of Research at Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, admits: “Yeah, and so if we alter our process, and we are able to obtain intact fetal cadavers, then we can make it part of the budget, that any dissections are this, and splitting the specimens into different shipments is this. I mean that’s, it’s all just a matter of line items.”
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So, what do these “intact fetal cadavers” look like?
Holly O’Donnell describes the moment after she and a co-worker had finished harvesting the brains from a fully intact aborted baby, when she was holding the body of the baby, thinking, “Oh my God, what am I doing.”
“And I take him, and I put him in [the biohazard container], and I remember he got stuck on the lid, and it turned around and its buttocks was in the air, and his two feet were dangling out,” she recalled.
“And I remember having to pick each one of his feet up and put them in the container and close the lid. … It’s just really hard, knowing that you’re the only person who’s ever going to hold that baby. … This could be a lawyer, this could be a fire-fighter, this could be the next president. … I feel like it’s a waste of life. It’s sad that so many people view it as a mistake, because it’s not. Life isn’t a mistake.”
4. The hardest part of the baby to get is the brains. So when the abortionist wants a brain, they will deliver the baby “breach” and only “crush” around the head to kill the baby.
Dr. Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood’s Senior Director of Medical Services, explains the gruesome process of obtaining good-quality fetal brain.
“And with the calvarium [head], in general, some people will actually try to change the presentation [of the fetus] so that it’s not vertex [head-first], because when it’s vertex presentation, you never have enough dilation….to deliver an intact calvarium,” she explains.
“So if you do it from breach presentation, there’s dilation that happens as the case goes on, and often, the last step, you can evacuate an intact calvarium [head] at the end.”
As she explained in a previous video, depending on what body part she wants: “I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.”
5. Planned Parenthood knows that if they do abortions without killing the baby first with Digoxin, the baby might be born alive. But they do it anyway, to obtain the best quality specimens.
In a normal later-term abortion, an abortionist will inject the baby’s heart with Digoxin to kill the baby (abortionists call this “ensuring fetal demise”) before delivery.
The problem is that researchers don’t want babies whose organs are filled with poison. They want “clean” specimens. And so we have Perrin Lartin, a “Procurement Manager” for Advanced BioScience Resources, assuring an actor posing as a potential buyer that any specimens they obtain would not be tainted with Digoxin.
The only problem is, if you’re not using Digoxin, you run the risk of a baby born alive. And Planned Parenthood knows that perfectly well.
As Dr. Nucatola explains in the video: “Providers that use Digoxin use it for one of two reasons. There is a group of people who use it so that there’s no risk of violating the federal abortion ban, which is if you induce the demise before you do the procedure, nobody’s going to say, you did a, live, whatever the federal government calls it, Partial Birth Abortion.”
But apparently running the risk of a born-live baby is worth it, when you're padding your bottom line with the bodies of those babies.