January 22, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – While most coverage of the Center for Medical Progress’ Planned Parenthood investigation concerns the sale of organs from aborted babies, the pro-life group’s undercover videos also showed evidence of a range of other apparent crimes. Now, on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, which imposed abortion on demand across the U.S., CMP has released a new report highlighting their findings on another aspect of the story: Planned Parenthood’s continued use of partial-birth abortion.
Intact dilation & extraction (D&X) abortion, better known as partial-birth abortion because it involves partially delivering a late-term fetus then killing him or her before the entire body has exited the birth canal, was banned by Congress in 2003, in a law the Supreme Court upheld in 2007. Other methods of late-term abortion remain legal.
Yet the videos revealed abortion industry personnel openly discussing ways to get around the ban, and on Tuesday CMP released a special report highlighting both that footage and documents the pro-life group says corroborate it.
“On undercover footage, Planned Parenthood medical directors and executives described abortions involving intact, living fetuses and procedures identical to those prohibited by law—and they routinely pointed to specific Planned Parenthood protocols as providing the legal loophole to do so,” the report says. “New primary-source documents, never before released publicly, now corroborate these statements on the videos, which a federal appeals court recently ruled were evidence that Planned Parenthood commits criminal partial-birth abortions.”
CMP first quotes former Planned Parenthood senior medical director Dr. Deborah Nucatola, who in one of the videos explained the process of obtaining intact fetal organs.
“So then you’re just kind of cognizant of where you put your graspers, you try to intentionally go above and below the thorax, so that, you know, we’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know, so I’m not gonna crush that part,” she says. “And with the calvarium, in general, some people will actually try to change the presentation so that it’s not vertex, because when it’s vertex presentation, you never have enough dilation at the beginning of the case, unless you have real, huge amount of dilation to deliver an intact calvarium.”
This, CMP notes, “matches up precisely with the legal and clinic definitions” of the D&X procedure, in which a baby whose head is facing the birth canal is rotated so he or she would exit the womb feet-first, before an abortionist stabs him or her at the base of the skull.
The report goes on to discuss other Planned Parenthood officials caught on tape discussing the delivery of “intact” dead babies, such as using the chemical digoxin to kill babies before partial delivery, so no part of the corpse that exits the womb is alive and the ban technically isn’t violated.
“The Federal Abortion Ban is a law, and laws are up to interpretation. So there are some people who interpret it as, it’s intent,” Nucatola claims. “So if I say on Day 1, I do not intend to do this, what ultimately happens doesn’t matter. Because I didn’t intend to do this on Day 1 so I’m complying with the law.”
CMP then quotes officials such as Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida vice president of medical affairs Dr. Suzie Prabhakaran and Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast surgical center administrator Tram Nguyen as further confirmation that the abortion giant uses “intent statements” to absolve themselves of culpability regardless of what they ultimately do.
The report notes that the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals interpreted these statements as evidence that Planned Parenthood was, in fact, violating the federal ban on partial-birth abortion. CMP then discusses the report’s newest revelation: a copy of Planned Parenthood’s own Medical Standards & Guidelines, which confirms the use of these intent statements.
The document states that “Mid-trimester abortion must be performed in a manner that complies with the federal Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003,” but also that abortionists must document both “intent to comply” and “that fetal demise occurred before the procedure or before passage of the anatomical landmarks.”
It lists multiple options for satisfying both requirements, and CMP argues that this “elaborate paperwork scheme” is really meant to “ensure that regardless of what actually happens in the abortion, Planned Parenthood’s record will appear spotless.” By contrast, the report notes, a legitimate “standard for authentic medical records would simply require that the doctor record what actually happens in the abortion procedure.”
“The Manual has no similar requirements or protocols to ‘document compliance’ with the federal Born-Alive Infants Protection Act or state fetal homicide laws,” but acknowledges “that labor and delivery is a distinct possibility in Planned Parenthood’s late-term abortion practice.” The delivery and subsequent killing of live infants in failed abortions was also alluded to in the undercover videos.
“As the federal appeals courts have now confirmed, CMP’s undercover evidence indicates that Planned Parenthood also violates the partial-birth abortion law,” the CMP report concludes. “The corroborating documents from Planned Parenthood’s late-term abortion protocols make it imperative that law enforcement and regulatory authorities take into account the severe violation of human rights and dignity that this disturbing part of Planned Parenthood’s abortion business represents.”
The Center for Medical Progress continues to defend itself from legal challenges brought by Planned Parenthood and the state of California. CMP founder David Daleiden told LifeSiteNews last week that the U.S. Supreme Court has requested that Planned Parenthood answer CMP’s latest petition, and an upcoming hearing in federal court provides an opportunity both for never-before-seen footage to be revealed and for Planned Parenthood officials to be confronted about the contents of the videos under oath.