Five Things You Need To Know From The Leaked Planned Parenthood Footage

By Jonathon Van Maren

After taking a break of a few days, I’ve finally completed watching all of the leaked Planned Parenthood footage that some hero on Capitol Hill released onto the Internet. In two previous pieces, I summarized everything you need to know so far. Now, I’m going to lay out the most important points I gleaned from the last four leaked videos. I reviewed the videos entitled Planned Parenthood Rep Admits Affiliates Can’t Stop Harvesting, Planned Parenthood Michigan: Lisa Harris, Planned Parenthood Michigan Workshop, and Planned Parenthood New York Rep.

1. Abortion clinics are going to harvest baby organs.

They’re not going to stop. In the shortest of the leaked videos, David Daleiden chats with a middle-aged, blond abortion provider who informs him that it’s not so much the harvesting of fetal organs that needs caution, it’s just that everyone needs to be careful so that it doesn’t end up on the front page of the New York Times. Because at the end of the day, “we can’t stop them,” she says with a shrug. “The Truth is that some might want to do it to increase their revenues and we can’t stop them. We only have carrots and sticks.”

David Daleiden, sounding incredulous: “Really? That’s the only control mechanism?”

The abortionist responds with a wry chuckle: “Well, we have medical standards and guidelines, and if they want to maintain…if they want to make it a franchise, get the stamp of approval, they have to comply with the medical standards and guidelines, which tissue donation is not a part of.”

In other words, there are plenty of different things that abortion clinics will have to comply with to achieve franchise status, including the number of people on the board, revenue cycles, accreditation, all sorts of things. “But tissue donation”—the harvesting of baby parts—“will never be one of those indicators.

It’s going to happen, it’s common, and abortionists don’t see it as a big deal. So that’s that.

2. The human experimentation the abortion industry is willing to facilitate is something out of a nightmare.

One video just shows a conversation between Michigan abortion provider Lisa Harris and David Daleiden, manning his BioMax table. They establish quite quickly that because of the gestation of the abortions her clinics perform—“19 and 6…because of other changes we’re probably going to inch that up”—she probably wouldn’t be able to provide many fetal “specimens” for research. However, Harris is very interested in the idea of donating dead fetuses to human research simply because that way, women can feel as if their abortion was “a greater good.”

David Daleiden, in chilling detail, describes the types of research the dead babies could be used for, as Harris nods admiringly: “The three things in demand right now are liver, thymus, and bone marrow right now because those are the three things used to construct the humanized mouse models…They have mutant strains of mice that have no mouse immune system…and then you engraft human fetal liver, thymus, and bone marrow into the mouse. It grafts in and the cells can reconstitute a functioning human immune system in the mouse model.”

This, Harris thinks, sounds like an excellent opportunity to help women feel better about their abortions, and thus would love to brainstorm ways of getting around research regulations. After all, I’m sure there’s nothing a traumatized woman ridden with guilt and regret after an abortion would rather hear than, “Don’t worry, honey. We turned her into a mouse.”

I preferred the ethical dilemmas of John Steinbeck’s novels, as heart-wrenching as they often were. Of Mice and Men meant something less insane back then.

3. Abortionists resent having to help rape victims leave terrible situations.

After previous sting operations and investigations proved that abortion clinics were likely to send sexual assault victims back into the arms of their abusers, the pro-life movement was successful in having many regulations passed that demanded these clinics report child abuse. The Michigan abortionist giving a workshop at the National Abortion Federation, however, felt this was cruel and unfair—to abortionists.

“Regulations turn physicians into agents of the state,” she complained. “Like making physicians mandatory reporters for child abuse—puts in them in the same role as a state actor, saying what the state wants them to say or doing what the state wants them to do.”

I think that statement could be more accurately phrased as, “Doing what society wants you to do.” It takes a special kind of callousness to whine about having to do your part in protecting girls, especially underage girls, from abuse and rape. But a customer is a customer, and good deeds are an irritating detour that makes it take longer to get to the paycheck.

4. Abortionists resent women who speak out about regretting their abortions.

“Abortion regret” is one thing that abortionists hate having to deal with. The Michigan abortionist giving the workshop thinks that women who regret their abortions should be ignored entirely as irrelevant, since “regret pervades the field of medicine. Without perfect knowledge of the future,” one might regret anything!

It’s interesting that many abortionists seem to be completely unwilling to admit the obvious: That the procedure they carry out is fundamentally different than all of the medical procedures they compare it to, as it has no healing properties. Abortion ends a life—it unnaturally and violently stops a process whereby a woman’s offspring is developing in her womb. This is obviously going to have a much different emotional impact than a knee replacement.

What’s interesting is that the abortionist notes that she thinks much of this is situational regret—she says that many people might regret smoking, but not the cancer surgery that results from that behavior. They might regret past decisions, but not the current one. However, she doesn’t carry through with her analogy—she won’t state that people should perhaps regret the risky and irresponsible sex that resulted in the pregnancy. Because of course, without risky and irresponsible sex, the abortion industry would virtually dry up and blow away.

The greatest irony in this particular workshop is when she says that many legislators pass anti-abortion regulations and laws because they’re long past their prime and “don’t remember what it’s like to be young.” She said, with a straight face, that these regulations were “age discrimination”—in spite of the fact that it is only age discrimination that allows her and the rest of the abortion cartel to carry on with their deadly business.

5. Abortionists admit that the abortion victim photography pro-lifers use is real.

The abortion rights crowd regularly claims that the imagery used by pro-lifers is fake or doctored as a way of avoiding a discussion about the violence that imagery reveals. But when one abortionist stood up to complain that she spent a lot of time rebutting the images on Facebook, the abortionist giving the workshop surprised her.

“I actually have a different response when someone portrays those images,” she responded. “Actually that’s my week…some weeks–and that’s what it looks like. Ignoring the fetus is a luxury of activists and advocates. If you’re a provider, you can’t ignore the fetus, right, because the fetus is your marker of how well – how good a job you did.”

“If you don’t account for all the parts and you don’t look carefully, you may be setting someone up for infection or hemorrhage, or whatever. The fetus matters clinically to us. In our work we can’t ignore the fetus, because the fetus is a marker of how good a job you did.”

Here, of course, she is referring to the fact that the abortion workers have to piece the fetus back together like a gruesome jigsaw puzzle after the abortion to ensure that a stray arm or leg won’t remain behind in the violently vacated uterus to cause infection.

So it’s time to own it, says she: “I actually think we should be less about denying the reality of those images and more about acknowledging that, yeah, that’s quite a truth. So, given that we actually see the fetus the same way, and given that we might actually both agree that there’s violence in here, ask me why I come to work every day. Let’s just give them all the violence, it’s a person, it’s killing. Let’s just give them all that. And then the more compelling question is, ‘So, why is this the most important thing I could do with my life?'”

I’m starting to see why the National Abortion Federation was fighting so hard to keep this footage from being released. Abortion activists might claim that abortion imagery is fake. But abortionists know that the imagery pro-life activists use is just photos of an abortion they consider a success.

From these videos, we can see the startling difference between what the abortion activists say in public, and what the abortion technicians say in private. David Daleiden has shone a light into the darkness and sent all the creatures that reside there skittering about in panic. The videos released by the Center for Medical Progress along with the footage that was leaked give us an essential picture of how this industry actually functions. Babies on bonfires, body parts in freezers, jigsaw puzzles of torn flesh and broken bones. David Daleiden is today’s Harriet Beecher Stowe and these videos are our modern Uncle Tom’s Cabin—he is Mary Shelley with a twenty-first century Frankenstein that she could never have conjured up in her own dark imagination. David Daleiden deserves the Congressional Medal of Freedom, and whatever other assorted trinkets spineless politicians give to people who actually make a difference. Because for once, we have journalism that actually has.