Time for pro-choicers and pro-lifers to agree to agree on something

     Dr. Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood's senior director of medical services, is shown in this screen shot from a secret video recording released by the Center for Medical Progress.

    Dr. Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood's senior director of medical services, is shown in this screen shot from a secret video recording released by the Center for Medical Progress.

    Calling all pro-choicers and pro-lifers! Might we finally agree to agree on something now that we know fetal body parts are sometimes carefully extracted during abortions and sold to the highest bidder? Might we concur that this practice is abhorrent?

    Though first, we should all thank Planned Parenthood Federation of America‘s senior director of medical services, Dr. Deborah Nucatola, for her brutal honesty on this subject, albeit during what she thought was a lunch meeting with a sales representative from a company that buys aborted embryo and fetus body parts and sells them for medical research.

    As Dr. Nucatola casually munched on salad and sipped red wine on camera, she revealed that “intact hearts,” “lungs” and “as many intact livers as possible,” which are extracted from developing human beings during abortions, are highly desirable in markets that profit from this barbaric practice. The doctor lumped these fetal hearts, lungs, livers and more under the umbrella term “tissue,” much like the advocates of abortion rights assured us baby boomers that an embryo or fetus was nothing more than “a blob of tissue” back in the day.

    PPFA’s Dr. Nucatola also said that with ultrasound technology’s help, she sometimes manipulates the position of the fetus during an abortion so she can reap healthy body parts.

    • WHYY thanks our sponsors — become a WHYY sponsor

    Bet more than a few post-abortive women thought “That’s not what I signed up for!”

    Furthermore, we can thank Dr. Mary Gatter, president of the Planned Parenthood Medical Directors’ Council, for her part in shining additional light on the back-alley nature of some abortion dealings. Much like Dr. Nucatolo, Dr. Gatter thought she was chatting with a fetal tissue procurement company representative over a meal. During on-camera dealmaking, Dr. Gatter informed us that “PPFA, our parent body, is on board with tissue donation, but we have to ask for a waiver to do it, and we have to lay out for them what our program’s going to be like.”

    There is compensation by the case for fetal tissue procurement, Dr. Gatter added. “Patients don’t get anything, of course…” While discussing what price Planned Parenthood should get for fetal tissue, with figures like $50, $75 and $100 per body part being verbally tossed across the table, Dr. Gatter claimed that PPFA does not profit from this practice.

    But patients might undergo a different abortion procedure to accommodate tissue procurement. After expressing concern about introducing methods with less suction than the standard suction method applied in abortions at 10 to 12 weeks, in order to produce intact and useable embryonic and fetal body parts, Dr. Gatter expressed a willingness to do just that.

    To her credit, Dr. Gatter looked terribly uncomfortable during this conversation about the monetary worth of aborted human body parts. Although the abortionist managed to crack a smile when negotiations appear to wrap up and she joked “I want a Lamborghini.”

    These two Planned Parenthood medical professionals told us more about what goes on behind some abortion centers’ closed doors than many of us ever imagined. And we can thank members of the Center for Medical Progress for capturing these revelations on video by tricking Dr. Nucatola and Dr. Gatter into talking about Planned Parenthood’s trafficking of fetal body parts during a 30-month undercover operation that the CMP dubbed “Human Capital.”

    According to this Irvine, Calif., based non-profit organization’s website:

    The Center for Medical Progress is a group of citizen journalists dedicated to monitoring and reporting on medical ethics and advances. We are concerned about contemporary bioethical issues that impact human dignity, and we oppose any interventions, procedures, and experiments that exploit the unequal legal status of any class of human beings. We envision a world in which medical practice and biotechnology ally with and serve the goods of human nature and do not destroy, disfigure, or work against them.

    If you find these “citizen journalists'” covert ways to be offensive, ask yourself how you might feel if a program like “60 Minutes,” rather than some pro-life outfit, had conducted this in-depth investigation. Whatever one’s stance on the abortion issue, there’s no arguing that CMP’s videos opens our eyes to disgusting practices by Planned Parenthood, a group that receives government funding, otherwise known as our tax dollars.

    Is that really how we want our hard-earned money to be spent by the government?

    On a more local level, Pennsylvania Republican lawmakers have asked Attorney General Kathleen Kane to investigate what goes on in Planned Parenthood’s Pennsylvania centers. PPFA representatives say that its Keystone state centers do not participate in fetal tissue donation. If true, that’s a relief! Because even more locally, we’ve already been shamed by what convicted mother- and baby-killer, West Philly abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell, got away with for years.

    No matter how one looks at it, abortion is a tragedy. Reports like these from the Center for Medical Progress also make it clear that in some circles, abortion can be big business.

    WHYY is your source for fact-based, in-depth journalism and information. As a nonprofit organization, we rely on financial support from readers like you. Please give today.

    Want a digest of WHYY’s programs, events & stories? Sign up for our weekly newsletter.

    Together we can reach 100% of WHYY’s fiscal year goal