Ninth Planned Parenthood Video: ‘Really Weird’ Loophole Let Government Buy ‘Fetal Tissue’

September 1st, 2015 11:56 AM

The latest video exposing Planned Parenthood hits at the “heart” of the abortion business – by following the money.

The Center for Medical Progress (CMP) released a ninth investigative video September 1 revealing the “relationship” between Advanced Bioscience Resources, Inc. (ABR) and Planned Parenthood in harvesting aborted baby parts. Among three conversations caught on camera, ABR’s Perrin Larton highlighted a “really weird” loophole that let the government to buy aborted baby parts – and discussed how, during abortion, babies sometimes “just fell out.”

According to CMP, ABR, as a tissue procurement company, has partnered with Planned Parenthood in obtaining aborted baby parts “longer than any other entity.” Founded in 1989 by CEO Linda Tracy, ABR has worked with “multiple” Planned Parenthood affiliates for 26 years.

The video showed undercover conversations with three different executives: Dr. Katharine Sheehan, former medical director of Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest (PPPS), Perrin Larton, Procurement Manager for ABR, and Cate Dyer, CEO of rival tissue company StemExpress.

In the footage, Sheehan detailed PPPS’s “relationship” with ABR to actors posing as tissue buyers. “We’ve been using them for over 10 years” and “just kind of renegotiated the contract,” she said. “They’re doing… the big collection for government-level collections and things like that.”

When an actor advertised, “We return a portion of our fees to the clinics,” Sheehan affirmed, “Right, get a toe in and make it, make a pro – alright.”

In conversations with ABR’s Larton, an actor asked about the history on tissue research tissue. “And you know what the really weird thing is? Embryonic [tissue], there’s still a lot of controversy about that,” Larton said. “But then, fetal [tissue] kind of got lost in the mix.”

According to Larton, a loophole allowed the government to pay for “fetal tissue.”

During the first Bush administration, she continued, “it was no federal funding could go to stem cell research or to embryonic cell research. But fetal tissue was taken out of that. So we continued to send tissue to people like NIH [National Institutes of Health]. Even though the government was paying for it, fetal tissue weren’t put in that little box of embryonic because it’s different.

And that’s not all the government funds. Planned Parenthood received more than $528 million in taxpayer funding during the fiscal year 2013-2014. That amounted to more than $1.4 million per day, through government grants, contracts and Medicaid reimbursements.

“Now they’re trying to make abortion illegal,” Larton complained. “And that’s where we get our tissue.”

Larton later elaborated, in gruesome detail, on ABR’s harvesting of aborted baby parts. “I literally have had women come in and they’ll go in the [operating room] and they’re back out in 3 minutes, and I’m going, ‘What’s going on?’” she began. “Oh yeah, the fetus was already in the vaginal canal whenever we put her in the stirrups, it just fell out.”

That clip was previously included in the seventh video released by CMP on August 19.

If women have “had a lot of births,” she stressed, “then that’s kind of what happens.” “But most of the time it is not intact,” she added.

Cate Dyer, former ABR procurement technician and founder of StemExpress delved into the financial details of ABR. The company was “funding places in Hawaii for themselves,” she shared.

She also suggested deep financial ties between ABR and Planned Parenthood. “Some staff – not that I know so much on the Planned Parenthood side, but I wouldn’t be surprised – there are some staff in the past that have been on the payroll with ABR,” she said.

According to Dyer, CMP said, ABR would pay an “advisor fee” to a clinic executive in order to maintain an “exclusive right” to obtain aborted baby parts at a given location. “There’s like, well enough known,” said Dyer in the video, that “for a long time there were some certain clinics that because they had paid advisors that were sitting on boards for these clinics, that were also an advisor to ABR, you were just never going to go anywhere with them, you know what I mean?”

The video, following last week’s footage of Dyer laughing over shipping baby heads, is part of CMP’s years-long investigative study into Planned Parenthood, “Human Capital.”

Media History

Since the release of CMP’s first video, the broadcast networks have proven hesitant to publicize the story – and when they did, they refused to even utter the word “baby.”

Not even three weeks ago, MRC Culture found that the networks spent an embarrassing total of 0.008% of their news shows playing the CMP footage exposing Planned Parenthood: 1 minute, 13 seconds out of 243 hours and 30 minutes.

From the beginning, the liberal media raced to defend Planned Parenthood. In the first 9 hours and 30 minutes of news shows broadcast after the story broke, ABC, NBC and CBS, spent only 39 seconds on the first video. It took more than 24 hours before all three covered the story. In the week after the first video, the networks gave a mere 9 minutes and 11 seconds to the story (in contrast, the nets devoted more than three times that to the Susan G. Komen controversy, when the charity temporarily decided to defund the abortion giant).

Also during their news shows, ABC, NBC and CBS covered the shooting of Cecil the lion more in one day than they did these videos in two weeks. That discrepancy continued even after three weeks since the release of the first CMP video.

The three networks haven’t mentioned the content of CMP’s last four videos. In fact, the networks haven't covered a single Planned Parenthood video release in one month

Not only that, but also they refused to cover the tens of thousands of Americans speaking out against Planned Parenthood during rallies held in late August.

The media similarly stayed silent on the case of Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell. Gosnell's trial, in which witnesses described baby abortion survivors “swimming" in toilets “to get out,” attracted a scant 12–15 reporters. Only after 56 days, multiple letters from members of the House of Representatives and a public outcry, did all three broadcast networks report on Gosnell.

Pro-Life Reaction

In a press statement, Priests for Life National Director Fr. Frank Pavone commented that the latest video “shows the tight financial relationship between abortion clinics and companies that buy the body parts of the babies killed there.”

“To deny the fact that Planned Parenthood sells body parts, alters the abortion procedure to do so, and is involved in this illegal activity at the highest corporate level, is now tantamount to asserting that the Earth is flat,” he added.