The Center for Medical Progress will release more video footage in the weeks to come. So said its head last night (22 July 2015, about 10:00 p.m. EDT). But too many people still defend Planned Parenthood. Selling baby parts from an abortion? No more serious than donating blood! On their account America has blood on its hands.

A two-and-a-half-year mission

The Center for Medical Progress (CMP) has a broader mission than abortion alone. In their view, a technological advance does not serve humankind well if it robs human beings, or the human race, of dignity. For that reason, they “oppose any interventions, procedures, and experiments that exploit the unequal legal status of any class of human beings.” That could include anything from abortion to euthanasia. It also would include the kind of experiment Hollywood film and TV producers often conceive of, to scare people.

Jean-Luc Picard: Even when we wore costumes like that, we already had begun to make rapid progress!

Q [dressed as a captain of United States Marines]: Oh, yeah? Care to review your “rapid progress”? [In an instant he has changed his costume to the uniform of a futuristic infantry soldier and affected a distinctly drug-addled air] “Rapid progress.” When humans learned to control their military with drugs.

The above comes from the premiere episode of a television show (Star Trek: The Next Generation, S01E01: “Encounter at Farpoint“; dir. Corey Allen; with Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, and John de Lancie; Paramount Pictures, 1987). If the Pentagon ever started work on that model of infantry training, the Center for Medical Progress would certainly oppose it.

Doctors removed this 10-week unborn child after the mother was found to have carcinoma in situ of the cervix. Photo: User “drsuparma” on flickr.com, CC BY-SA 2.0 Generic License

But abortion concerns us here. In or about January of 2013, CMP started a new investigation: the Human Capital Project. Planned Parenthood is, of course, the first, and still the largest, chain of abortion clinics. Planned Parenthood has always wanted to do abortion more than anything else. Margaret Sanger founded it and named it to sound good and “caring.” They offer cervical-cancer screenings and other such services mainly to hide their priority, and also to have people think them a “caring” enterprise. They will lure more women in that way. They tell them plainly: it’s OK to get rid of “the problem,” and it won’t hurt a bit.

The CMP began to suspect Planned Parenthood clinics and their officers were selling organs and other tissues from the abortions they did. To investigate, they sent undercover teams to pose as buyers of abortion remains. They did not force any of those Planned Parenthood officers to say the things they said. But did CMP break any laws? No. Certain franchisors and store chain heads, wanting to see whether franchise holders and store managers are doing their jobs, often send “mystery shoppers” in to pretend to shop for a product, while actually scoring the sales staff on their pitch and so on.

But CMP did more than get abortion mill executives to reveal their secret thoughts and acts. They have willing witnesses who testified to them and, one presumes, will gladly testify before any Congressional or State legislative committee – or in a court of law. And they have gathered “more than two hundred pages of primary source documents.”

Mr. David Deleiden founded CMP. Last night he sat with Sean Hannity on his TV show. His staff have released two videos already. He promised to release more such videos in the weeks and months to come. Some of that footage, he said, will show these abortion mill officers speaking about even worse things than Drs. Deborah Nucatola and Mary Gatter have already said.

Separately, Mr. Deleiden defied Planned Parenthood to go on “persecuting” him and trying to shut people up.

Selling abortion remains

“Planned Parenthood [runs] an enterprise-wide operation that traffics and sells baby body parts,” Mr. Deleiden says. In fact, federal law forbids anyone to sell organs or other body parts or fluids. (Doctors-in-traiing used to sell their blood for money to buy toothpaste. Today, Medicare pays most house officer salaries.) The abortion execs make clear how they plot to skirt the law. The footage CMP have already released, would surely convict Planned Parenthood and its officers of running a “continuing criminal enterprise,” as the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act defines that phrase.

Incredibly, people still want to defend Planned Parenthood. Dr. Anne Davis (Physicians for Reproductive Health) gives the flavor-of-the-day defense. She compares the “giving” of abortion tissues to science, to the giving of blood.

Dr. Davis has no logical basis to compare the two. First, one who gives blood, knows what he does when he does it. No one tells the women who go in for an abortion, what will happen to the baby parts. (Dr. Gatter seems to think the patients wouldn’t care.)

Second, to get around the charge of selling the parts, Planned Parenthood rents space to the companies who collect the parts. They set these rents after figuring out how many specimens they might collect on a normal work day. Churches, schools, and other places where the Red Cross goes to collect blood, do not rent space. They offer their space rent-free. This writer has given blood many times. Never once has he had to pay someone to admit him to the venue. Dr. Davis can talk all she wants about the costs of collecting blood. But the Red Cross covers that cost through its own fundraising. Dr. Davis didn’t tell you that, of course.

Dr. Davis also speaks of “rare fetal conditions” for which, she says, any woman would “need” an abortion. That’s all very well. She does abortions for a living. She would never think of ways to save the child. Beyond that, the typical woman getting an abortion does not have that reason. And Dr. Davis knows it. The more typical case runs thus: She had a fling. Maybe she was cheating on someone else that night. She got pregnant. She doesn’t want someone (maybe the man she cheated on) to know. And “it’s none of my business.” (See Coma, directed by Michael Crichton, who wrote the script from Dr. Robin Cook’s novel; with Geneviève Bujold, Michael Douglas, Rip Torn, and Richard Widmark; MGM Pictures, 1978.)

At last report, committees of legislators in seven States have sworn to investigate Planned Parenthood for selling abortion parts. And CMP will release more videos, both short and long (so that anyone having two hours or more to spend, can judge for himself whether CMP took anything out of context). They also are working on a multi-episode documentary on their project. That should bring more chills even than Michael Crichton or Robin Cook brought in with their most shocking projects about science gone horribly wrong. (Or that Anthony Hopkins and Dino De Laurentiis brought in with their chilling projects based on the most savagely urbane anti-hero in the history of the theater in all its forms.)