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Two months after damaging videos surfaced on the internet, Planned Parenthood remains at the center of a political storm. In July, the California-based anti-abortion group Center for Medical Progress released video footage they claim shows a high-level executive from the reproductive health-care provider discussing the sale of tissue from aborted fetal organs for profit.
However, John-Henry Westen, cofounder of Voice of the Family and LifeSiteNews.com, claims that the sale of fetal organs in the United States is not a new practice. He says US Americans should become more aware of how their tax dollars are being used, and put a stop to it.
In a recent column, you say that the sale of aborted fetal body parts has been happening for years. Why don’t more people know about this?
The very first time we reported on this was in 1998. A researcher by the name of Mark Crutcher conducted a similar investigation to what [Center for Medical Progress founder] David Daleiden has done now, and he discovered a price list of aborted baby body parts that [clinics] were selling through research centers.
This was all uncovered way back then. There was a Canadian university involved in it, and then later an abortion clinic in the United States also involved. The evidence was there, but it was largely denied by the mainstream media, until ABC News did another investigation and confirmed it.
This was back in 1999. You already had not only this story known, but the confirmation of this having happened. It’s laughable, but it was being denied back then. This time, however, it is too obvious to deny it. They have it on camera, with all the evidence of the world, including [president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America] Cecile Richards herself admitting to it.
So instead of denying it the way they did 15 years ago, now they just say: “Oh well, it is all legal; we are doing research.”
This is a horrific practice that has been going on for years. I’ve still got the old price list of what it cost for a liver, a brain, and a whole intact fetus at various developmental stages.
Was Planned Parenthood solely involved in this?
No, Planned Parenthood is just one part of the abortion industry. This is a practice that the whole industry was using. I’m sure there are probably some smaller clinics that aren’t engaged in this practice, but for the most part, a lot of the bigger abortion clinics are into the selling of aborted baby body parts.
Planned Parenthood and abortion agencies like that are very much money-making industries. They not only get government grants — supposedly not for abortions, but they are always used for that anyway — but they charge for their so-called services.
And at the same time, they take the aborted babies — the dead bodies of whom they’ve killed — and they actually sell them; so they make money hand over fist.
Why is the government willing to act now, but not back in 1999?
Well, the government is not really acting. What the government is concerned about is that they would alter the abortion procedures so as to procure body parts. In other words, they are not even saying that the whole thing is illegal; they are saying it is illegal to sell the parts for profit.
That is why in the videos you see Planned Parenthood making different arguments about how they would make it seem like they are not getting a profit for doing it; and how they can charge certain fees based on different things that they have to do; and they try to be careful about not wanting to change the abortion procedure, although they admit on camera that they actually do it.
If this has been going on for over 15 years, why have people waited so long to act?
That’s the thing; the regular public did not know it. Unbelievably, it was not covered well 15 years ago; it was denied as if it didn’t exist, and that denial worked.
For decades, the pro-life movement has been painted as exaggerating and untrue, but, in fact, that is an absolute lie all by itself.
The very fact is that there are a million children aborted every year in the United States. The reality is that this is a killing business, like we have never seen before in all of history.
Even if we take the World Wars and combine them together, we still don’t get the kind of carnage we have seen with abortion in the United States for the past 20 years.
That is the real horror, and we are glad that some of this horror is now exposed.
Now that this issue has finally reached the public eye, what are the pro-life movement’s objectives moving forward?
Definitely the objective with this is to have Planned Parenthood defunded.
We know that while they are a business, they want funds, and the pro-life movement says that people should not be forced to pay to kill more children. That is a gross offense to the many pro-life people who, through their taxes, are being forced to pay for Planned Parenthood.
Also, to lessen the killing. The goal is, as always, to protect life; to be there for the mothers, and help them deal with their unplanned pregnancies in a way that doesn’t cause them the danger of abortion — mostly emotionally, psychologically; and to be able to save the lives of more children.
Editor’s note: the PanAm Post, as a publication, does not take a stance on abortion.
