Planned Parenthood Is Not Harvesting ‘Baby Parts’
David Daleiden, the 26-year-old face of CMP – which misrepresented itself as a biomedical charity to the IRS in order to gain nonprofit status – believes in “fetal personhood.” That is to say he thinks any pregnancy at any stage deserves to be afforded the same rights as a born human. He wrote his senior thesis on the subject. The upshot of fetal personhood is that abortion at any stage is considered an act of murder, and forms of birth control that prevent implantation are considered abortion – therefore, they’re acts of murder too.
Daleiden has worked with Live Action, another anti-abortion operation that tried, unsuccessfully, years ago to use similar undercover video tactics to discredit and take down Planned Parenthood. Live Action’s public face is Lila Rose, who believes abortion “doesn’t un-rape a woman” – that people who become pregnant as a result of rape shouldn’t be allowed to get abortions – and who opposes birth control.
But wait, there’s more. There’s a guy on CMP’s board of directors named Troy Newman, who’s best known for his work with the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue. Operation Rescue harassed Kansas abortion provider George Tiller for years – the group has proudly detailed its campaign against him. The harassment did eventually stop… when a man named Scott Roeder gunned down Tiller, killing the doctor while he was at church.
Police later found the phone number for Operation Rescue’s Cheryl Sullenger, who served time in the Eighties for conspiring to bomb an abortion clinic, on a note in Roeder’s car. Roeder has said that he had been communicating with Sullenger and Newman about “justifiable homicide” against abortion providers before he killed Tiller. (Both of the Operation Rescue leaders denied this after Tiller’s murder.)
That sounds more than a little extreme, no? That the more than one million Americans who get abortions each year – around two-thirds of whom are already parents – are murderers? That people who use birth control are murderers? That the murder of abortion providers is justified? Of course it does. Because it is.
But let’s go back to the fetal tissue thing. Even if CMP’s beliefs about abortion are shocking, maybe Daleiden and crew really are concerned about a secret black market for baby parts. I mean, that sounds awful!
Except for the fact that overwhelming evidence shows there is no secret black market for baby parts. People have definitely looked: So far 10 states have launched investigations, at the behest of anti-abortion legislators and attorneys general, into Planned Parenthood’s fetal tissue donation practices. None so far have found such a black market, and some, like Missouri, have definitively found no evidence whatsoever for one. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal even called for an investigation into Planned Parenthood in his state, despite the fact that no Planned Parenthood provider in Louisiana provides abortions at all.