The Blackest of Black Markets

Tenth Planned Parenthood Video Released

“Everything We Provide Is Fresh”

Patterico

[guest post by Dana]

A tenth Planned Parenthood video has been released by the Center for Medical Progress.  This new video features conversations between Dr. Carolyn Westhoff, Senior Medical Advisor for PPFA; Dr. Vanessa Cullins, Vice President for External Medical Affairs for PPFA; and Deborah VanDerhei, National Director for the Consortium of Abortion Providers (CAPS) at PPFA, and focus on buyers’ organ preferences, efforts to keep the practice under wraps, and of course, profit:

“We’ve just been working with people who want particular tissues, like, you know, they want cardiac, or they want eyes, or they want neural,” says Dr. Westhoff to a prospective fetal organ buyer. “Certainly, everything we provide–oh, gonads! Oh my God, gonads. Everything we provide is fresh.” Westhoff continues, “Obviously, we would have the potential for a huge P.R. issue in doing this,” before offering to introduce the buyers to “national office abortion people” from Planned Parenthood. VanDerhei refers to payments for fetal tissue as “donation for remuneration,” which carries the connotation of financial reward or benefit without regard for actual expenses. “I have been talking to the executive director of the National Abortion Federation, we’re trying to figure this out as an industry, about how we’re going to manage remuneration, because the headlines would be a disaster.”

“Is this really worth getting–I don’t even know what in general, what a specimen generally brings in?” VanDerhei later asks a prospective buyer. When she is told $100 per specimen, she remarks, “But we have independent colleagues who generate a fair amount of income doing this.” VanDerhei suggests that Planned Parenthood goes to great lengths to avoid leaving a paper trail about their fetal tissue activity: “It’s an issue that you might imagine we’re not really that comfortable talking about on email.”

As Vanessa Russo, Compliance Program Administrator for Planned Parenthood Keystone in Pennsylvania, observes:

“A company like this that wants to give our organization money for the tissue–I think that that’s a valid exchange, and that that’s okay.”

On a side note: Yesterday, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, who heads the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee investigating Planned Parenthood’s practices, subpoenaed all of the unedited videos from the Center for Medical Progress.

–Dana