WMC News & Features

The dangerous group behind the latest attacks on Planned Parenthood

Jan Schakowsky 250

When the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee held its September 9 hearing absurdly called “Examining the Horrific Abortion Practices at the Nation’s Largest Abortion Provider”—the first of several scheduled this fall—they knew their attempt to shut down Planned Parenthood wasn’t going anywhere. The “show trial,” as Zoe Carpenter termed it in The Nation, was rich with hyperbole based on the now infamous undercover videos that charge Planned Parenthood with profiting from the illegal sale of fetal tissue—or “baby parts,” as right-wing extremists were calling it. “Less than 40 minutes had elapsed by the time someone quoted Adolf Hitler,” Carpenter noted. “The hysteria lasted for nearly four hours, marked by claims that abortion providers start their day with a ‘shopping list’ of body parts to procure,” and a hideous list of procedures, including cutting open a fetus’s face, complete with accusations that fetuses cry and scream as they die.

Neither Planned Parenthood nor the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), the organization that produced the undercover videos, was called to testify. Instead, two “abortion survivors” (people who allegedly lived after their mothers’ failed terminations) spoke, along with Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), who admitted that neither he nor anyone else from his party had actually seen the complete videos. As Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) put it when the hearing ended, “Senator Joseph McCarthy would be proud of this committee today.”

This hearing was followed on September 17 by another one conducted by the House Subcommittee on Health. It was called “Protecting Infants: Ending Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Providers Who Violate the Law.” Then, on September 18, the full House considered H.R. 3134, the Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2015, sponsored by Rep. Diane Black (R-TN). It called for a one-year moratorium on federal funding to any Planned Parenthood affiliate that provides abortion while the House further investigates the CMP videos. The House also considered H.R. 3504, the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, sponsored by Franks. In the end, while knowing that Planned Parenthood would not actually lose its funding because the Senate would not vote on the measure, the House voted 241 to 187 to defund Planned Parenthood.

So who is the organization wreaking havoc on Planned Parenthood, and how was it able to get the U.S. House of Representatives to engage in these “show” hearings?

Calling itself “a group of citizen journalists,” CMP claims it is “dedicated to monitoring and reporting on medical ethics and advances.” Its website uses coded language to espouse concerns about “contemporary bioethical issues that impact human dignity” and uses similar language in opposing “any interventions, procedures and experiments that exploit the unequal legal status of any class of human beings.” Its leaders include board member Troy Newman, the president of Operation Rescue, an extremist group with ties to violent acts against abortion clinics, and Cheryl Sullenger, Operation Rescue’s Senior Policy Advisor. Newman boasts that he has “permanently closed hundreds of abortion mills,” while Sullenger served two years in federal prison for conspiracy to damage an abortion clinic.

For more than two years now, CMP has conducted what it calls an “investigative journalism study” designed to document “how Planned Parenthood sells the body parts of aborted babies.” CMP claims to have “gathered hundreds of hours of undercover footage, dozens of eyewitness testimonies, and nearly two hundred pages of primary source documents” to support its accusations against Planned Parenthood. The videos that started the current furor come from a mulitpart series. Another in the series (and tenth video by CMP) was released on September 15, designed to coincide with the House hearings. CMP claims that it features “several top-level Planned Parenthood executives discussing the organization’s secretive practices around aborted fetal parts harvesting.” Repeated voice and email messages by this reporter to ascertain how many more videos are forthcoming and their release dates remain unanswered.

There is no question at this point that CMP’s claims about Planned Parenthood are false. News and fact-checking organizations including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Politifact have agreed with National Public Radio in its conclusion that the CMP videos “contain no evidence that Planned Parenthood has done anything illegal.” A report by the Southern Poverty Law Center cited consensus among expert analysts that when the recordings are viewed in their entirety, “it is obvious that the Planned Parenthood officials only charged biomedical companies that use the tissue for research for costs like storage and transportation—which is completely legal and accepted practice for tissue donors.”

Further, five states that investigated Planned Parenthood all concluded there was no wrongdoing. California and Texas lawmakers are now calling for investigations of CMP.

Fusion GPS, a Washington, D.C.-based research firm, assembled three teams of experts in video forensics, production, and transcription to review five secretly recorded videos of Planned Parenthood staff. Its report to Congressional leadership concluded that “a thorough review of these videos in consultation with qualified experts found that they do not present a complete or accurate record of the events they purport to depict.” The report stated that, among other things, CMP had heavily edited content “so as to misrepresent statements made by Planned Parenthood representatives,” and that “the short videos significantly distort and misrepresent the conversations in the full footage.”

“We’ve said all along that these videos were heavily edited to deceive the public, and now expert analysis confirms it,” Ashley Coffield, CEO of Planned Parenthood Greater Memphis Region, said in an online report to supporters. “Three teams of experts … have determined, as we’ve always said, that the videos have no value in a legal context, cannot be relied upon for any official inquiries, and have no credibility as journalistic material.”

The so-called Center for Medical Progress is clearly a dangerous extremist group with a dubious history, and the clear intent to continue harassing Planned Parenthood by mounting malicious campaigns about the vital work of the deeply respected organization. Planned Parenthood advocates, donors, and clients as well as the media must remain vigilant and vocal in exposing their insidious actions and their malicious agenda.

In her response to findings of no wrongdoing by Planned Parenthood, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) clearly recognized the importance of such action. She noted that CMP “may have broken the law by recording and releasing videos without consent, filing fraudulent tax documents, and using a fake driver’s license to gain access to Planned Parenthood facilities,” adding that “Congress should not have to waste any more time, resources or taxpayer dollars on this witch hunt.”

But perhaps it was the comments of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) when she spoke before Congress in August against defunding Planned Parenthood that resonate most strongly for women. “Did you fall down, hit your head, and think you woke up in the 1950s or the 1890s?” she asked her colleagues. “Because I simply cannot believe that in the year 2015, the United States Senate would be spending its time trying to defund women’s health care centers. … This year alone Republican state legislators have passed more than 50 new restrictions on women’s access to legal health care. … The Republican vote to defund Planned Parenthood is just one more piece of a deliberate, methodical, orchestrated, right-wing attack on women’s rights, and I’m sick and tired of it. Women everywhere are sick and tired of it. The American people are sick and tired of it.”


SHARE

[SHARE]

Article.DirectLink

Contributor
Sign up for our Newsletter

Learn more about topics like these by signing up for Women’s Media Center’s newsletter.