Tag: center for medical progress
Planned Parenthood Is Fighting Back

Planned Parenthood Is Fighting Back

Planned Parenthood is battling on multiple legal fronts across the country, close to a year after the airing of several heavily edited videos that purported to show staff selling fetal tissue.

The organization has filed 15 lawsuits challenging states that want to defund or otherwise curtail its activities.

Kansas and Ohio are the latest states to announce the pulling of federal funds from the organization and its affiliates. Both are being sued.

Planned Parenthood is also suing the Center for Medical Progress, the anti-choice group behind the production of misleading videos.

In a statement made when the lawsuit was filed in January, Dawn Laguens, Executive Vice President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said, “This lawsuit exposes the elaborate, illegal conspiracy designed to block women’s access to safe and legal abortion, and we filed the case to hold them accountable.”

A House panel, heavily Republican, is investigating the transfer of fetal tissue. It claimed last week to have evidence a company involved violated federal privacy laws and committed other ethics violations.

Yet the fallout from the Center for Medical Progress’s videos stems from a practice that has gone on for decades. Research on fetal tissue led to the very first polio vaccine. It was also crucial for the development of vaccines for hepatitis, rubella, chicken pox, shingles, and rabies, and today is used for research into such conditions as Alzheimers and Parkinson’s disease.

“Fetal tissue donation is entirely legal and plays a vital role in medical research,” Planned Parenthood wrote in its suit against the Center for Medical Progress. “Virtually every person in the United States has benefited from research that relies on fetal tissue.”

And the videos in question, far from showing the Planned Parenthood staff were angling to make a profit from the practice, revealed almost the exact opposite. The amount discussed on camera was so small it would have hardly covered expenses.

It is illegal to profit from the transfer of fetal tissue. In law, profit is described as “valuable consideration” but that does not include reasonable payments associated with the “transportation, implantation, processing, preservation, quality control, or storage of human fetal tissue.”

The American Medical Association states: “Fetal tissue is not provided in exchange for financial remuneration above that which is necessary to cover reasonable expenses.”

Investigations in 12 states, including Kansas and Ohio, found no evidence that Planned Parenthood tried to profit from the transfer of fetal tissues for medical research.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn) is leading the House investigative panel established as a result of the edited videos.

She claimed last week to have uncovered evidence of privacy and ethics violations, evidence described by Democrats on the panel as “unverified ‘documents and testimony’ from so called ‘informants’ to allege wrongdoing by StemExpress.” Some of that evidence came from the Center for Medical Progress. StemExpress denies any wrongdoing.

In a statement, Blackburn said the company and abortion clinics “make a profit from the baby body parts inside the young woman’s womb.”

Blackburn’s language echoes that of Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, who stated that he wanted to defund Planned Parenthood because it is involved in the “trafficking of baby body parts.”

But a representative for Gov. Brownback was very clear last month, saying the governor defunded the organization “in order to protect the unborn and support a culture of life in Kansas.”

The videos had other real world consequences, according to the Planned Parenthood lawsuit against the Center for Medical Progress, which described the group and its key members being involved in a “complex criminal enterprise.”

“Millions of people who view the manipulated videos and inflammatory accusations were made to believe that Planned Parenthood had violated the law and acted improperly,” the lawsuit reads.

“There was a dramatic increase in the threats, harassment, and criminal activities targeting abortion providers and their supporters and, in particular, Planned Parenthood health center after the release of defendants.”

In November, Robert Dear shot up a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, killing three and injuring nine more, he shouted “No more baby parts!”

The express aim of the enterprise had the ultimate goal of interfering with women’s access to legal abortion, the lawsuit states.

Photo: A member of the New York Police Department stands outside a Planned Parenthood clinic in the Manhattan borough of New York, November 28, 2015. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly

Texas Prosecutor Offers Probation To Anti-Abortion Activist Behind Video

Texas Prosecutor Offers Probation To Anti-Abortion Activist Behind Video

By Ruthy Munoz

HOUSTON (Reuters) – An anti-abortion activist indicted for using a fake driver’s license ID to aid secret filming inside Planned Parenthood facilities turned himself into authorities in Houston on Thursday and was offered a probation deal, prosecutors said.

David Daleiden, indicted in January by a Houston-area grand jury, appeared at Harris County District Court on a charge of tampering with a governmental record, which can bring up to 20 years in prison. He also faces a misdemeanor charge for trying to procure fetal tissue.

Daleiden leads the California-based Center for Medical Progress that released the secretly filmed videos used to accuse the women’s health group of trading in aborted fetal tissue.

He was offered a probation deal in which, if he keeps a clean record for a certain period of time, charges would be dropped, prosecutors said.

Daleiden’s lawyers said he planned to reject the deal and is seeking an apology from prosecutors.

Daleiden told a news conference outside court that he wants Texas to prosecute Planned Parenthood, saying it “is open for business in baby body parts.”

Planned Parenthood has denied Daleiden’s allegations and sued in federal court, arguing the people who recorded the videos acted illegally.

In a twist for the Texas Republican leaders who had ordered an investigation, the grand jury in January cleared Planned Parenthood of wrongdoing and indicted video makers Daleiden and Sandra Merritt.

“We’re glad they’re being held accountable, and we hope other law enforcement agencies pursue criminal charges, as well,” said Eric Ferrero, vice president at Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Merritt, a lesser figure in the filming, appeared at a Houston court on Wednesday and was also offered a probation deal.

Lawyers for the activist do not dispute that the pair used false IDs but said they did so for investigative journalism.

Countering that contention, Eric Ferrero, vice president at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said, “We don’t know of any journalists who have engaged in wire fraud and mail fraud, lied to multiple government agencies, tampered with government documents, and broken laws in at least four states only to lie about what they found. It’s hard to imagine anyone calling that ‘journalism’.”

The videos released last summer purported to show Planned Parenthood officials trying to negotiate prices for aborted fetal tissue. Under federal law, donated human fetal tissue may be used for research, but profiting from its sale is prohibited.

In response to the videos, Texas and other Republican-controlled states tried to halt funding for Planned Parenthood. U.S. congressional Republicans pushed for a funding cut.

Planned Parenthood has said Daleiden and Merritt presented fake IDs in April 2015 and posed as research executives from a fictitious company to secretly film conversations at a health and administrative center in Houston.

(Writing by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by Grant McCool, Toni Reinhold)

Photo: A member of the New York Police Department stands outside a Planned Parenthood clinic in the Manhattan borough of New York, November 28, 2015. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly

For Planned Parenthood, Justice Seldom Gets More Poetic

For Planned Parenthood, Justice Seldom Gets More Poetic

By Leonard Pitts Jr., Tribune Content Agency

“A lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”

That nugget of wisdom dates from the 1800s, i.e., decades before anyone ever heard of the Internet — much less Fox “News.”

If a lie traveled that fast in the 19th century, you can only imagine its speed in the 21st, when media and the World Wide Web have given it wings. Indeed, in 2016, the lie is so broadly and brazenly told as to cower truth itself and to render impotent and faintly ridiculous the little voice insisting, against all evidence, that facts matter.

It seems increasingly obvious that to many of us, they simply don’t. Not anymore. We find ourselves embarked upon a post-empirical era in which the very idea that facts are knowable and concrete has become quaint. These days, facts are whatever the politics of the moment needs them to be.

We’ve seen this over and over in recent years. We’ve seen it in the controversy over Barack Obama’s birthplace, in the accusations that Sept. 11 was an inside job, in the charge that weapons of mass destruction were in fact discovered in Iraq, and in the claims that there is no scientific consensus about global warming.

Lunatic assertions that fly in the face of the known are now the norm in American political discourse. So last week’s news out of Houston came as a welcome jolt.

It seems Planned Parenthood was exonerated by a grand jury after an investigation into spurious charges the reproductive healthcare provider was selling baby parts for profit. Simultaneously, two so-called “citizen journalists” who orchestrated the hoax — David Daleiden, 27, and Sandra Merritt, 62 — were indicted.

It was a moment of sweet vindication for Planned Parenthood, following months of vilification and investigation. This all sprang from a series of videos secretly recorded by Daleiden’s anti-abortion group, “The Center For Medical Progress” during conversations with officials of various Planned Parenthood affiliates.

Released last year, the videos purported to show the officials negotiating the sale of fetal tissue with people they believed to be medical researchers. As Planned Parenthood first protested, an investigation by FactCheck.org later indicated, and a grand jury now affirms, the videos were deceptively edited. Tissue from aborted fetuses has been used in biomedical research since the 1930s to study everything from polio to Parkinson’s, and while the law prohibits its sale, the patient is allowed to donate it, and Planned Parenthood is allowed to recoup reasonable costs for preparation and transportation to supply it to scientists.

This is what the Planned Parenthood representatives were talking about. This is what the videos were edited to hide.

One is reminded of how, back in 2010, another activist used another deceptively-edited video to suggest that a speech by a black federal employee named Shirley Sherrod was proof of anti-white hatred. It turned out Sherrod’s speech actually made precisely the opposite point; she spoke of the need to overcome such hatred.

That video, like these, suggests that what we’re dealing with here is not “citizen journalists” — whatever that idiotic term even means — but activist zealots out to advance their agenda and embarrass their opponents by any means necessary, without regard to simple decency or plain old truth. Increasingly, that is the way of things.

So it’s welcome news that the two CPM hoaxers find themselves facing felony charges for allegedly using falsified driver’s licenses to identify themselves to Planned Parenthood. We are told that that constitutes fraud. In other words, Daleiden and Merritt were ensnared by the trap they set. Justice seldom gets more poetic.

Yes, lies have always moved faster than truth. But it feels good to see truth pull even every now and then.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)

Photo: David Daleiden, American Life League via Flickr.

Anti-Abortion Activists Get Caught In Their Own Sting

Anti-Abortion Activists Get Caught In Their Own Sting

When anti-abortion activists began a fraudulent “sting” operation against Planned Parenthood, they surely had no idea that it would lead to this: criminal indictments against their own plotters. This is one of the best instances of retributive justice to hit the political scene in decades.

The anti-abortion crowd who carried out this campaign certainly deserve what they got. They set out to use lies, deception and, it turns out, allegedly illegal acts not just to embarrass Planned Parenthood but also to cripple it — to turn the organization, which is one of the nation’s leading providers of women’s reproductive health services, into such a pariah that its funding would dry up. Instead, the schemers have been exposed as the liars and frauds that they are.

Their deception was in keeping with the long and tawdry history of the anti-abortion crusade, which has used falsehoods and misinformation to try to prevent women from having access to safe and legal abortions. Activists have claimed that abortion is linked to breast cancer. (It isn’t.) They have insisted that abortion leads to long-term mental anguish. (There are no data to support that claim.) And some have even said that there is no reason to include exceptions for rape and incest in any abortion restrictions, since rape cannot lead to pregnancy. (That’s just nonsense.)

This particular episode of right-wing overreach hit the airwaves last year, when an anti-abortion activist named David Daleiden, director of the so-called Center for Medical Progress, released videos that purported to show Planned Parenthood employees selling fetal tissue retrieved from abortions, which is illegal. He claimed the videos showed “a criminal conspiracy to make money off of aborted baby parts.”

But, like other so-called stings by ultraconservative “citizen-journalists,” this operation did not depend on fairness, accuracy or transparency. Instead, the videos were heavily edited and sometimes doctored to give the appearance of wrongdoing.

Of course, that didn’t stop conservative politicians from pouncing on the opportunity to show their support for Daleiden’s efforts. Businesswoman Carly Fiorina, a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, dove headfirst into the miasma of Daleiden’s lies, suggesting during a September debate that she had seen video footage of “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says, ‘We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.'”

No such video exists, and PolitiFact later ruled Fiorina’s dramatic tale “mostly false.”

Some Republican hard-liners in Congress, including presidential contender Ted Cruz, insisted that their party should shut down the government rather than assent to a budget that included funding for Planned Parenthood.

Meanwhile, several investigations were launched into Planned Parenthood’s alleged perfidy. Multiple states, from Kansas to Georgia to Massachusetts, conducted probes, as did three congressional committees. None — not one — of the investigations turned up any wrongdoing by Planned Parenthood.

Indeed, Harris County (Houston), Texas, also convened a grand jury to investigate Planned Parenthood. But in a stunning irony, the grand jury cleared Planned Parenthood and instead returned criminal indictments against Daleiden on a felony charge of tampering with a governmental record and on a misdemeanor charge related to purchasing human organs. A second anti-abortion activist, Sandra S. Merritt, was indicted on a felony charge of tampering with a governmental record. (Both felony charges involve making fake driver’s licenses to fool Planned Parenthood employees about their actual identities.)

If supporters of Daleiden and Merritt try to persuade you this is some partisan smear, know that the Harris County prosecutor who convened the grand jury is a Republican, Devon Anderson, who has described herself as “pro-life.” “As I stated at the outset of this investigation, we must go where the evidence leads us,” she told reporters.

Not that the anti-abortionists are giving up. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that their separate investigations would continue. They are as relentless as their partisan colleagues in Congress have been in investigating Benghazi — and similarly unsuccessful.

But finding evidence of genuine criminal wrongdoing was never the goal of these investigations. Instead, ultraconservatives who crusade against reproductive rights are animated by a desire to turn back the clock to a time when women had little control over their own bodies. Their critics have dubbed this a “war on women” for good reason.

(Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.)

Photo: Protesters stand on a sidewalk outside a Planned Parenthood clinic in Vista, California August 3, 2015. REUTERS/Mike Blake