A pro-life activist investigated for criminal activity by then-Attorney General Kamala Harris in 2015 released undercover footage Tuesday, showing Planned Parenthood executives apparently discussing the sale of fetal body parts from late-term fetuses, some of which had been delivered alive and mostly intact.
David Daleiden of the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), who posed with a colleague as laboratory wholesalers at the National Abortion Federation’s commercial trade show in 2015, videotaped two conversations with Dr. Ann Schutt-Ainé, the Chief Medical Officer of Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, and Tram Nguyen, RN, the branch’s vice president of abortion access.
While the CMP has always contended that Daleiden’s videos revealed illegalities, Planned Parenthood said at the time the initial videos were released that their staffers were discussing legal, not-for-profit donation of fetal tissue to research firms.
But Daleiden claims these newly-released videos show even more demonstratively that Planned Parenthood’s talking points at the time were false — and that staff was engaged in wrongdoing.
“Schutt-Ainé and Nguyen described dismembering the fetuses after delivery to get around possible violations of the federal partial-birth abortion law,” Daleiden, who calls himself a citizen journalist, told The Post.
In one conversation, an undercover activist from CMP tells Nguyen and Schutt-Ainé that “liver is in short demand” and outlines the competition for fetal organs and cells based on what is “more profitable” for suppliers.
“You told me about the proposition, and so now every time a do a D&E [dilation and evacuation abortion], I’m like, ‘Oh there’s some lungs, there’s some kidneys,’” Schutt-Ainé is seen telling Nguyen in the video.
Nguyen then apologizes to Daleiden for showing him a dismembered fetus at a previous site visit and explains that aborted fetuses are sometimes delivered with one missing limb.
“We just had to hurry up, whereas other days it’s more intact, where it’s like maybe only like an arm that’s disarticulated,” Nguyen says.
Later in the video Nguyen is heard saying: “I’m like, ‘Yeah, I have like a leg for you!’ I’m like, oh s–t, if other people were to hear me, they’d be like, you are f–king evil.”
Neither Schutt-Ainé nor Nguyen responded to calls from The Post. No one answered the phone at the Gulf Coast Planned Parenthood branch in Houston Tuesday. The national office of Planned Parenthood did not respond to an email from The Post.
In the second of the two videotaped conversations, Daleiden asks Schutt-Ainé and Nguyen how to get the most intact late-term aborted fetuses for organ harvesting.
“A lot of it has to do with dilation of the mother’s cervix, the opening to the uterus,” Schutt-Ainé says.“Because when you have good dilation, a cervix that’s either well-dilated and/or just softer and more pliable, then as you bring the fetus down, you can get more of it out before disarticulation occurs.”
Typically, it can take three or four “passes” of the forceps into the birth canal to get the fetus out, Schutt-Ainé says in the second video.
Adds Nguyen: “There are some that are like, I need you to make one more pass, one more pass.”
Schutt-Ainé explains that is to “avoid PBA” and Nguyen follows up with: “Yeah, I was like, ‘Uh, getting a little bit too close!’”
PBA stands for the federal Partial-Birth Abortion law.
Schutt-Ainé further explains that “if I’m doing a procedure, and I’m seeing that I’m in fear that it’s about to come to the umbilicus [navel], I might ask for a second set of forceps to hold the body at the cervix and pull off a leg, or two, so it’s not PBA.”
The federal partial-birth abortion law prohibits delivering a fetus alive past the navel, with intent to take any action after that that will kill the fetus.
In June 2015, working undercover, CMP emailed Nguyen and Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast VP of Research Melissa Farrell a purported contract for $750 per fetal liver and $1,600 per pair of fetal liver and thymus.
The Post viewed the unsealed emails that were produced by Planned Parenthood as exhibits in the organization’s lawsuit against Daleiden and CMP in San Francisco Federal Court.
Daleiden faces eight felony charges and possible jail time in California for making the videos without getting the executives’ permission to film them, as well as “manufacturing” a fake driving license in order to enter Planned Parenthood offices in Houston. A trial date has tentatively been set for December in San Francisco Superior Court.
According to court documents, Nguyen forwarded the purported contract to PPGC’s Regional Medical & Surgical Services Director, Dyann Santos.
Santos asked, “Do you want to do this?” — to which Nguyen replied, “Yes ma’am.”
“Planned Parenthood repeatedly told Congress, the courts, and the public that it had ‘rebuffed’ any opportunity to sell aborted baby body parts in Texas,” Daleiden told The Post.
After Daleiden released the initial videos from CMP’s undercover sting in 2015, the National Abortion Federation, representing Planned Parenthood, got a federal injunction against the release of the footage.
At around the same time, then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris’ office, acting on a request from Planned Parenthood, opened a criminal investigation into Daleiden and the CMP that has been going on for nine years.
Daleiden has accused Harris of “weaponizing” her office in deciding to prosecute him at the behest of Planned Parenthood.
In March 2016, California state Department of Justice agents raided Daleiden’s’ Orange County home and seized the videos.
Congress had also subpoenaed the footage from CMP in late 2015.
This past May, the San Francisco District Court ruled that CMP cannot be prevented from republishing any of the subpoenaed footage.
