When all body-parts-selling scandals aren’t equal
A cadaver controversy exposes double-standards toward abortion industry giant Planned Parenthood.
Imagine learning from a national news outlet that a deceased family member’s body was “cut up and leased out” for medical research, without consent or even your knowledge.
That was the situation more than two dozen families found themselves in last year, as NBC News began publishing the results of an extensive investigation into a Texas medical school.
NBC wrote of the unfolding, grisly scandal at the University of North Texas Health Science Center:
Over a five-year period, the center had received about 2,350 unclaimed bodies from Dallas and Tarrant counties and used many of them to train medical students; others it dissected and leased to outside groups, including major biotech companies and the U.S. Army, helping bring in about $2.5 million a year to the center.
As part of the series, NBC printed the names of more than 1,800 people whose bodies may have ended up in the center’s possession. Here are just a few of the headlines:
In the wake of the NBC report, reaction has been swift and furious. In about six months:
The center suspended its body donation program.
Officials in charge of the program were fired.
The center issued an apology to the families.
The center’s president resigned (ostensibly for personal reasons).
“Device makers, research companies and other groups” including the Army, along with two Texas counties, canceled contracts.
A Republican state senator filed legislation to outlaw experimenting on corpses without consent.
The Texas Funeral Service Commission, a state regulator, also opened an investigation. From NBC again:
The Health Science Center shipped many of the bodies and body parts to out-of-state medical schools, device makers and health care education companies — charging $649 for a head, $900 for a torso, $703 for a pair of legs.
At SBA Pro-Life America, this story sounded eerily familiar – and stood out as a case study in double standards.
In the latest episode of our Exposed: Abortion in America podcast, guest David Daleiden reflects on Planned Parenthood’s shocking frankness about profiting from the harvest and sale of body parts from aborted babies. (See all podcast episodes here.)
It was not corporate media, but rather a pair of bold citizen journalists who would uncover this major scandal. Among the outrages their work revealed:
High-level Planned Parenthood employees haggling over the price of body parts, with one quipping, “I want a Lamborghini.”
A Planned Parenthood medical director suggesting federal law against partial-birth abortion is “up to interpretation.”
A longtime Planned Parenthood abortionist stating, “You need to pay attention to who’s in the room” when deciding whether to follow laws protecting babies born alive.
Planned Parenthood abortionists laughing and talking shop about rolling eyeballs, broken skulls and needing to “pull off a leg or two.”
Planned Parenthood NYC entertaining the “financial incentive” of up to $1,500 for a fetal liver.
Horrific experiments involving aborted baby scalps grafted onto lab rats.
Planned Parenthood misleading women, telling them aborted baby body parts have been used to find cures for diseases like diabetes, cancer and AIDS.
The cultural impact of Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress’ undercover videos can’t be overstated; even some lifelong abortion supporters appeared shaken. The videos became a presidential campaign issue. (Hillary Clinton, of all people, called them “disturbing,” although she quickly doubled down on support for Planned Parenthood.)
So, the abortion giant launched a PR campaign to discredit and suppress them. When Planned Parenthood hired Democrat-aligned oppo firm Fusion GPS (of Steele dossier infamy) and declared the videos “heavily edited,” left-wing media ate it up. After a subsequent forensic analysis by Coalfire Systems found instead that the videos were “authentic and show no evidence of manipulation or editing,” crickets.
Planned Parenthood initially apologized for its employees’ “tone,” and they purportedly stopped accepting payment for body parts. Yet Dr. Deborah Nucatola, a key figure in the videos, was unrepentant and “didn’t get the big deal” in a court hearing years later. Her LinkedIn lists her as employed by Planned Parenthood to this day.
Nancy Pelosi defended Planned Parenthood on CNN, dismissing the videos as “not real” and refusing to even answer the question, “Is there not anything on those videos that bothers you at all?”
In California, then-Attorney General Kamala Harris and her successor Xavier Becerra criminally prosecuted Daleiden and his colleague Sandra Merritt for recording “confidential communication” – a first for any journalist under California law, and a move even the L.A. Times editorial board called “disturbingly aggressive,” noting the similarity to undercover investigations of cruelty to animals. Harris, campaigning for U.S. Senate at the time, met secretly with Planned Parenthood about two weeks before her office conducted a raid on Daleiden’s home.
In Texas, Houston prosecutors convened a grand jury ostensibly to investigate Planned Parenthood but turned around and indicted Daleiden instead. Absurdly, the charges included attempting to purchase or sell human organs. The district attorney’s office shared confidential evidence with Planned Parenthood. The charges were later dismissed.
It fell to Republican members of Congress to examine the evidence at the national level. The Senate Judiciary Committee and House Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives spent nearly a year and a half reviewing 30,000 pages of documents and hearing hours of testimony. The panel’s final report, in more than 400 pages, detailed for the record that Planned Parenthood and its associates may have trafficked in the organs of aborted babies. Based on that evidence, Congress made 13 criminal referrals.
In 2017, the new Trump Justice Department confirmed that it had opened an investigation into Planned Parenthood. It’s unclear how far they got, though justice obviously stagnated under the Biden-Harris administration, which put peaceful pro-life activists in prison.
Meanwhile, with the notable exception of their temporary exit from the Title X program under President Trump’s Protect Life Rule, the abortion giant’s taxpayer funding continues to increase (partly from blue states liberalizing their abortion laws):
“Research” profiteering helps solve a perennial problem for the abortion industry: what to do with all the bodies.
But abortion victims’ families, too, are not unaffected. Women already suffering the scars of an abortion – which nearly 70% describe as inconsistent with their values and preferences, unwanted or outright coerced – are re-traumatized by the thought of their child’s body being desecrated again. Serena Dyksen, who was raped as a young girl and further endured a brutal, degrading abortion at the hands of Indiana abortionist Ulrich “George” Klopfer, shared her reaction when the preserved remains of more than 2,400 aborted children – some two decades old – were discovered in Klopfer’s home garage and in his car after his death in 2019:
That night I went to bed and I started crying and just crying, and I was like, ‘God…?’ My first question was, ‘Was one of the babies mine?’
Since 2016, Indiana has had a law on the books – signed by then-Governor Mike Pence – requiring humane and dignified disposition of the remains of aborted children, either by burial or cremation. Planned Parenthood fought that law, yet the U.S. Supreme Court upheld it in 2019 and has declined to take up further challenges to it.
In Ohio, after an all-trimester abortion amendment to the state constitution passed, Planned Parenthood and the ACLU sued to get rid of a similar law and got a county judge to block it.
Tragically, most victims of abortion don’t have names known to us. There’s no public-records list linked to grief-torn families to help them find some kind of closure. However, as in the case of the D.C. Five babies, we can ensure as best we can that someone, somewhere will always remember them while the fight to hold the abortion industry accountable continues.
