"Planned Parenthood Sells Parts" Controversy

About

The Planned Parenthood Sells Parts controversy refers to a viral video and campaign by a pro-life organization called the Center for Medical Progress wherein actors, pretending to be medical professionals, secretly filmed a discussion with a Planned Parenthood employee where the employee appears to be suggesting that Planned Parenthood sells fetal body parts it extracts in partial-birth abortions. The video caused outrage in the pro-life community, but was debunked as portraying a false situation by Planned Parenthood.

Origin

On July 14th, 2015, a pro-life organization called Center for Medical Progress posted two videos on YouTube, along with a lengthy exegesis on their web site,^[1] detailing a meeting they paid two actors to have with Planned Parenthood doctor Deborah Nucatola. In video, the actors are pretending that they are approaching Planned Parenthood as medical professionals interested in beginning a transaction where they purchase body parts from partial birth abortions. Nucatola appears to nonchalantly explain a process by which this would be possible, while eating salad and having wine. The edited version also features news clips from older news stories about Planned Parenthood (below left). In two days, this video received almost 2 million views. The group also posted what they claim is an unedited version of the conversation (below right), which received 92,000 views in the same period.

The video had been filmed July 25th, 2014, and the Center for Medical Progress claimed that its release was the first in a series and the result of a three year investigation.

Precursor

The act of sending paid right-wing undercover operatives to create videos against progressive targets was pioneered in 2009, after actor pretending to be a prostitute and pimp asked for tax advice from the federally-funded community group ACORN (below left). While ACORN claimed that the tapes were heavily edited in order to slander the organization, the tape elicited outrage from the right wing media like Fox News, and federal funding for ACORN was eventually cut.^[2]

A similar campaign was conducted in 2011 against Planned Parenthood by the anti-abortion group Live Action, which sent actors pretending to be a pimp and a prostitute into a clinic to obtain an abortion for the pregnant woman (above right).^[3]

Spread

The videos were distributed widely throughout the right wing media on the day of their release, including many anti-abortion outlets like LifeNews.com and Fox News.^[4]^[5] It was also written about on mainstream media outlets like the Washington Post and Gawker.com.^[6]^[7] Planned Parenthood soon addressed the video, accusing the Center for Medical Progress of trying to mount a misleading “sting” campaign against the medical provider. They also explained the conversation that was held from their point of view:

“At several of our health centers, we help patients who want to donate tissue for scientific research, and we do this just like every other high-quality health-care provider does -- with full, appropriate consent from patients and under the highest ethical and legal standards,” spokesman Eric Ferrero said. “In some instances, actual costs, such as the cost to transport tissue to leading research centers, are reimbursed, which is standard across the medical field.”

Nonetheless, the hashtag #PlannedParenthood was trending nationally on July 14th and 15th, with almost 200,000 tweets.^[8]