Washington: House Republican leaders on Wednesday announced a congressional investigation of Planned Parenthood, a day after anti-abortion activists released a video of an unsuspecting official from the organisation explaining how it provides foetal parts to researchers.
Echoing the activists’ allegation, Speaker John A. Boehner and other top Republicans suggested that Planned Parenthood was selling foetal parts, which is illegal if done for profit. But Planned Parenthood said that while it charges for expenses such as processing and transporting, it makes no money from the foetal tissue donated by women who get abortions. The official shown in the video repeatedly says something similar to two activists posing as biotechnology representatives.
The California-based group responsible for the video, the Centre for Medical Progress, appears to have been started relatively recently. Its creator, David Daleiden, once worked with another anti-abortion group, Live Action, and both he and Live Action’s leader, Lila Rose, who also promoted the video, are familiar to Planned Parenthood affiliates from previous undercover videos. Daleiden and Rose did not return calls and emails on Wednesday.
The release of the video and subsequent House investigation opens a new round in the partisan wars over Planned Parenthood that have raged since Republicans took control of the House four-and-a-half years ago. This time, Republicans running for president eagerly joined in, promising to stoke the furore, as anti-abortion conservatives took to social media to demand action.
Past battles provoked backlashes against congressional Republicans and against Mitt Romney, the party’s presidential nominee in 2012. But even before the video began circulating online, Republicans had moved to cut all money for Planned Parenthood and the Title X family planning programme from a spending bill awaiting a House vote.
“When an organisation monetises an unborn child — and with the cavalier attitude portrayed in this horrific video — we must all act,” Boehner said in a statement.
Four senior Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which will conduct the investigation, said in a statement that they would “get to the bottom of this appalling situation.” Two Republican governors ordered investigations in their states: Greg Abbott of Texas and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, who is a presidential candidate.
Other Republican contenders for president condemned Planned Parenthood, including former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Carly Fiorina and former Texas Governor Rick Perry. Another candidate, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, drew the most applause during a campaign stop in South Carolina on Wednesday when he boasted of having defunded Planned Parenthood in his state.
A spokesman for Planned Parenthood, Eric Ferrero, said in a statement that the Republicans’ claims were “flat out” untrue, “but that doesn’t matter to politicians with a long-standing political agenda to ban abortion and defund Planned Parenthood.”
“Our medical practices and guidelines in this area are clear,” he added, “and we do this important work just like other high-quality health care providers — with full, appropriate consent from patients, under the highest ethical and legal standards, and with no financial benefit for the patient or Planned Parenthood.”
But the companies that acquire such tissue from Planned Parenthood can command high prices, depending on the processing required, given the demand among researchers.
“These tissues are very valuable for studying human development and finding out what makes it tick,” said Dr Susan Fisher, who directs the Human Embryonic Stem Cell Programme at the University of California, San Francisco. “Can we reprogram cells in the same way to repair disease processes? Can we have a better understanding of the sort of haywire development that accompanies some tumours?”
“A lot of women want to make these donations” in the hope that useful information can be gained, Fisher added.
The National Institutes of Health spent $76 million (Dh279.14 million) in 2014 on research involving human foetal tissue, and it expects to spend the same amount this year. Researchers at universities with medical centres that perform abortions may obtain foetal tissue there, but private companies also act as middlemen, obtaining tissue from abortion providers and selling it to researchers.
The Planned Parenthood official in the video, Dr Deborah Nucatola, the senior director of medical services, mentions StemExpress, a five-year-old business in Placerville, California, that describes itself as “the largest provider of maternal blood and foetal tissue globally.”
The Sacramento Business Journal reported in November that the company’s revenue had grown by more than 1,300 per cent in three years, and Inc magazine in August put its yearly revenue at $2.2 million.
The company, which advertises “special discounts to the academic community,” sells tissue from foetuses, afterbirth and cadavers, including foetal livers and liver stem cells — Nucatola says in the video that foetal livers are coveted — as well as placentas, umbilical cords, skin, diseased tissue and tumours. Some of the materials are highly processed, and the prices reflect that: The company’s catalogue shows that a vial of 2 million foetal liver cells sells for $2,240.
By contrast, Nucatola said in the video that Planned Parenthood clinics might charge $30 to $100 for a foetal specimen, to recover the costs of preserving, transporting or shipping.
