FuzzyLumpkins
08-28-2015, 12:04 AM
Planned Parenthood told Congress on Thursday that the organization’s physicians on rare occasions make adjustments to an abortion procedure if a patient wants to donate fetal material.
Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, wrote in a letter to congressional leadership that if a woman who has decided to have an abortion wants to donate the fetal tissue or organs, she and her physician choose which method is best suited to her case. With certain methods, a physician can adjust the procedure to better facilitate the requested donation, she said.
Abortion opponents say the statement amounts to a smoking gun that suggests illegal activity. In one of the series of sting videos that has put the women’s health organization on the defensive since mid-July, a Planned Parenthood physician discusses in graphic terms how procedures may be adjusted to better facilitate tissue donation.
David Daleiden of the Center for Medical Progress, the group behind the videos, told POLITICO on Thursday that the point is something “Congress needs to really hammer home in their investigations.”
But Richards’s letter, which accompanied a commissioned report outlining a series of misleading edits in the videos, seeks to explain the distinction. She indicated that a physician does not adjust which procedure to use — such as whether to do a medically induced abortion or a surgical procedure. Instead, the physician only makes adjustments during the course of the procedure as warranted to donate tissue. She likened it to an obstetrician adjusting the delivery of a baby if the mother wants to preserve the cord blood.
Federal law prohibits physicians from actually switching the abortion method to facilitate donation when the tissue is used for federally funded fetal transplantation. Richards noted that the statute is outdated because it doesn’t cover any of the fetal research done today but that Planned Parenthood still upholds the spirit of the law.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/08/planned-parenthood-provides-tissue-donation-details-121827.html#ixzz3k5CuvPMg
Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, wrote in a letter to congressional leadership that if a woman who has decided to have an abortion wants to donate the fetal tissue or organs, she and her physician choose which method is best suited to her case. With certain methods, a physician can adjust the procedure to better facilitate the requested donation, she said.
Abortion opponents say the statement amounts to a smoking gun that suggests illegal activity. In one of the series of sting videos that has put the women’s health organization on the defensive since mid-July, a Planned Parenthood physician discusses in graphic terms how procedures may be adjusted to better facilitate tissue donation.
David Daleiden of the Center for Medical Progress, the group behind the videos, told POLITICO on Thursday that the point is something “Congress needs to really hammer home in their investigations.”
But Richards’s letter, which accompanied a commissioned report outlining a series of misleading edits in the videos, seeks to explain the distinction. She indicated that a physician does not adjust which procedure to use — such as whether to do a medically induced abortion or a surgical procedure. Instead, the physician only makes adjustments during the course of the procedure as warranted to donate tissue. She likened it to an obstetrician adjusting the delivery of a baby if the mother wants to preserve the cord blood.
Federal law prohibits physicians from actually switching the abortion method to facilitate donation when the tissue is used for federally funded fetal transplantation. Richards noted that the statute is outdated because it doesn’t cover any of the fetal research done today but that Planned Parenthood still upholds the spirit of the law.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/08/planned-parenthood-provides-tissue-donation-details-121827.html#ixzz3k5CuvPMg