A former Planned Parenthood clinic director has confirmed that a clinic she previously worked in would coerce women into signing up for research involving the harvesting of organs from aborted babies.
Abby Johnson, who previously worked for a Texas branch of the abortion group, gave an interview in response a series of undercover videos appearing to show that the group has been selling baby parts.
Johnson, now a pro-life activist, told The Daily Signal that as staff members of a Planned Parenthood clinic they were compensated for every woman they were able to enrol in a research study. She said this created “coercive tactics”.
Humanity
She said that staff would be trained on how to persuade women to sign up for the research.
Johnson explained: “We never discussed, ‘They may want just a leg, or an arm, or these specific organs.’ That would create a sense of humanity in their unborn child.
We never discussed, ‘They may want just a leg, or an arm, or these specific organs.’ That would create a sense of humanity in their unborn child.
Abby Johnson
“And really, we would even shy away from calling it foetal tissue research because just calling it tissue sanitises it—the women don’t necessarily think about the body of their baby, they’re just thinking about blood and tissue.”
Illegal
Johnson pointed out that doctors would sometimes change abortion procedures to make it easier to harvest parts – she said that although this is illegal, Planned Parenthood cover themselves by claiming to use different methods as a form of “care”.
She said Planned Parenthood claim to need extra money to collect and provide specimens for research, when in fact there is “no extra work”.
One undercover video released by the Center for Medical Progress includes an interview with Holly O’Donnell, who took a job as a “procurement technician” at a company which has dealt with Planned Parenthood called StemExpress.
Sum of money
Although she thought she would just be drawing blood, O’Donnell was tasked with procuring body parts from aborted babies in a Planned Parenthood clinic.
She said that Planned Parenthood would get a certain sum of money for whatever they could “procure”.
She said: “The main nurse was always trying to make sure we got our specimens.
Compensated
“No one else really cared, but the main nurse did because she knew that Planned Parenthood was getting compensated.”
Alabama, Louisiana, New Hampshire, Arkansas and Utah have chosen to de-fund Planned Parenthood, but a move to halt federal Government funding has been recently blocked in the Senate.
The five states all received letters from the Obama administration warning that they may be breaching federal law.