Planned Parenthood used many tools in their media arsenal to deceive their own supporters into believing they never sold the organs and tissues of aborted babies.
No, the undercover videos are not fake or heavily edited
The Center for Medical Progress' undercover video series exposing the practices of fetal organ harvesting are completely genuine. All they did was have a few actors pose as a company wishing to purchase the baby body parts, and Planned Parenthood and other members of the usually secretive abortion industry happily let them into their inner world. The videos are simply Planned Parenthood leaders and others talking on camera. In addition to the highlight clips released, full footage of every encounter was released. Even Planned Parenthood's own video review was forced to acknowledge there was no tampering involved. This paid report claims everything is out of context (it's not) and was designed simply to give a sound byte for supporters (essentially none of whom will ever read the actual report) to believe and rally around.
It's illegal to traffic fetal organs but nobody cares in the Obama Administration
If it's illegal to buy and sell baby body parts, how did Planned Parenthood get away with it? The law involved allows compensation for donations. In other words, those receiving the organs can cover any costs Planned Parenthood incurred while harvesting them. Because the law is vague, Planned Parenthood can claim whatever they want involving costs. As the videos showed, however, Planned Parenthood staff would do no actual additional work. They let the organ buyers into their office to speak with women (HIPAA violations?), and then pick through the corpses of the aborted babies like vultures for any profitable organs they could find. Unfortunately with a staunch ally in the White House with President Barack Obama, Planned Parenthood knew a pro-abortion justice department would never go after them.
Another legal problem was Planned Parenthood admitted to changing abortion procedures in order to harvest fresher body parts for sale. Any deviations in the procedure are supposed to be solely for the benefit of a patient, not for financial benefit. Again, pro-abortion officials means the abortion industry won't be held accountable.
The value of human life
Beyond the legality of organ trafficking, the harvesting of dead babies for spare parts touches the human conscience on many levels. As the videos show, Planned Parenthood was keenly worried about the public learning about their practices. Because of the impact of the videos, Planned Parenthood claims they will no longer sell fetal tissue.
Planned Parenthood and others often claim the baby is just a blob of tissue, or a ball of cells, or some other dehumanizing epithet. These clumps of cells, however, were generating intact livers, glands, brains, hearts, etc. for Planned Parenthood to sell. In one video we hear a clinic working marveling at the intricacies of the human spine, a spine that belonged to a fully-formed baby ripped limb from limb several minutes prior.
Throughout the videos, you hear that livers and thymus glands are the hot commodity in the baby parts market. Just what were they being used for? Many Planned Parenthood supporters have been led to believe that they will be used in transplantation for other babies in need. That's half true; the perfectly functioning liver/thymus pair is popular because it can be transplanted, but into mice, not people. The mice will then have a pseudo-human immune system that can be further experimented on. We also learned that the intact brains of some aborted babies ended up in a summer science camp for kids to play with.
These were lives with intrinsic value, and after being ripped apart—one limb at a time—the indignity was complete. These aborted babies were developed and human enough to be used as science experiments, but not human enough to be included in the human family in the eyes of Planned Parenthood.