Today, the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) posted footage of a Planned Parenthood abortionist discussing what happens when babies are born alive after failed abortions. The latest video is a shocking addition to the undercover videos released starting in 2015 by the group of citizen journalists at CMP.
In the most recent exposé, an undercover journalist from CMP poses as a buyer seeking baby body parts. Dr. DeShawn Taylor, Medical Director of Planned Parenthood of Arizona at the time the video was made, talks openly with the buyer about the possibility of obtaining “intact” specimens. By intact, Taylor means babies delivered whole in an abortion rather than violently dismembered in the womb, as is common in many abortion procedures. Taylor cautions, “I gotta worry about my staff, people’s feelings about it [the baby]comin’ out lookin’ like a baby.” Understandably, most people would be upset to see the level of development and, above all, the humanity of the preborn child after the child’s death. Taylor reveals that even abortion workers do not want to know what they are doing.
Taylor’s warning about how staff might react to seeing whole babies is not new. Cate Dyer expressed similar concerns about her staff encountering recognizable babies. What is most shocking about the undercover footage of Taylor is what comes next: She discusses babies born alive. When the journalist posing as a buyer asks Taylor what happens when a baby is born alive, she says “the key, you need to pay attention to who’s in the room, right? Because the thing is the law states that you’re not supposed to do any maneuver after the fact to try to cause demise. So it’s really tricky.” There is nothing tricky and this is not a gray area: If a child is born alive after a failed abortion, murdering that child is, just that, murder. Furthermore, Arizona law requires that abortionists “use all available means and medical skills to promote, preserve, and maintain the life of a baby who is delivered alive.”
The reason abortionists like Taylor are willing to commit risky abortion procedures in order to have an “intact” baby is the same reason that drives the rest of Planned Parenthood’s business model: profit. Intact specimens offer buyers of fetal tissue many organs to sell to researchers for experimentation. Unlike the gruesome dismemberment abortion in which organs are crushed and ripped apart, an intact specimen would offer buyers many healthy organs to select. As Taylor tells the buyer, “most of the time we do dig,” meaning the abortionists inject digoxin into the baby before the abortion, stopping the heart and lowering the chances that the baby will be born alive. If the organs of that baby are going to be sold, however, digoxin cannot be used because the organs will not be serviceable for research if the baby has been poisoned. Taylor’s frank discussion reveals the strong incentives for abortionists to deliver born alive infants in order to sell their body parts for profit.
In other parts of the video, Taylor discusses the force required to rip the biceps from a fully formed baby in the womb. She, like other Planned Parenthood executives in CMP videos, discusses altering abortion procedures, in this case by having a woman “do a little labor” as part of the abortion in order to harvest intact babies. We can expect to hear the same inaccurate soundbites from the anti-Life lobby that the CMP videos are “highly edited” and “thoroughly debunked.” Quite to the contrary, no one has been able to show that the inhumane statements were in any way fabricated. The abortion executives said what they did, and DeShawn Taylor is the latest shocking example.
What we learned in the latest video from CMP is that one of America’s most notorious killers, abortionist Kermit Gosnell, was not the exception. Infants born alive after failed abortions are not a rarity. Instead of preserving these innocent and vulnerable lives, abortionists respond, “It’s really tricky.”
Texas Right to Life hopes this video results in a thorough investigation by authorities.