Former Planned Parenthood Employee Says Moms Were Pressured Into Donating Baby Parts

Between 2001 and 2009 Abby Johnson worked for the Southeast Texas Planned Parenthood Clinic, the same place where the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) filmed the fifth undercover video showing PP selling aborted baby parts. In an interview with the Daily Signal which is unrelated to CMP, Ms Johnson said employees received a bounty for each woman they convinced to allow their baby to be mutilated and sold off in pieces. 

Ms. Johnson, was the clinic's director when she quit in 2009 after witnessing a doctor performing an abortion on an ultrasound. Since then she has been a pro-life activist, criticizing Planned Parenthood’s abortion practices. The organization of course has tried to discredit her story and at one point even obtained a temporary injunction against her, Abby was cleared of any wrongdoing.

Now, in light of allegations that Planned Parenthood is engaging in illegal activities surrounding its harvesting of fetal body parts, Johnson walked The Daily Signal through her experience with the donation process, from the moment she would ask a woman to participate in a “life-saving” study to the second her facility shipped off the body parts.

The actual fetal tissue study—the research—is not brought up until she goes into counseling. I’m saying counseling, but it’s really when she goes in to sign all the papers. After she signs the consent form for the abortion, then we would bring up the study.

To get a "client" to agree to participating in the study PP is careful to use the same kind of de-humanizing vocabulary progressives have been using to attack the CMP videos its not a baby or a fetus, its tissue.

"we are participating in a study and she has an opportunity today to donate the tissue that’s removed from her uterus to a research laboratory where they will be working on life-saving treatments for various diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or other types of medical studies. We would tell her this is an opportunity for her to possibly save the life of someone else by donating this tissue. By creating this altruistic scenario, women would almost always consent and say, “Yes, absolutely.”

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. And really, we would even shy away from calling it fetal tissue research because just calling it tissue sanitizes it—the women don’t necessarily think about the body of their baby, they’re just thinking about blood and tissue."

And at least when Abby was with the clinic for every patient a member of the staff snookered into allowing their child to be dissected and sold off that staff member received a finders fee.

It depended on how much Planned Parenthood was getting per research participant. For our fetal tissue study, we got paid about $200 per baby that we sent. If I recall correctly, I think the compensation to the staff was about $20 per enrollment. If it was a minor study … one time we did a study where they were testing different kinds of pap brushes … we got about $5 for each patient.

The doctors would use the same tools whether the baby's tissues were to be sold off or not.  But they would sometimes use the tools in a different way.

There were times where doctors would use a manual aspiration technique as opposed to the vacuum aspiration because the vacuum suction that we used was so strong that it would basically just shred the parts of the baby. If we were trying to get a more intact specimen, the doctor may use a manual aspiration procedure, which doesn’t include the machine and does less damage to the actual baby.

Planned Parenthood has done such a good job covering themselves because both of those procedures are considered acceptable standard of care. They can say, “We’re not doing the manual aspiration to get a more intact specimen; we’re doing it because this woman’s concerned about pain and this would be less painful than the vacuum aspiration procedure.”

The explanation goes on to explain what happens to the baby when it is taken from the uterus and how the various body parts are picked off.

She also talked about how much money Planned Parenthood was making from each baby:

The researchers provided the Styrofoam box and dry ice to Planned Parenthood. Literally the only cost we had was shipping the box. And that was about $20 every time we shipped. So Planned Parenthood is getting $200 per specimen, and we’re taking all the specimens, putting them in one box and shipping it off for $20. The different fetal body parts are not shipped individually.

So for example if they were shipping a heart and a liver, they got $400. Take away the $20 they gave the staffer for pushing the mom into donating the baby parts and the $20 for shipping and handling, Planned Parenthood had a nice business.

What makes Abby's story so interesting is that it's independent verification of the CMP videos which Planned Parenthood still claims were totally bogus.