Republican lawmakers have tried to dig themselves out of the divide created when the The Alabama Supreme Court ruled last month that frozen embryos created by in vitro fertilization should be considered children. And former president Donald Trump attempted to shed the political burden of near-total abortion bans imposed in red states after the crisis.Dobbs v. Jackson as he campaigns for a get-out-of-jail-free card at the White House.
But now Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has come with a shovel to dig that divide a little deeper. Greene was quite scary and all smiles as she announced on X, formerly known as Twitter, that she would be holding a hearing next Tuesday to investigate “the black market in baby organ harvesting.” She also invited people to register on her Congress website for a live broadcast of the hearing.
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To be clear, there is no black market for organ harvesting from babies. And there’s nothing to smile about when it comes to Greene’s latest political theater cascade.
Vice President Kamala Harris made history Thursday when she became the first sitting president or vice president to visit a facility providing abortions: a Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Paul, Minnesota. Greene is trying to revive a malicious and debunked smear campaign against family planning. Women who gave birth by force falsely claimed that the health care provider was profiting from the illegal sale of aborted fetal parts to medical researchers.
Democrats on House Oversight Committee created a special web page and YouTube videos to debunk misinformation about Planned Parenthood, such as the claim that its clinics perform late-term abortions to sell body parts. They don’t.
Only a few Planned Parenthood clinics have donated fetal tissue for medical research, with the patient’s informed consent, the organization said. In the past, clinics received compensation from researchers to cover their costs of processing and transporting materials, but the policy was changed in 2015 and clinics no longer accept reimbursement for tissue donation expenses .
But what’s most telling about what Greene is planning are the two witnesses she announced will appear at her hearing: prominent anti-abortion activists David Daleiden and Terrisa Bukovinac.
Daleiden, who founded a group known as the Center for Medical Progress, was bound by the Southern Poverty Law Center has “some of the hardest anti-abortion extremists in the country.
In 2015, Daleiden’s group released a series of deceptively edited undercover videos purporting to show Planned Parenthood employees involved in the sale of so-called “aborted fetal body parts” for profit, which would have been illegal. This has led to efforts in several Republican-controlled states to defund Planned Parenthood health centers.
At least 13 states conducted investigations into Planned Parenthood that found the organization committed no wrongdoing. A similar investigation conducted by the House Oversight Committee, spearheaded by Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner, reached the same conclusion.
Planned Parenthood, in turn, sued Daleiden’s group. In 2019, a jury found in favor of Planned Parenthood, concluding that Daleiden and his group violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and engaged in fraud, trespass, breach of contract, and illegal secret recordings.
The jury awarded Planned Parenthood compensatory and punitive damages totaling more than $2 million for the harm caused by Daleiden and his co-conspirators. In October 2023, the United States Supreme Court refused to hear the Daleiden group’s appeal of a lower court’s ruling upholding most of Planned Parenthood’s damages award, Reuters reported.
Bukovinac gained notoriety in March 2022 during a protest outside the Washington Surgi-Clinic in DC when she and another anti-abortion activist, Lauren Handy, pretend you got a box containing five fetuses and 110 smaller ones from a medical waste truck driver. The clinic is not affiliated with Planned Parenthood.
Police later said the fetuses were aborted in accordance with DC law. In 2022, police removed fetuses from a refrigerator in Handy’s house after she and several other protesters were indicted on federal charges for blocking access to the Surgi-Clinic during an earlier protest in 2020. In August 2023, Handy and four co-defendants were found guilty of illegal blocking the reproductive health clinic. Bukovinac was not among those charged.
Bukovinac founded a group known as Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, which demanded that the Washington clinic be investigated for infanticide. In September 2023, Bukovinac, who identifies as a “pro-life progressive,” stood outside the Surgi-Clinic to announce that she was running for president in the Democratic primary (even though she did not got virtually no traction) – a move she was hoping for. would allow it to broadcast graphic anti-abortion advertisements, Michigan Advancement reported.
Daleiden and Bukovinac have already telegraphed to X the subject of Greene’s hearing. Right-wing media like The federalist having picked up a report earlier this month from Daleiden’s group. This time, Daleiden’s group did not use secret videos, but apparently selected documents obtained through a public records request. Daleiden’s group claimed that Planned Parenthood of San Diego (now known as Planned Parenthood) Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest) had a contract agreement “to provide body parts of aborted fetuses” to the University of California, San Diego in exchange for “valuable consideration”, namely a share of the intellectual property rights resulting from their research.
“This new evidence shows that Planned Parenthood is selling the body parts of late-term aborted babies, in violation of federal law, for a much higher price than ever before,” Daleiden says in the report.
But beyond the sensational headlines, the report states that the biological materials mentioned are actually “fetal and placental tissues.” Daledin’s group also claims that the University of California’s total patent invention revenue for 2021-2022 exceeded $127 million, but the link links to a page referencing the entire University of Calgary system, with no amount specified for patents derived from fetal tissue research at UCSD.
THE website for Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest contains no reference to the Daleidin group’s allegations. But there is something even more alarming about this hearing: the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision on frozen embryos and the Republican Party’s efforts to pass legislation that states that human life begins at conception.
And this is the impact on research on fetal tissues and embryonic stem cells following the Supreme Court ruling of June 2022 overturning Roe v. Wade, which guaranteed the right to abortion throughout the country.
Immediately after the ruling, medical researchers were already express your concerns that the decision would result in new restrictions that ““this will reduce the availability of fetal tissue and embryonic stem cells,” or cause some states to pass laws banning such research altogether, according to The scientist website.
In 2021, the Biden administration discarded restrictions imposed by former President Donald Trump on federal funding of medical research using human fetal tissue from elective abortions. If Trump wins in November, even tougher restrictions could be imposed.
The Guttmacher Institutea research group defending abortion rights, wrote that these federal grants support research “on a wide range of diseases including diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, spinal cord injury, hemophilia, leukemia, sickle cell disease, ALS and many others.
In 2016, when Daledin’s group first took on Planned Parenthood, the Guttmacher Institute wrote in its report:
Research on fetal tissue dates back to the 1930s and has led to major advances in human health, including the near elimination of childhood scourges such as polio, measles and rubella in the United States.. Today, fetal tissues are used in the development of vaccines for Ebola and HIV, in the study of human development, and in efforts to treat and cure conditions and diseases that afflict millions of Americans.
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