Planned Parenthood is not “Selling Baby Parts”

I’ve been wanting to write about my thoughts on this since I first heard about the ridiculous allegations and watched the edited video in question that depicted a Planned Parenthood executive discussing the sale of baby parts with an anonymous party.

I think this video pretty much sums up the sarcastic angle of my opinion here because if you listened to the outrage, you’d think they were literally selling baby hearts and baby lungs on the black market! I mean, seriously – I watched a clip of Sean Hannity asking whether these parts were being used for transplants…

Just to be clear – even when a fetus hits the 22nd week (roughly time when a fetus is considered viable outside of the womb), it’s about the size of a banana, making the lungs about the size of a quarter and the heart and everything else even smaller.

So what per se would we be transplanting these micro-sized organs into, anyways???

Anyways, the rational angle of my opinion comes from personal experience because my wife and I actually went through something similar two years ago with regards to the fertility treatments we went through that resulted in the birth of our son.

Our first IVF cycle produced 12 human embryos, of which only 3 ended up being viable at the 5-day mark.

2 were unsuccessful in our first attempt, and the third was frozen cryogenically for six months before being used successfully in our second attempt and eventually became our son, Christopher.

As for those other 9 embryos, however, we were given a choice.

They could either be discarded simply as medical waste, or we could donate them for scientific research.

It was one of the few decisions throughout the entire process that we didn’t even have to stop to think about because if research from our failed embryos could help in any way to make the process a little easier for people on down the road by learning more about fetal development or the effect of hormones on maternity or anything else, it was well worth it because otherwise they were just going in the trash anyways.

We had to sign special consent paperwork agreeing to this in advance, and I’m sure just like Planned Parenthood, our clinic collected a small fee for the care and transport of the fetal tissue being delivered to their research partners. It’s not like you can just take discarded embryos and throw them in a box for the UPS guy to pick up once a week! Anything under $100/specimen for professional scientific services once you factor in storage, courier services, etc… is comical to be considered “profit.”

If you want a look at what actual profiting from the illegal sale of human tissue looks like, check out this undercover investigation that VICE did over in Bangladesh about the black market trade of kidneys. Selling an adult kidney for the price of a used car is very different from selling unborn fetal tissue for medical research that was otherwise headed for the garbage…

Of course, it was abundantly clear to me from the moment I heard about this controversy that the stink about Planned Parenthood isn’t really about what they do with their medical waste, it ultimately just ties back to people believing that abortion shouldn’t be legal as a medical procedure at all. Even though it’s this type of research that ultimately serves to make pregnancy safer and more viable for women around the world, and even if abortion only accounts for 3% of Planned Parenthood’s business, who also happens to provide its variety of services to 1 in 5 women in America.

If something’s too ridiculous to be true, it probably is.