Planned Parenthood has been awash in controversy recently—but many people haven’t heard about it. The story is gruesome and gut wrenching; it is not the kind of news we like to hear about or watch on our nightly news. But this isn’t why it hasn’t been a big story. It is because Planned Parenthood officials, liberal political leaders, and our media are exerting major effort to bury the story.

You should want to know about what’s happening inside Planned Parenthood’s medical facilities, because it reveals a lot about the tragically sad mental state of many people in America today. Here is what’s happening.

On July 14 and 21, David Daleiden of the Center for Medical Progress (cmp) released two separate videos—taken undercover—of senior Planned Parenthood officials negotiating prices for harvested body parts—brains, livers, hearts—from aborted babies. In the first released video, Dr. Deborah Nucatola casually and unemotionally discusses how a forceps tool can be used to crush a baby in the womb to prevent damage to saleable fetal organs. Her conversation takes place while she eats a salad and drinks some wine. In the second video, Dr. Mary Gatter discusses price and an abortion technique that is “less crunchy” to facilitate harvest of fetal body parts, also over a lunch of salad and wine.

The casualness of both officials is chillingly ghoulish and Nazi-like. When haggling over the price of an embryonic liver, Gatter even states jokingly: “If it’s still low, then we can bump it up. I want a Lamborghini.”

In a third video, released on July 28, Dr. Savita Ginde, medical director at the Denver, Colorado, Planned Parenthood facility, is secretly videotaped in a pathology lab where babies are taken after being aborted. Surrounded by staff and tissue buyers, she also talks about making money from aborted body parts: “I think a per-item thing works a little better, just because we can see how much we can get out of it.” This most graphic of the three videos actually shows Dr. Ginde and her medical assistant looking over the already separated body parts of an aborted child.

This video was shot in an American Planned Parenthood medical facility—not a middle-European Nazi death camp.

Planned Parenthood is the single largest abortion provider in the United States. According to its website, Planned Parenthood conducts 40 percent of America’s abortions each year, which totals almost a third of a million. It receives a half-billion tax dollars annually.

You would think the revelations in these videos would be big news, filling tv and radio airwaves. But they are not. Why not? Could it be that the mainstream media are ignoring them in order to protect Planned Parenthood?

Disregard for Law

This is not to say there is no outrage over the videotapes. Ten states and the U.S. Congress are launching investigations into Planned Parenthood practices. Pro-life organizations, Republican presidential candidates, Fox News and Rush Limbaugh all have been discussing the morbid practices.

However, most of the outrage over the videotapes is coming from Planned Parenthood and leftist liberal leaders. Why are they so upset? Not because of cut-up, aborted baby body parts. They are outraged over the legal threat to Planned Parenthood and the potential loss of their government funding.

In response to the backlash over the first video released by cmp, Planned Parenthood ceo Cecile Richards released her own video on July 16 in an effort to quell the brewing storm sure to thunder down on Planned Parenthood.

“In the video, one of our staff members speaks in a way that does not reflect that compassion,” Richards states. “This is unacceptable and I personally apologize for the staff member’s tone and statements,” referring to Dr. Nucatola’s luncheon conversation over the use of forceps. Dr. Nucatola is more than just a staff member. She is the senior director of medical services for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Notice that Ms. Richards makes no admission of or apology for the sale of fetal organs.

“I want to be really clear, the allegation that Planned Parenthood profits in any way from tissue donation is not true,” Richards assures all who watch her video. “Our donation program, like any other high-quality health care provider, follows all laws and ethical guidelines,” she states with emphasis.

This final statement will likely prove very problematic for her. Here’s why.

In the first video released by cmp, Dr. Nucatola explains that her clinic’s harvest of fetal tissue has legal implications. “[T]he Federal Abortion Ban [on partial-birth abortions] is a law, and laws are up to interpretation. So if I say on day one, I do not intend to do this, what ultimately happens doesn’t matter,” Nuctola says as a matter of fact on the hidden camera. What she means is that, depending on the fetal body parts requested from buyers, abortion providers in her clinic might opt to perform a partial-birth type of abortion to preserve the body parts. This does not square with what Cecile Richards said.

In a fourth video released on July 30, Dr. Savita Ginde is also taped in a long discussion about working with lawyers to be sure their harvest of fetal tissues is called “research” and not “business.” She specifically mentions that she needs to talk to Dr. Nucatola to make sure that the Denver clinic handles fetal-tissue sales the same way that other Planned Parenthood clinics do. These two videos make a strong case that Planned Parenthood is being deceitful in its practices and holds great disregard for federal law.

Buying or selling human body parts is a felony. The commercial trafficking of body parts from an aborted baby is punishable by up to 10 years in prison and/or a fine of up to $500,000. In some cases, donation of fetal organs is not illegal, but regulations prohibit altering the timing or method of abortions for the purpose of later using the fetal organs in research. Republicans in Congress say Planned Parenthood’s apparent circumvention of these laws means federal funding for the program should be pulled until full investigations can be conducted on Planned Parenthood’s handling of fetal body parts.

Time to Demonize CMP

In an interview with abc News, Richards blasted the cmp videos, calling them “highly selectively edited” videos released by “militant anti-abortion activists.” Richards also told George Stephanopoulos that the videos “are part of the most militant anti-abortion movement that has been behind the bombing of clinics, the murder of doctors in their homes and in their churches, and that’s what actually needs to be looked at.”

The effort to demonize the cmp has begun to deflect people’s attention off Planned Parenthood’s fetal body parts distribution practices. On July 28, Planned Parenthood hired the high-profile Washington, d.c., public relations firm SKDKnickerbocker as it scrambles to deal with the ongoing scandal and cmp’s vow to release a total of 12 videos. SKDKnickerbocker immediately went to work to encourage journalists not to cover the story.

On July 28, the Los Angeles County Superior Court issued a temporary restraining order barring cmp from releasing any videos of any of the three high-ranking StemExpress officials discussed in the third video by cmp.

On July 29, the Washington Post printed an article written by Cecile Richards stating: “These extremists created a fake business, made apparently misleading corporate filings, and then used false government identifications to gain access to Planned Parenthood’s medical and research staff with the agenda of secretly filming without consent—then heavily edited footage to make false and absurd assertions about our standards and services. They spent three years doing everything they could—not to uncover wrongdoing, but rather to create it. They failed.”

If you have the stomach, watch the videos. They speak for themselves. Nowhere does it appear that the statements by Planned Parenthood officials have been edited. Something evil is being covered up at Planned Parenthood.

Also on July 29, the White House said that President Barack Obama would oppose any attempts by Congress to defund Planned Parenthood.

It is not our intention to take sides in this matter. However, this controversy shows that there is a much bigger issue here that we all should be concerned about.

How did the officials at Planned Parenthood featured in the videos—all of them women—get to the state of mind where they could be so casual about discussing the sale of aborted baby body parts? These women know they are talking about babies—not just tissue. On one of the videos, a medical assistant, picking through a dish full of body parts, says, “Another boy!”

What Abortion Does to Us

“Abortion critics have long warned that the problem is not only the obvious—what abortion does to the fetus—but also what it does to us,” states Charles Krauthammer, commentator for the Washington Post.

He is talking about what performing or experiencing abortion does to the human mind.

“It’s the same kind of desensitization that has occurred in the Netherlands with another mass exercise in life termination: assisted suicide. It began as a way to prevent the suffering of the terminally ill. It has now become so widespread and wanton that one fifth of all Dutch assisted-suicide patients are euthanized without their explicit consent,” continued Krauthammer.

There is a human mental desensitization—or more accurately, a degeneration—that happens with the practice of abortion.

Abortion has been a controversial subject in America for decades. The controversy around abortion seems complex, yet it really is not. Simply stated, the abortion controversy comes from human beings using human reason to make moral decisions beyond human ability. Man is not capable of making moral judgments without the higher law of God. That is what has made this issue so complicated.

For example, when Americans first decided to constitutionalize abortion—nullifying the abortion laws of all 50 states in 1973—the judges, lawyers and proponents reasoned from a term they called “viability,” or the time when a fetus, which is a human baby, could live on its own outside its mother’s womb. In the famous legal cases heard by the Supreme Court Roe v. Wade—and its companion case, Doe v. Bolton—”viability” was established to be 14 weeks, or at the completion of the first trimester. At “viability,” a human fetus looks like a baby.

Roe v. Wade gave women the right to choose to abort their baby after 14 weeks based on their “right to privacy” upheld by the 14th Amendment and on threat to their “life or health.” However, Doe v. Bolton created an unlimited definition of “maternal health” allowing abortion-on-demand to be available through all nine months of pregnancy. Let’s look at this honestly. The Supreme Court gave a woman the right to choose to legally murder her baby.

As a result, the United States is currently one of only nine nations that allows abortion after 14 weeks of gestation. Essentially, the United States permits abortion after viability for any reason.

Can you begin to see how easy it is for medical professionals and others who promote abortion to reason that harvesting baby body parts is also OK?

The Deceitful Human Mind

Once the human mind starts down a slippery slope, the depths of evil it can accept are nearly endless.

Krauthammer sees this problem but not even to the depth he should. In his commentary “The Price of Fetal Parts,” he discusses that assisted suicide in the Netherlands “began as a way to prevent the suffering of the terminally ill.” On the surface that may sound good to human beings, yet assisted suicide is still murder, even for a terminally ill patient. For the Dutch, thinking that assisted suicide is good was just the beginning of the euthanization of “one fifth of all Dutch assisted-suicide patients … without their explicit consent.”

The same is true of abortion. When doctors, judges, lawyers, men and women begin thinking that abortion is good in a few cases like the health of the mother, rape or incest, what’s to stop them from deciding abortion is good for other reasons—and while you’re at it, you might as well make some extra money on the side?

God warned our first parents about such scenarios at the time He created and began human life on this planet. Of course, people scoff at what the Bible so skillfully records for us. Yet the very first instruction God gave Adam and Eve was about the two ways of life humans could choose to follow. This vital teaching is encapsulated in God’s easy-to-understand teaching in Genesis 2 of the two trees: the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

The tree of life represented Adam and Eve choosing to live a life in close contact with God, living by the Ten Commandments, and following God’s revealed instruction now found in the Bible. Living this way would lead them and their children into a wonderful relationship with God and a spectacular future.

However, if they chose to live by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they would then choose to live life by their own rules as directed by their own minds and Satan the devil. They would decide for themselves, under Satan’s influence, what was good and what was evil. God shows that Adam chose to go his own way (Genesis 3). Adam and Eve rejected God, His law and revelation and chose to follow Satan. This is the only sound way to explain what is happening in our world today.

Abortion is murder! Cutting up aborted babies and selling their body parts has Satan’s thinking written all over it—it is inhuman to even consider doing such a thing. The Bible shows us that Satan hates God, and he most certainly hates human beings who have the potential to be born into the God Family.

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it,” warned the Prophet Jeremiah (Jeremiah 17:9). This is the perfect description of what man has become because of Adam’s fateful decision. We have become adept at deceiving ourselves that our decisions on assisted suicide and abortion are good, when they are just the opposite. Humanity must learn that it is tragic folly not to live God’s way.

There is positive hope even in all of this. When God cut Adam and Eve off from the tree of life (Genesis 3:22-24), He laid out a plan to rescue all mankind from that fateful decision. You can read about this plan in two of Herbert W. Armstrong’s most important works, Mystery of the Ages and The Incredible Human Potential.