Planned Parenthood is caught in a life-threatening crossfire—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 that 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.

What is happening with Planned Parenthood is one of this year’s big stories. You should want to know about what is taking place inside Planned Parenthood’s medical facilities, because it reveals a lot about the tragically sad mental state of many people in America today.

Planned Parenthood’s recent controversy began in mid-July. On July 14 and 21, David Daleiden of the Center for Medical Progress (cmp) released two videos, taken undercover, of senior Planned Parenthood officials negotiating prices for harvested body parts—brains, livers, hearts—from aborted babies. In the first video, Dr. Deborah Nucatola casually and unemotionally discusses how forceps can be used to crush a baby in the womb to prevent damage to salable fetal organs. Her conversation takes place while she eats a salad and drinks some wine. In the second video, Dr. Mary Gatter discusses prices 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 these officials is chillingly ghoulish. 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: “We don’t want to do just a flat-fee (per baby) of like, $200. A per-item thing works a little better, just because we can see how much we can get out of it.” She also laughed while looking at a plate of fetal kidneys that were “good to go” 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.

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 half a 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? Are mainstream media ignoring them in order to protect Planned Parenthood?

Disregard for Law

This is not to say there is no outrage over the videotapes. Twelve states and the United States Congress have launched 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 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.

“In the video, one of our staff members speaks in a way that does not reflect that compassion,” Richards states, referring to Dr. Nucatola’s luncheon conversation over the use of forceps. “This is unacceptable and I personally apologize for the staff member’s tone and statements.” 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 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 us. “Our donation program, like any other high-quality health care provider, follows all laws and ethical guidelines.”

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

In the first video, 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,” Nucatola says as a matter of fact on hidden camera. What she means is that, depending on the fetal body parts that buyers request, 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 Richards said.

In a fourth video released on July 30, Dr. Ginde is 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. Dr. Ginde also states, “We don’t want to get called on, you know, selling fetal parts across states.” 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 the organization’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 host 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 deflected 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 scrambled 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 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.”

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

By the end of August, cmp had released four more videos, each one ramping up the horror over the disturbing practices taking place in Planned Parenthood’s medical facilities.

The videos speak for themselves. Nowhere does it appear that the statements by Planned Parenthood officials have been edited. Evil is being covered up at Planned Parenthood.

This controversy reveals a much bigger issue that we all should be concerned about.

How did the Planned Parenthood officials featured in the videos—all of them women—arrive at 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, exclaims, “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,” stated syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer (July 23).

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—induced by 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—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. However, what intellectual liberals and judges refused to recognize is that at conception the tiny ball of tissue is already a human 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” making abortion-on-demand 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?

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

Krauthammer speaks of this problem. In his commentary “The Price of Fetal Parts,” he wrote 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?

The Deceitful Human Mind

God warned our first parents about such scenarios at the time He created human life on this planet. The very first instruction God gave Adam and Eve was about the two ways of life humans could choose to follow. This truth is encapsulated in God’s easy-to-understand teaching of the two trees in Genesis 2: 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. 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. When you think about abortion, do you see that people have taken on Satan’s nature? It is a satanic-type hatred that leads to abortion.

The Apostle Paul gave us a clear prophetic look into our time. “This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come,” he wrote. “For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, Without natural affection …” (2 Timothy 3:1-3). Our time is certainly perilous for millions of unborn children. How can a woman murder her own baby? She certainly must love her own life more—and she certainly has lost her “natural affection” for her baby.

The Prophet Jeremiah warned, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). This is the perfect description of what man has become because of Adam’s fateful decision to go his own way—without God’s guidance. We have become adept at deceiving ourselves that our decisions on life and death—whether through assisted suicide or 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. They are free upon request.