Video Exposes Planned Parenthood False Claims on Fetal Development

By Randall K. O’Bannon, Ph.D., National Right to Life

Planned Parenthood has written off “Right to Know” laws as “unnecessary.” PPFA asserts that its affiliates already give women relevant information about abortion and there’s no need for the kind of legislation that tells women of abortion’s risks, alternatives, or what’s going on developmentally with the child inside the mother’s womb.
Yet a new undercover video reported on by the Catholic News Agency (CNA) appears to show just the opposite.

The new video, released by a group called Live Action, was reported on April 13 by the CNA. You can read the full CNA story at www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/undercover_video_exposes_abortion_clinic_misinformation_about_fetal_development.

According to CNA, the video shows a staffer from a Planned Parenthood clinic in Milwaukee telling a woman that is supposed to be six to eight weeks pregnant that her baby has “no arms, no legs, no heart no head, no brain.”
CNA says that the Planned Parenthood staffer tells the woman that images of abortion are fabricated, that a child that age has no “identifiable parts” and is just “fetal matter.” CNA says that “The staffer also emphasizes the difficulties of adoption and urges the woman to obtain an abortion as soon as possible.”

This hardly complies with state law that reportedly mandates that woman receive medically accurate information before having an abortion. Anyone who looks at a basic fetology textbook can quickly see how far off this is from the truth.

An unborn baby’s heart begins beating as early as 18 days after fertilization and is beating steadily by the middle of the third week. Between the third and fourth weeks, the baby’s head and spinal column become easily distinguishable, and arm buds begin to form.

By the time the sixth week rolls around, the child’s legs and fingers are forming. Brain waves have been measured this early. (Check out the facts for yourself, along with the footnotes to medical sources, in the Trust Fund’s publication “A Baby’s First Months.”

There are, quite clearly and to the contrary of the declarations of the staffer, “identifiable parts” such as arms, legs, heart, head, and brain. As far as the staffer’s promotion of abortion over adoption, what happened to respecting a woman’s intelligence and her “right to freely choose” among the various options?

What these videos expose is not dedication to women’s “freedom of choice” or women’s health but to the promotion and performance and profits of abortion.