Presidential hopefuls Rand Paul and Ben Carson join protesters at US Capitol calling for organization’s defunding – but poll suggests most Americans disagree

The group behind two anti-abortion videos targeting Planned Parenthood has released a third video, continuing a two-week campaign that has seen renewed calls to defund the healthcare organization as well as several state and congressional inquiries.

Planned Parenthood was forced on the defensive after the release of the first of three undercover videos two weeks ago showed an official with the organization discussing the legal but controversial practice of donating fetal tissue for medical research. The organization has forcefully and repeatedly denied that it profits from the practice, saying the videos have been heavily edited and taken out of context.

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On Tuesday, the Center for Medical Progress, the previously obscure group behind the attacks, released a third video that includes graphic footage – obtained surreptitiously – of a lab technician separating tissue collected from an aborted fetus.

“This video really shows such extremely disturbing violations of patient privacy and dignity,” Dawn Laguens, executive vice-president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, told reporters during a conference call on Tuesday.

Coinciding with the newest video’s release, anti-abortion activists staged “women betrayed” rallies in dozens of cities around the country to protest the organization. At the US Capitol in Washington, protesters were joined by Republican presidential contenders Ben Carson and Rand Paul, along with several other anti-abortion politicians.

During the rally, Paul announced that he had secured a commitment in the Senate to vote on a bill that would defund the organization before Congress recesses. Republicans face an uphill battle to secure the 60 of 100 senate votes needed to approve the bill – there are 54 Republicans in the Senate and only a handful of anti-abortion Democrats.

Republican lawmakers have also called on the the US Department of Health and Human Services and the Justice Department to investigate claims that the organization broke the law by selling fetal tissue, as the Center for Medical Progress asserts.

Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood and its constellation of political allies are doubling down on their defense of the nearly 100-year-old organization, as it becomes clear Republicans aren’t letting the issue fade.



“It’s outrageous, not to mention wildly unpopular, that politicians are using this widely discredited attack against Planned Parenthood to push through legislation rolling back women’s access to healthcare,” Laguens said.

The overwhelming majority of federal funding the organization receives consists of reimbursement for Medicaid visits, the organization said in a statement. Moreover, it said, 90% of services Planned Parenthood provides are for preventive health.

The organization noted that federal law already withholds funding for abortion and therefore defunding the organization would in effect hurt its ability to provide preventative health services such as sex education and breast cancer research.

During the conference call, Planned Parenthood unveiled the results of a new poll, conducted by Hart Research, that found 63% of voters don’t support congressional efforts to defund the organization. The poll also found that voters were more likely to vote for a candidate who supported funding the organization than one who has called for it to be defunded, by a margin of 58% to 26%.



“The bottom line here from all of this research is that Americans continue to support funding for Planned Parenthood,” said Geoff Garin, president of Hart Research, on the call.

The poll surveyed 800 registered voters, and was conducted after the release of the first two videos; it has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

Videos made from undercover footage

The videos were filmed over the course of 30 months in an effort to document “how Planned Parenthood sells the body parts of aborted babies”, the Center for Medical Progress said in releasing them.

Its activists, posing as representatives from a “fetal tissue procurement company”, surreptitiously filmed one official detailing how to abort a fetus to preserve its organs and a second official discussing prices for specimens.



The latest video includes undercover footage of a physician – identified as Dr Savita Ginde, the vice-president and medical director of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado – discussing fetal tissue procurement with an activist disguised as a buyer while they observe specimens in a laboratory.

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It also includes an interview with a former procurement technician who says she used to work for Stem Express, in a Planned Parenthood clinic. The woman, Holly O’Donnell, describes her discomfort with the work and said she “blacked out” the first time she picked up a specimen.

“I thought I was going to be just drawing blood, not procuring tissue from aborted fetuses,” O’Donnell said.

David Daleiden, the Center for Medical Progress’s head, has said there are several more videos to be released soon, in addition to between 100 and 200 pages of documents from Planned Parenthood and its “proxies”.

In addition to the videos, Planned Parenthood is dealing with a possible data breach. The group said on Monday it had notified the FBI and the Department of Justice that hackers had attempted to gain access to the abortion provider’s employee information systems.



The potential data breach appears to have been first reported by the Daily Dot on Monday. The report cited a hacker group called “3301” taking responsibility for the attack, which has yet to be officially confirmed. The hacker group told the news site that the cyber-attack was “politically motivated”.

Laguens, of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said the undercover videos took the organization by surprise, calling the “level of deviousness” required to sustain the ruse “unprecedented in its scale”.

“We certainly didn’t know until the first video was released,” Laguens said. Since then, Planned Parenthood has been working to both put out the political fire and improve its firewall, to avoid such breaches in the future.

“We have tons of people working on this and I feel confident that we’re taking every step possible.”