For decades, Planned Parenthood and other abortion advocates have insisted that abortion does not end human life, but rather removes undifferentiated “clumps of cells” before they develop human characteristics. Last year’s undercover videos from the Center for Medical Progress exposed that claim as utterly false, capturing PP executives haggling over prices for organ sales from aborted fetuses, including hearts, brains, livers, and entire intact bodies. Live Action follows that up with former PP clinic managers, who explain the reality of abortion and the need for the euphemism “products of conception” rather than saying body parts while making sure an abortion has been completed:

Today, national pro-life organization Live Action released video testimonials from a former Planned Parenthood manager and nurse describing in detail what happens immediately following abortions in the “products of conception” lab where abortionists sift through the dismembered body parts of the babies they just killed. The gruesome process these women describe exposes not only the barbarism of abortion, but also that Planned Parenthood isn’t aborting “clumps of cells” or “products of conception” – euphemisms the abortion industry often uses to mislead women about how developed their babies are – but rather children with beating hearts at just three and a half weeks old.

Sue Thayer explains the process of accounting for body parts, or as they call them, POCs:

“I remember standing there looking at that, and I said, ‘Why are there three arms?’ You know, and we’re looking, and the gal training me said, ‘Twins – it was twins.’ And I said, you know, ‘Do you tell the mom that she had twins?’ And she says, ‘No, it usually just upsets them.’”

Marianne Anderson also describes working in the POC room, and how it desensitized workers to killing:

“He would sometimes talk to [the aborted child], saying – I’ll never forget him saying, ‘Now, where’s your little arm? I didn’t see – I’m missing this arm.’ And he would sift through it, trying to find the pieces, make sure he had everything. And then he’d say – I remember him saying, ‘Oh, there you are! Now, where’s the head and where’s this?’… There was another doctor who also visited… He really seemed to kind of get into it. He – I’ll never forget the first day he was there – and he goes, ‘Look at this – this is so cool!’”

The “clump of cells” argument exists to dupe the public into ignoring the brutal nature of abortion, as I wrote last year at The Week during the CMP campaign to expose it. Unfortunately, the “clump of cells” lie works, and sometimes mutates into even cruder slogans:

Abortion defenders claim that the procedure does not terminate life, and that it has no more moral meaning than excising a tumor or a cyst, a “clump of cells” in the most common construction. On Twitter, a young actor in Hollywood offered a more crude assessment this week. “A pile of goop should not have more rights than a human being,” Lucas Neff tweeted, “period.” Now, though, we see that the same abortion clinics that argue for the “pile of goop” status see things very, very differently when it comes time to benefit from the results of their services. They adjust their techniques to extract and market human organs for buyers to meet demand, with the clear value attached on the basis of both their humanity and specificity. Clinic executives like Dr. Ginde want to negotiate those markets on a per-item basis because of the value that humanity and specificity provides to both parties, “just because we can see how much we can get out of it.” The true danger to Planned Parenthood and the entire industry is the exposure of their hypocrisy. The two positions of “clumps of cells” and negotiating over human organs from abortions are mutually exclusive. One cannot extract human organs from “a pile of goop,” or from tumors or undifferentiated “clumps of cells.” Human organs come from human beings, and the only way to harvest them from unborn human beings is to kill them first. The videos cut through all of the misdirection, all of the antiseptic generalities used in defense of abortion, to expose its true nature — and that’s what has Planned Parenthood panicked over the videos.

The POC lie has been exposed before. Abby Johnson, who left Planned Parenthood to champion the pro-life cause, discussed this in detail years ago. In October 2011, I recorded part of her speech to a local pro-life group in which she explained POCs and the necessity of accounting for body parts after abortions precisely because they’re not just “clumps of cells” that are part of the woman’s body. The tenacity of this lie is a credit, so to speak, of Planned Parenthood’s commitment to prevarication and misdirection.