A California abortionist testified this week during the preliminary criminal hearing of the Planned Parenthood video journalists that there is “no question” some second-trimester induced abortions discussed in the videos resulted in live births.

An unlikely witness for the defense, Dr. Forrest Smith, an OB/GYN who touted to the court he is “the longest practicing abortion doctor in the United States today,” addressed in his testimony video footage produced by the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), reported LifeSiteNews.

According to the report, Smith said it was quite probable some of the abortionists featured in the undercover videos that exposed Planned Parenthood’s fetal tissue practices purposely changed abortion procedures in order to be more likely to harvest body parts that would be fresher.

One video, created by journalists David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, showed a presentation by Alisa Goldberg during a 2014 Planned Parenthood conference. Goldberg was advocating for the use of high doses of abortion drug misoprostol to complete a second-trimester induced abortion in only one day.

“According to Smith, Goldberg’s presentation suggests that Planned Parenthood abortionists were employing a method that was likely to result in live births,” LifeSiteNews reported.

The procedure recommended in the video presentation used large doses (300 to 400 mg) of the abortion drug every three to four hours to induce labor for a late-term abortion so that the unborn baby “comes out without any assistance from the abortion doctor,” in a “fetal expulsion.”

“In this case clearly the intent is same-day surgery,” Smith testified. “They fully intend to put the uterus into labor.”

Smith said that “very few people in abortion, outside of Planned Parenthood, do that.”

He added another CMP video in which Perrin Larton, procurement manager for biomedical company Advanced Bioscience Research (ABR), discussed a “fetus falling out” was also likely a situation involving “fetal expulsion.”

Peter Breen of the Thomas More Society, one of Daleiden’s attorneys, asked Smith whether “fetal expulsion” would result in a live birth.

LifeSiteNews reported:

“There’s no question in my mind that at least some of these fetuses were live births,” Smith replied. In response to Breen’s question, Smith said he was aware that the drug digoxin — which overwhelms the baby’s heart — is used in abortion to “induce fetal demise, a euphemism they like.” If a baby was expelled during an abortion using misoprostol and the drug digoxin had not been used, would the baby be alive, Breen asked. “No question it’s alive,” answered Smith.

Smith testified the sign of life is a beating heart and said abortionists featured in the CMP videos who appeared to use other criteria such as “no movement” or “no breathing” were “completely wrong.”

The report continued:

Smith testified that to comply with the partial-birth abortion ban, his technique in a D&E [dilation and evacuation] abortion is to extract the umbilical cord, and cut it so “exsanguination can occur.” He then “watches with my ultrasound” for a heartbeat. The baby’s heart will continue to beat for “six-and-a-half to seven minutes,” he said. That’s been his consistent observation in the 25 years he’s used this method.

Smith continued the proper standard of care for babies born alive during an abortion was to “institute promptly all resuscitative care.”

Failure to do this, he said, means the fetus “dies by neglect.”

Smith admitted that abortion is killing a human being.

“You can kill a human being, which I admit abortion is, but you have to do it in certain ways,” he said.

Dr. Therese Deisher, who testified for the defense Wednesday, told LifeSiteNews Smith’s testimony “definitely proved that these babies are being deliberately born alive for the purposes of harvesting, the changes in the method and the refusal to use digoxin, which stops the heart.”

“They want those babies coming out with beating hearts,” she said, adding that Smith’s testimony made it “very clear that this is intentional.”

In June the Trump administration announced it will no longer provide taxpayer funding for research in its programs that use human fetal tissue derived from the body parts of aborted babies.

Prior to that announcement, the Department of Health and Human Services ended a contract between ABR and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) amid concerns the biomedical company was providing the government with “fresh” aborted baby tissue to engineer humanized mice for drug experimentation.

Daleiden and Merritt are the first undercover journalists to be criminally prosecuted in the history of the state of California.

The two journalists were slapped with 15 felony counts of recording confidential information without consent by the office of the California Attorney General (AG), including its past AG, current U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, and her successor, Xavier Becerra.

Harris received thousands of dollars in campaign donations from Planned Parenthood, and, subsequently, she and her office raided Daleiden’s home and seized his personal property, including his laptop, instead of prosecuting Planned Parenthood.

The preliminary hearing at San Francisco’s Superior Court will determine if any of the charges against the journalists could proceed to a trial.