Committee Rejects CA Lawmaker's Request For Planned Parenthood Audit

A legislative committee Tuesday denied a proposal from a Riverside County lawmaker for an audit to determine whether Planned Parenthood violated healthcare laws by allegedly hawking infant organs without authorization.

“I am appalled that my Democratic colleagues would allow partisan politics to triumph in the face of such damning allegations,” said Assemblywoman Melissa Melendez, R-Lake Elsinore. “The people of California deserve elected officials who demand accountability, not political puppets.”

Melendez had submitted a formal request for the Joint Legislative Audit Committee to order an investigation of Planned Parenthood based on a series of undercover videos that recorded the organization’s executives and physicians purportedly revealing how whole body parts can be procured and provided for a price.

Planned Parenthood, which facilitates abortions and related health services, has contracts with the California Department of Public Health and the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

The 14-member audit committee voted 7-3 to deny Melendez’s request. Four Assembly members voted against the proposal, joined by three senators. All the “no” votes were cast by Democrats, including Melendez’s Inland Empire counterpart, Sen. Richard Roth, D-Riverside. The three affirmative votes were cast by Republican lawmakers. Four committee members were absent.

“My Democratic colleagues crow about standing up for women’s rights, but today we saw their true colors,” Melendez said. “When asked to draw back the curtain and shine a light on Planned Parenthood’s attack on women, they instead pulled the cover up over their eyes and remained silent.”

Melendez, who described Planned Parenthood as a “body part chop shop,” accused the organization of committing repeated medical consent violations, specifically by not disclosing to women receiving abortions that surgical procedures might include collecting fetal tissue for sale.

Melendez had offered a former procurement technician for Placerville- based StemExpress, a self-identified worldwide provider of clinical specimens for research, as a corroborative witness in any future audit.

StemExpress has been directly implicated in the alleged harvesting of intestines, which has been exposed in a series of undercover videos first released in mid-July by the Center for Medical Progress, a pro-life group that targeted Planned Parenthood in its “human capital project.”

The project has resulted in five videos documenting instances in which Planned Parenthood doctors and executives were caught on tape detailing how aborted fetuses could be used to extract hearts, lungs and livers for sale.

In one video, the senior director of Planned Parenthood’s medical services branch, Dr. Deborah Nucatola, was taped allegedly telling how it’s possible to preserve and “evacuate an intact” baby skull for tissue collection.

Trading in human body parts is a federal crime.

Planned Parenthood has released statements denouncing the videos as “heavily edited” and intended to “falsely portray” the organization as a

baby parts broker. The group insists that its “tissue donation programs support life-saving scientific research” and are carried out with the full consent of abortion recipients.

Bills were introduced last month in both the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate to defund Planned Parenthood at the federal level.

The Senate proposal failed to garner enough votes earlier this month but is expected to be re-introduced this fall. A House vote is anticipated after lawmakers return from summer recess.

Several Republican presidential candidates have called for the government to divorce itself from the organization, which received more than a third of its $1.3 billion in revenue last year from federal and state sources, according to published reports.

“Planned Parenthood is subsidized with millions of taxpayers’ dollars each year and should be held accountable and defunded for involving California taxpayers in their black market human tissue schemes,” Melendez said.

--City News Service. Photo courtesy of Melissa Melendez’s office