Not just a clump of cells -- it's a revenue opportunity!

The Center for Medical Progress has begun releasing video and documents from its two-and-a-half-year investigation of Planned Parenthood and the sale of body parts from aborted babies.

The first undercover video released is of a lunch meeting with Dr. Deborah Nucatola, Senior Director of Medical Services, Planned Parenthood Federation of America. While enjoying a glass of wine and a salad, she casually discusses the care taken in dismembering a baby so that the desired parts can be harvested, using ultrasound to decide which parts to crush. Nucatola describes changing the "presentation" of a baby to breech position to make it easier to extract the baby's head -- "calvarium" as she euphemistically calls it. What she describes is essentially the same techniques used in illegal partial-birth abortion. The sale of fetal tissue is also a violation of Federal law.

As expected, pro-abortion ghouls claim that the video has been misleadingly edited, so CMP has released unedited footage -- the full 2 hour, 42 minute, 22 second lunch meeting. You can read the transcript of the unedited footage here.

On the documents page, CMP presents original source material -- orders and fulfillment for fetal body parts, ads enticing abortion clinics to enter into "financially profitable" partnerships with companies that are seeking the organs of aborted babies, help-wanted ads and bonus payments for body-part harvesters.

Commenting on the news, columnist Matt Walsh points out that Planned Parenthood's harvesting and transfer of organs undermines a common pro-abortion talking point: "It's only a clump of cells!"

The fact that body parts are being "donated" clearly indicates that the child has a body with parts. It is not a blob nor a lump nor a ball nor a clump. It's a body. With organs. And limbs. A body. A body that is living. A body belonging to a member of the human species. A body that must be caused to stop living through a method that is commonly referred to as "killing."

Writing at RedState, Leon Wolf draws some conclusions about the fact that this practice is occurring and that so many Americans will defend it:

For decades, our elected officials and political leaders have indulged the polite fancy that conservatives and liberals both have similar, good-natured wishes for America at heart, with but honest, good-faith disagreements about the best policy means to achieve those shared ends.

It's time for that happy horsecrap to end....

And here is the problem - a pretty significant part of the country is essentially okay that this is happening. How do I know this? Because a sufficient mass of people in America sent back to office essentially the same cabal of Congresscritters who couldn't vote to defund Planned Parenthood in 2011, and furthermore re-elected the President in 2012 who campaigned in their favor. Get it? Forget taking actual legal action against Planned Parenthood, we (as in, the people who vote in elections in America), cannot even muster the will to elect politicians who will stop our tax dollars from going towards it.

What do people possessed of basic human decency have in common, politically or culturally, with the portion of America that can watch this video and either be actually glad about what it contains, or dismiss it with a shrug of the shoulders and a hearty "meh"?

Nothing at all, and it's time we stopped pretending otherwise.

Wolf closes with an excerpt from Richard Selzer's Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery about the lingering horror of encountering the remains of aborted babies on a city sidewalk, the result of a mishap in the disposal of "hazardous waste" from a hospital.

UPDATE:

Douglas Wilson says the pro-life public needs to join in the pursuit of this story, turning up the heat on companies and non-profits who donate to Planned Parenthood and politicians who work to direct taxpayer dollars to them:

When Congress reconvenes this fall, we will no doubt have a pitched battle over federal funding for Planned Parenthood. This is as it should be, and a lot of money for PP is at stake. Compared to a military campaign, that battle will be the equivalent of besieging the capital city. But like a capital city, the walls there are thick and well-reinforced. Because we are ostensibly a democracy, that fortress is configured to look like it is open to your input. But for the most part, whenever an uproar starts, they are prepared to withstand it. They do withstand most of them. Most "marches on Washington" end, everybody goes home, and the Beltway Natives go back to being themselves. But sometimes real changes do happen. We want this to be one of those times.

So the principal of pursuit needs to be observed before the ultimate political battle is joined. Between now and then, we need to go after certain designated soft targets that are directly related to all this. Does your corporation give money to Planned Parenthood? In the light of these videos, you are certainly in a position to ask why. So why not ask why?

The moment is right, and the momentum is good. Nobody wants to defend what is going on in those videos. Look at the candidates for the Democratic nomination -- that's a crew that is willing to defend truckloads of indefensible things, and on this subject all of them have their heads down to study patterns in the carpet. And so the question must constantly be posed - do you want to support what is going on in those videos? The only possible answers are, "no, we should quit supporting them," or "yes, we should support them." But nobody wants to say "yes, we should support them." So ask the hard questions that require one response or the other....

A profile of David Daleiden, the young man who headed the 30-month investigation into Planned Parenthood and the marketing of organs from aborted babies:

"It is a paradox that we can't have laws that recognize unborn babies as human, and yet, it is their very humanness that makes them valuable for experimentation," Daleiden said in an interview last week with the Register.

"It is as if they [the biotech companies] are going on a treasure hunt for the heads or hearts of babies, but how much more valuable would those heads and hearts be if they were allowed to grow up and be a part of society?"...

It was while majoring in government at Claremont McKenna College in California that Daleiden received his first hint that the abortion industry was selling parts from aborted babies.

"I was working as a research assistant and attended a stem-cell conference as part of my job," he said. "The presenter mentioned using cells from an aborted baby for research. That got my attention. I thought, 'Wait a minute -- what?'"

Although he had been active in the pro-life movement since high school, before that moment, he had not thought about aborted babies being used in research.

That thought stayed with him. He continued his pro-life work, which included working as a citizen journalist investigating the abortion industry, and became the director of research for Live Action in 2008.

In 2013, at the age of 24, he founded the Center for Medical Progress to investigate in-depth bioethical issues. "Human Capital" is its first project....

According to Daleiden, although the biotech company incurs all the work and expenses involved in procuring the body parts, Planned Parenthood still charges a "specimen fee" for each one.

"Our investigators spent almost three years deeply imbedded with Planned Parenthood and their affiliates," Daleiden said. "And we heard from their own mouths, over and over, again and again, that they make money off of selling the parts of aborted babies and have a profit motive in doing so."

"Turning aborted babies into a revenue stream is an inhuman exploitation of the not fully dead," Daleiden said.

"They are saying that some unborn babies are more valuable dead than alive. It's a terrible, barbaric place for a democratic society to go."