Video details methods for aborted baby harvest

An abortionist shares trade secrets for extracting intact baby body parts from the womb in a newly released, undercover video by the Center for Medical Progress (CMP).

Pro-life activists filmed the video in October 2014 at a meeting of Planned Parenthood abortionists, according to CMP. In it, Amna Dermish, who performs abortions at Planned Parenthood in Austin, Texas, says, “My aim is usually to get the specimens out pretty intact.”

The Planned Parenthood facility where Dermish works does not harvest fetal tissue for scientific experimentation. CMP’s videos so far have focused on proving Planned Parenthood profits from the sale of aborted baby body parts for science. In the video released today, an undercover journalist approaches Dermish and a colleague, posing as a tissue procurement agent who wants to work with their facilities. Dermish says she will let her facility’s medical director know and then describes how she performs abortions on babies of 16-21 weeks gestation.

Dermish says she occasionally uses ultrasound guidance to rotate the baby to a feet-first position for easier extraction, a technique known to be used in partial-birth abortions. In those procedures, a living fetus is delivered partway, killed, and delivered the rest of the way. Partial-birth abortions are illegal under federal law.

Dermish said that when aborting a baby of 20 weeks of gestation or later, she uses the drug digoxin to kill the baby before delivery. She does not specify whether she uses the feet-first method without digoxin on babies of younger gestational age—which could be considered a partial-birth abortion—but she does say she does not usually need to use that method before 19 weeks of gestation.

When the journalist tells her that intact fetal brains are in demand, Dermish replies, “I haven’t been able to do that yet, the intact calvarium [head]. … Well, this will give me something to strive for.”

She and an unidentified colleague from a different facility then launch into a conversation about how someone in the Planned Parenthood office likes to dissect dead babies after they are aborted.

Dermish: “The heart we frequently see at nine weeks, and she always looks for it.”

CMP: “Just for fun?”

Unidentified colleague: “Well, it’s cute. It is cute.”

Dermish: “It’s amazing. It’s sort of—I have so much respect for development, it’s just incredible.”

Dermish trained under abortionist Deborah Nucatola, the senior director of medical services at Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Nucatola described a partial-birth abortion technique to harvest fetal organs in the first Planned Parenthood video released July 14 by CMP.