In November 2015, Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar at The View rudely shut down then-presidential candidate Carly Fiorina, insisting that she was lying when she stated that Planned Parenthood had admitted to harvesting baby parts from aborted fetuses.
On Friday, in a development which is predictably failing to get the media visibility it deserves, Orange County’s district attorney announced a $7.8 million settlement with two California companies accused of “selling fetal-derived cells and tissues” obtained from fetal body parts acquired from Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers. When will ABC demand that Whoopi and Joy apologize to Fiorina — and to the nation?
Here is the relevant November 6, 2015 video excerpt:
Transcript (bolds are mine throughout this post):
CARLY FIORINA: Let’s just start with abortion.
JOY BEHAR: OK.
FIORINA: I mentioned common ground. Actually, the American people have found common ground on this issue. Whether you’re pro-choice or pro-life — I’m pro-life. But whether you’re pro-choice or pro-life, the majority of Americans are horrified by the reality that we’re harvesting baby parts through late-term abortions.
WHOOPI GOLDBERG: Carly, I need to stop you —
FIORINA: The majority of Americans —
GOLDBERG: — because that is not — you know that’s not true.
FIORINA: You asked me a question.
GOLDBERG: Carly, no one is harvesting baby parts.
FIORINA: Well, that’s interesting. That’s interesting.
GOLDBERG: No one is harvesting baby parts.
FIORINA: That’s interesting—
GOLDBERG: Oh, Carly, come on, girl —
FIORINA: — that Planned Parenthood. It’s interesting that Planned Parenthood just announced that they were no longer going to take compensation for that —
GOLDBERG: They were not harvesting baby parts, baby. They were not harvesting — go ahead, Carly, because, yeah, you have the floor. My bad.
BEHAR: You can’t say things like that that aren’t true. That offends my sensibility to hear you say something like that when you know it’s not true.
By November 2015, 11 undercover videos had already been released by the Center for Medical Process showing that Planned Parenthood had indeed been harvesting fetal body parts, and that the abortion provider was profiting from their sale, not merely recovering its costs.
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As Steven Ertelt reminded everyone at LifeNews on Saturday in his coverage of the settlement, the first two of those 11 videos released in July 2015 — almost four months before the confrontation on The View — showed that Planned Parenthood was harvesting baby parts — even to the point of modifying its abortion procedures to ensure that intact parts could be obtained — and that it was a profit-generating enterprise:
- In the first video: Dr. Deborah Nucatola of Planned Parenthood commented on baby-crushing: “We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.”
- In the second video: Planned Parenthood’s Dr. Mary Gatter joked, “I want a Lamborghini” as she negotiated the best price for baby parts.
The next nine CMP-released videos listed at the Life News link, plus other CMP footage published after a hacker stole it from a Congressional committee, further documented Planned Parenthood’s and its customers’ grisly baby-parts-for-profit practices. All of them were released before that November episode of The View.
Additionally, as Fiorina noted, by that time Planned Parenthood had already announced, as seen in an October 13, 2015 dispatch at the Associated Press, that it would “maintain programs at some of its clinics that make fetal tissue available for research, but will cover the costs itself rather than accepting any reimbursement.” In other words, the harvesting which had been occurring for years would continue, but the compensation would cease.
Ertelt’s rundown of the Orange County settlement really should be read in full, as it has many ugly details the few media outlets covering the story have avoided mentioning. Here are his three opening paragraphs:
Two Companies That Sold Aborted Baby Parts for Planned Parenthood Forced to Close Down
In what is the first successful prosecution in the scandal involving Planned Parenthood, the abortion industry, and the sale of aborted baby parts, two companies that sold aborted baby parts for the nation’s biggest abortion company have been forced to close down.
The two California-based companies reached a settlement with the Orange County District Attorney’s office of almost $8 million dollars. As a result of the settlement the two companies will close up shop over the next couple of months and will no longer be selling parts from babies killed in abortions for Planned Parenthood or anyone else.
This is huge news and the first successful result of the effort by the Center for Medical progress and leading pro-life organizations to expose the industry surrounding the sale of aborted baby parts.
A March 2016 Center for Medical Progress video demonstrated that that the two companies, Da Vinci Biosciences and DV Biologics, had “been harvesting baby parts at the local (Orange County) Planned Parenthood for sale across the county.”
The Orange County DA learned that the scope of the companies’ sales was far broader, finding, as reported by Ertelt, that they were “illegally selling parts of aborted babies’ brains for as much as $1,100 from 2009-2015 to pharmaceutical companies and academic institutions in Japan, China, Singapore, South Korea, Germany, Switzerland, Australia, the Netherlands, Canada and the United Kingdom.”
According to a Friday story at the Los Angeles Times, which is treating the news as a local item, a complaint filed by CMP in September 2015 triggered the Orange County DA’s initial investigation. Longtime NewsBusters commenter Gary Hall has informed me that the story appeared in Monday’s print edition on Page B3 in … the business section.
The Associated Press’s unbylined Saturday story on the settlement waited until its final paragraph to tersely mention CMP’s involvement, and failed to acknowledge that CMP’s undercover videos brought Planned Parenthood’s previously secret harvesting-for-profit practices to the nation’s attention.
Neither the LA Times nor the AP published a reaction from CMP head Dale Daleiden, so I will: “@DaVinciBio admission of guilt for selling baby parts from @PPOSBC is a ringing vindication of @CtrMedProgress citizen journalism methods and accuracy.” #PPSellsBabyParts #ShutThemDown.”
A relevant Google News search done at 11 a.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday indicates that there has been very little other establishment press coverage. The stories which have appeared betray a conscious attempt to keep “baby parts” out of their headlines and content in favor of the sanitized term “fetal tissue.”
Based only on what was known two years ago, Whoopi Goldberg’s and Joy Behar’s rude, bullying treatment of GOP presidential candidate Fiorina was so completely out of line that it should have led to immediate and serious disciplinary action against the pair. But of course it didn’t. News of the Orange County, California settlement should lead to further calls for Goldberg and Behar to apologize to Fiorina and their viewers for their behavior, and for calling Fiorina a liar when they were clearly the ones who were lying.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
LifeNews.com Note: Tom Blumer is president of a training and development company in Mason, Ohio, and is a contributing editor to NewsBusters, where this column originally appeared.
