Planned Parenthood just suffered a stinging defeat in court in regards to videos that showed staffers at the company negotiating prices for aborted baby parts, as PJ Media reports:
In 2015, the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) released a list of sting videos showing staffers at Planned Parenthood affiliates negotiating prices for aborted baby body parts.
Planned Parenthood hired Fusion GPS — the firm notorious for compiling the Trump-Russia dossier — to blast the sting videos as “deceptively edited.” That narrative received a powerful legal defeat earlier this month.
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The footage implicating Planned Parenthood in the sale of aborted baby body parts for profit was not just embarrassing — it also revealed illegal behavior.
The State of Texas decided to strip $3.1 million in Medicaid funding from the abortion giant due to this law-breaking, and Planned Parenthood sued to retain it.
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A district court issued an injunction preventing Texas from taking the money, but the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the injunction.
Writing for a three-judge panel, Judge Edith H. Jones issued a rebuke to the district court.
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“The district court stated, inaccurately, that the CMP video had not been authenticated and suggested that it may have been edited,” Jones wrote in the ruling.
The district court had ruled against the Texas Health and Human Services Commission’s Office of Inspector General (OIG), but it did not give OIG a fair hearing, Jones argued.
The district court “felt free to credit all of the trial testimony from [Planned Parenthood]—none of which had been offered during the state administrative procedures— [but] the court bound the IG solely to the administrative record and expressly refused to consider any support for termination ‘not included in the Final Notice and not part of the Inspector General’s termination decision.'”
“Having thus narrowed the evidence, the court concluded that OIG ‘did not have prima facie . . . evidence, or even a scintilla of evidence, to conclude the bases of termination set forth in the Final Notice merited finding the Plaintiff Providers were not qualified,'” Jones wrote.
Yet there was clear evidence in Texas’s favor. Jones cited a study from a forensic firm finding that the CMP videos were not deceptively edited.
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“In fact, the record reflects that OIG had submitted a report from a forensic firm concluding that the video was authentic and not deceptively edited,” Jones wrote in a footnote. “And the plaintiffs did not identify any particular omission or addition in the video footage.”
The reliability of the CMP sting videos has now been upheld by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, undermining Planned Parenthood’s attempts to discredit them.
If we lived in a sane world this ruling would spell the end of Planned Parenthood. Any organization that sold baby parts would be shunned.
Unfortunately that is unlikely as we live in a world that has gone crazy. What’s more likely is Democrats will seek to increase Planned Parenthood’s funding.
