Planned Parenthood Medical Director: “Dismemberment” Abortion “Checkbox” Skirts Partial-Birth Law

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE PLANNED PARENTHOOD MED DIRECTOR: “DISMEMBERMENT” ABORTION “CHECKBOX” SKIRTS FEDERAL PARTIAL-BIRTH LAW Dr. Suzie Prabhakaran, Medical Affairs VP for Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida, Confirms PPFA Uses Paperwork to Fake Compliance with Late-Term Abortion Rules Contact: Kate Bryan, kbryan@, ORLANDO, July 27--Never-before-released undercover video shows Dr. Suzie Prabhakaran, the Vice President of Medical Affairs for Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida, graphically discussing Planned Parenthood’s late-term “dismemberment” and partial-birth abortion protocols in the context of fetal body part harvesting. The new video comes as the U.S. Senate is debating provisions to terminate taxpayer subsidies to Planned Parenthood, the nation’s biggest abortion business. At a Planned Parenthood conference evening reception, CMP investigators posing as buyers from a biotech company discuss partnering with Dr. Prabhakaran’s Planned Parenthood affiliate in order to harvest fetal organs and tissues from the 2nd-trimester abortions performed there. Prabhakaran advises that her affiliate is merging with the Orlando Planned Parenthood, which does abortions up to 23 weeks and has a high procedure volume, with eighteen abortions at 18-weeks and above scheduled for the next week. Prabhakaran discusses how Planned Parenthood allows their abortion doctors to certify compliance with the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban, which prohibits abortions in which a fetus is extracted alive up to certain anatomical landmarks (18 . 1531). According to Prabhakaran, Planned Parenthood abortion doctors can certify compliance with the law by using a feticide like digoxin to kill the fetus before the abortion, or they can simply “document” their “intent” to do a “dismemberment” abortion where the fetus is pulled apart with forceps rather than extracted intact. “So some people train to just document that like, you know to comply with the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban, you basically have to say, ‘I intend to utilize dismemberment techniques for this procedure,’” explains Prabhakaran. “So every time you do a procedure, that’s how you document. So, like, there’s like a checkbox,” Prabhakaran states, “so it would be before the procedure, you do your evaluation, you write, ‘I intend to utilize dismemberment techniques for this procedure.’” Prabhakaran indicates she never uses digoxin to kill the fetus before the abortion, and relies entirely on the “checkbox” to “document” her intent in the abortion to certify compliance with the federal law: “I’m not doing digoxin, and we’re just going to document and there’s never been a problem.” Prabhakaran’s description of Planned Parenthood’s loose protocols for 2nd-trimester abortion procedures corroborates statements by Dr. Deborah Nucatola, Senior Director of Medical Services for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, in CMP’s first undercover video, that show a lax attitude toward the partial-birth abortion law: “The Federal [Partial-Birth] Abortion Ban is a law, and laws are up to interpretation. So there are some people who interpret it as it’s intent. So if I say on Day 1 I do not intend to do this, what ultimately happens doesn’t matter.” Nucatola states in the first video that Planned Parenthood abortion doctors can make changes to the abortion technique in order to bring the fetus out intact for body parts harvesting, regardless of any initial “intent” statement: “So if you do it starting from a breech [feet-first] presentation, there’s dilation that happens as the case goes on, and often, the last step, you can evacuate an intact calvarium [head] at the end.” CMP project lead David Daleiden notes, “Planned Parenthood medical directors and abortion doctors feign compliance with the federal partial-birth abortion law on paper, knowing full well that ‘what ultimately happens doesn’t matter’ so long as no one is scrutinizing what they actually do to women and children in the operating room. And the fact that Planned Parenthood has a ‘dismemberment’ ‘checkbox’ on their abortion forms should tell the public and policymakers everything they need to know about this barbaric abortion business. The Department of Justice should open an immediate investigation into Planned Parenthood’s late-term abortion practices, and the U.S. Congress must stop forcing taxpayers to subsidize Planned Parenthood’s brutal abortion empire.” ###