As physicians who practice in the Hippocratic tradition (1) we denounce the heinous actions described by the doctors in the recently released videos from the Center for Medical Progress. (2) It is the privilege and duty of all physicians to use our knowledge for the healing of disease, and for the good of each and every human person entrusted to our care. That is the basis of the doctor-patient relationship. Yet in the CMP videos, we learn — from the mouths of the leadership of Planned Parenthood themselves — that the youngest, most vulnerable of Americans are brutally killed in procedures specifically designed to maximize the harvest of their body parts. This grotesque perversion of the healing arts by abortionists in Planned Parenthood facilities is not medical care. Trafficking in human bodies and body parts should have no place at all in the practice of medicine. Elective abortion is not medical care.

The unborn child has a heartbeat two weeks after conception. She has fingers, toes, brain activity, and all major organs by 8 weeks. By 20 weeks her nerves that sense pain are functional. By 22 weeks, she can live outside the womb.

As Planned Parenthood clinics are reaping their grisly harvest, babies in the womb express the same reactions as children who are already born: their pain-response hormones increase; they try to withdraw from the abortion instrument used to dismember them; their hearts race. Yet Planned Parenthood destroys these fellow human beings and plunders their bodies even while they are still alive.

The procedures that kill babies in Planned Parenthood (or any) clinics are not “medical care”. The intentional destruction of any innocent human being — much less the harvesting and sale of body parts — has no place in the practice of medicine. The crushing of unborn children in the womb, and the ghoulish picking over of their broken bodies for saleable pieces, should be called what it is: the most barbaric form of human trafficking.

1. http://www.hippocraticregistry.com/

2. http://www.centerformedicalprogress.org/cmp/investigative-footage/