Earlier this week, the Center for Medical Progress released its seventh video in a month and a half attacking Planned Parenthood over the (perfectly legal) use of fetal tissue for medical research. The video is just as heavily edited as the preceding six, but in a new move, the clips also uses photos from unrelated sources.
The video features Holly O'Donnell, a former technician at biological company StemExpress, which until earlier this week helped Planned Parenthood distribute fetal tissue to medical research groups. O'Donnell talks about the process of collecting the tissue, as the video cuts to photos of fetuses.
But the photos used in the video are actually not of fetuses aborted at Planned Parenthood clinics, Think Progress reports, and in one case, the photo is not an aborted fetus at all, but a picture of a stillborn infant, used without the mother's consent. Lexi Oliver Fretz originally posted the photo on her blog, in a post talking about mourning her stillborn son.
In a post on Facebook, Fretz writes:
The Center for Medical Progress' campaign to get Planned Parenthood defunded has instigated renewed calls from Republican law makers to investigate the health care provider. But a group of Democrats, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and New York Congressman Jerry Nadler, denounced the Center for Medical Progress, with Nadler called the videos "nothing more than a witch hunt" against Planned Parenthood.
Some Congressional Democrats are also calling on the Justice Department to investigate whether the group broke state or federal laws in their undercover recordings, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Earlier this month, a California judge issued a restraining order against the group, preventing it from releasing undercover videos of a National Abortion Federation meeting, citing safety concerns for some of the top abortion experts who attended the event.
Five states–Louisiana, Alabama, Utah, New Hampshire, and Arkansas–have so far moved to try and directly revoke state funding for Planned Parenthood on the back of the videos, though, the New York Times reports, the organization has successfully fought moves like this in court in the past.