During the Republican debate earlier this month, Carly Fiorina referred to the Planned Parenthood sting videos made by the Center for Medical Progress: “Watch a fully formed fetus on the table,” she said, “its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.”
That does not appear on the video. The video does include an interview with a technician who claims that she has seen this happen, and there’s some spliced footage of an abortion used to illustrate her testimony. But that’s it. Nevertheless, Fiorina has doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down on the accuracy of her obviously inaccurate statement.
Today, the provider of the footage released the entire 13-minute video:
He [] made no claim that the images shown in the video had anything to do with Planned Parenthood, the organization that Fiorina and others have targeted for federal defunding. “I am neither confirming or denying the affiliation of the clinic who did this abortion,” Cunningham said.
….The full source video, which is extremely graphic, lasts about 13 minutes, and shows a fetus being extracted from the mother, placed in a metal bowl, prodded with medical instruments and handled by someone in the room. At times the fetus appears to move, and at other times it appears to have a pulse. There are no images on the full video of any attempt to harvest the brain of the fetus, and there is no sound. Cunningham said the jump cuts in the video are the result of the camera being turned off and on.
So there you have it. The video was not taken at a Planned Parenthood clinic. The fetus shows some reflexive movement, but that’s all. No one says the fetus has to be kept alive. No one harvests the brain.
But other than that, Fiorina was 100 percent correct!
