By Anna Matson, staff writer
Recently many Republicans are pushing to take federal funding away from Planned Parenthood. This came up after The Center for Medical Progress (CMP), an anti-abortion organization, released videos in which its founder, David Daleiden, posed as a potential buyer from a fake biomedical research company he set up, called Biomax Procurement Services, to get Planned Parenthood to negotiate the prices for different types of fetal tissue.
When CMP released these videos for the first time, they were heavily edited. One was attempting to make the Planned Parenthood’s Senior Director of Medical Services, Deborah Nucatola, look as if she were haggling prices to get the most profit. In the unedited videos Nucatola says that the price range is “anywhere from $30 to $100 [per specimen], depending on the facility and what’s involved… So it just needs to be justifiable.”
Sherilyn J. Sawyer, the director of Harvard University and Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s “biorepository,” told FactCheck.org that “there’s no way there’s a profit at that price.” In an email she continued:
“In reality, $30-100 probably constitutes a loss for [Planned Parenthood]. The costs associated with collection, processing, storage, and inventory and records management for specimens are very high. Most hospitals will provide tissue blocks from surgical procedures (once no longer needed for clinical purposes, and without identity) for research, and cost recover for their time and effort in the range of $100-500 per case/block. In the realm of tissues for research $30-100 is completely reasonable and normal fee.”
The law specifically states that it is legal to charge “reasonable payments associated with the transportation, implantation, processing, preservation, quality control, or storage of human fetal tissue”. This is so the costs of those services provided are covered and the donation does not impact the clinic financially. To put it simply, the money received is not for the tissue but for the services.
In the video, Nucatola acknowledges, “there’s not going to be one thing that works for every patient”. She continued in the video:
“But I think every one of them is happy to know that there’s a possibility for them to do ‘this extra bit of good,’ in what they do. And I think patients respond most to knowing the types of outcomes that it might contribute to, so for example Alzheimer’s research, Parkinson’s research.”
She also clarifies that “at the end of the day, [clinics] want to offer this service because patients ask about it.” Tissue donation is an option for patients but no tissue will be donated without the informed consent of the patient.
In Planned Parenthood’s Annual Report for 2013-2014 it states that out of all the medical services they provide, only 3 percent of it is for abortions while 42 percent is STI/STD testing and treatment and 34 percent is contraception. It also states that 41 percent of their revenue is from the government. Considering federal law says no government money is to be used for abortions, if they do take away that funding, it will only make things harder for those who look to Planned Parenthood for contraception and testing/treatment, which is 76 percent of their total medical services.
This fight over the government funding for Planned Parenthood is about abortion, even though Planned Parenthood is primarily not about abortion. Planned Parenthood is mainly about reproductive health and contraception; their goal is to prevent the spread of STIs/STDs and to lower the amount of unintended pregnancies. They want to be able to help people with financial difficulties have affordable options for their reproductive health needs.