When testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, Priests for Life medical advisor Dr. Anthony Levatino succeeded in introducing into the Congressional record a covertly recorded video about third-trimester abortion. It created quite a stir among committee members.
The House committee is looking into Planned Parenthood and the possibility that it is profiting illegally from the sale of baby body parts. Dr. Levatino, who has testified before Congress numerous times, decided he wanted to describe exactly how a late-term abortion is performed and to show panel members, and the American people, how women are treated during the procedure.
Of the five minutes he was allotted, Dr. Levatino spent half describing a dismemberment abortion that literally tears a baby apart. This type of abortion is used for most second-trimester abortions, and Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards admitted in her prior testimony before the committee that Planned Parenthood aborts babies up until the point of viability.
The second half of Dr. Levatino’s testimony was spent showing a shortened version of a Live Action video of an interaction between a woman who is 27 weeks pregnant and Southwest Women’s Options, an Albuquerque abortion clinic that aborts children up until their due date. During a telephone call, a clinic worker and an abortionist calmly tell the woman that an abortion at 25 weeks is $8,000, and the cost goes up $1,000 every week past that. They explain that the baby will be killed in the clinic by being stabbed with poison, after which labor will be induced.
The clinic worker then tells the woman what to do if she goes into labor while she is in her hotel room: Unlock the door, call the clinic, and sit on the toilet. “You don’t gotta look down,” she is told.
Dr. Levatino said several things in the video were illustrative.
“At $8,000, and $1,000 a week for every week after 25, most of the money made from that abortion is profit,” he said. “There’s a striking difference between standard OB care costs for a pre-term delivery and what they’re charging. In reality, women are paying extra for a dead baby.”
The second thing that struck Dr. Levatino is that women can be “left to labor in hotel rooms with no medical intervention. This is not medical care.”
Dr. Levatino said Democrats on the panel were determined not to allow it into the official record of the hearing and because there were not enough Republicans in the room when a vote was taken, they succeeded in having it withdrawn. But a second vote taken when Republicans had returned allowed the video to be entered.
“There was a lot of yelling,” Dr. Levatino said. “I think the Democrats found it embarrassing. They bark about a woman’s right to choose but so many people don’t know exactly what these women are choosing. They sure as heck didn’t want that kind of video in an official record.”