Picketers mark ‘National Day of Protest’ outside Riverhead Planned Parenthood

Anti-abortion protesters picketed outside Planned Parenthood’s Riverhead office Saturday morning, part of a national day of protest called by a coalition group called ProtestPP.

Thirty to 40 people lined both sides of East Main Street outside the complex housing the local Planned Parenthood office. Holding signs declaring “Abortion Kills Children,” “Planned Parenthood sells baby body parts” and “Defund Planned Parenthood,” the protestors stood quietly on the roadside, waving to acknowledge the occasional car horn honking.

The national day of protest is part of a movement to strip Planned Parenthood of Title X federal funding, which began when an organization called the Center for Medical Progress released videos beginning last month of secretly recorded conversations between people posing as medical researchers and Planned Parenthood officials discussing the sale of fetal tissue for medical research.

“Until I saw those videos, to be honest I didn’t know they were selling body parts,” said picketer Karen Hummel of Riverhead.

Planned Parenthood calls the undercover videos misleading and defends the employees who met with the people they believed to be medical researchers.

A 1993 federal law allows for the donation of fetal tissue for research purposes, even if the tissue came from a voluntary abortion. It allows for the reimbursement of expenses, but prohibits making a profit on the transfer. Planned Parenthood clinic staffers in the videos repeatedly said they sought no profits, Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards told the NY Times this month.

The undercover “video-stalking” operation was a “completely unsuccessful” three-year campaign to “entrap doctors” by “the most militant wing of the anti-abortion movement,” Planned Parenthood said in a press release posted on its website. The group called the videos “very highly edited” and “sensationalized.” The people responsible for them “have zero credibility,” Planned Parenthood said. “They set up a fake company. They apparently used fake government IDs. They’ve faked faxed tax filings and completely falsified what they were about.”

David Daleiden, an anti-abortion activist from California, founded the Center for Medical Progress and a company called BioMax Procurement Services to establish credibility for his undercover operation, which he says resulted in thousands of hours of video over 30 months, according to the N.Y. Times. While the Center for Medical Progress released edited “summary videos” to the media, Daleiden says the full unedited videos have been posted on the organization’s YouTube channel all along.

“Good undercover work is not dishonest — it’s always oriented toward communicating truths that otherwise would be buried, and so most people don’t have a problem with that unless they have something to hide,” Daleiden told the National Review in an interview published July 30. “We’ve completed a nearly three-year-long, in-depth study documenting and illustrating how Planned Parenthood sells aborted-baby parts, and we’re placing the information before the public where all can see and judge for themselves,” he said.

Planned Parenthood’s fetal tissue programs exist in “a handful” of centers in three states, out of 700 centers nationwide, and will continue to operate, the group’s president said in an ABC news interview. It says tissue is voluntarily donated by women and only donated tissue is provided to researchers. In a new video released yesterday, a former technician with a company called StemExpress claims she saw people illegally collect fetal tissue and organs without patients’ permission at a clinic. The company “unequivocally” denied the allegations, according to CNN.

Abortions make up less than 10 percent of Planned Parenthood’s services nationwide, she said. Since the family planning work funded by Title X prevents unwanted pregnancies, which are by far the ones most often terminated, it makes no sense for anti-abortion advocates to support cutting funds that help prevent unwanted pregnancies, Richards said.

No abortions are performed at the Riverhead Planned Parenthood office, which provides family planning and sexual health counseling and testing.

Picketers have protested for years outside the office complex every Wednesday afternoon from 12 noon to 2 p.m. It is coordinated by the “Respect Life” group at St. Isidore’s church in Riverhead, Hummel said.

On Saturday morning, before they dispersed, the protestors put down their signs and joined hands, as Eileen Benthal of Jamesport led the group in prayer, ending with a group recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.

Benthal urged them to use social media to advance the pro-life cause and to “remember, this is prayerful and loving and not to be attacking.”