Planned Parenthood to stop taking money for fetal-tissue donation

After having spent months saying that its officials were doing nothing unethical in undercover videos showing them haggling over the price for aborted fetal organs, Planned Parenthood’s leader said Tuesday the group will no longer accept any payment for the parts.

Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, called the new policy an effort to end the scandal over what she has called edited and misleading videos.

But there was no sign she would succeed as Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill said their investigations would go on and continued to denounce the practice of harvesting aborted fetal tissue as barbaric, whether done for profit or not.

“Our Federation has decided, going forward, that any Planned Parenthood health center that is involved in donating tissue after an abortion for medical research will follow the model already in place” at one affiliate, in which “no reimbursement for its reasonable expenses” is accepted, Ms. Richards said in a letter dated Tuesday to Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health.

The letter was also sent to Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell.

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