Riverhead supervisor joins Planned Parenthood protesters on E. Main Street, calls on Congress to defund organization

Riverhead Supervisor Sean Walter joined anti-abortion protesters outside the Planned Parenthood office on East Main Street yesterday afternoon.

Walter, a Republican and avowed devout Catholic, said he has “always wanted to stand with them” and intends to continue to do so.

A small group of people have protested outside the Riverhead Planned Parenthood office at 550 E. Main St. every Wednesday afternoon for years. It is a regularly scheduled “Pro-Life Prayerful Presence,” according to the L.I. Coalition for Life, a Ronkonkoma-based right-to-life organization.

Walter said in an interview last night he supports efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, which receives federal Title X grant funds to provide family planning, contraceptives and testing for sexually transmitted diseases. The Title X funding cannot be used to pay for abortions, though Planned Parenthood, as a private provider, can receive Medicaid reimbursement for abortion services provided to Medicaid-eligible patients when the pregnancy would endanger the life of the woman or resulted from rape or incest.

The current movement to strip Planned Parenthood of Title X funding 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.

“How in the world would anyone think we should sell baby parts?” Walter said yesterday outside the office complex on East Main Street that houses a Planned Parenthood facility, where he held a placard that read “ABORTION KILLS CHILDREN.”

“It reminds me of a dark time in European history. Absolutely we should defund them,” Walter said.

Congressional Republicans and Republican presidential candidates have called for defunding Planned Parenthood since the first video was released. Senate Democrats on Aug. 3 blocked a bill fast-tracked by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that would have yanked Planned Parenthood’s funding. Two similar bills were introduced in the House but were not brought to a vote prior to the August recess.

Republicans in both the chambers have vowed to take the measure up again when Congress returns to Washington in September. Some elected officials have threatened a government shutdown if the short-term funding bills that finance the federal government contain Title X funding for Planned Parenthood.

Planned Parenthood calls the undercover videos misleading and defends the employees who met with the people they believed to be medical researchers. They did nothing wrong, Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards told the New York Times this month. A 1993 federal law — supported by McConnell at the time — 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, Richards said.

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.

A coalition of pro-life groups called ProtestPP is calling for a National Day of Protest on Saturday, Aug. 22, at Planned Parenthood facilities all across America, including the one in Riverhead.