Healthy & Free Tennessee
A scene from this year’s Women’s March on Nashville.
The Memphis City Council will review a resolution Tuesday to outlaw the “sale of organs and body parts of aborted babies.”
The resolution follows a YouTube video that surfaced last week from an anti-abortion group that said the video proves that Planned Parenthood sells fetal organs for a profit. Planned Parenthood refutes the claim and said it does harvest fetal organs but only on a volunteer basis and only for donation to medical science.
Many have said the video was edited to make a case against Planned Parenthood. The original video, created by the California-based Center for Medical Progress, is nearly three hours long and has been viewed almost 170,000 times. It was edited to an eight-minute version, which has been viewed more than 2.4 million times.
Boyd
The Memphis City Council resolution is sponsored by Cordova council member Bill Boyd. It reads, in part, “the Memphis City Council is utterly outraged over reports that the aborted remains of babies are allegedly sold like commodities on the open market for profit by certain clinics and facilities that are violating the law and disregarding medical ethics…”
The resolution urges the Tennessee General Assembly to make new laws for stiffer penalties against “against any individual or group that performs or allows partial-birth abortions and engages in the commercial trafficking of human body parts.”
But a coalition of Tennessee groups working for “sexual health and reproductive freedom” say a new law would interfere with programs created to help with medical research. The group called Healthy & Free Tennessee said it is seeing policies like the Memphis City Council resolution pushed throughout the country and the language in them, especially “body parts of aborted babies,” is intentionally inflammatory.
“We are concerned that this resolution will not be in line with professional standards in the field,” said Dana Asbury, the West Tennessee organizer for Healthy & Free Tennessee. “We are also upset to see our city council use fabrications as an excuse to push policies that interfere with medical research in order to target abortion providers.”
The council is set to review the resolution during its Personnel & Intergovernmental Committee, which begins tomorrow at 8:30 a.m. Watch it here.
