Center for Medical Proress broke laws, not Planned Parenthood
National Memo
Why The Group Trying To Frame Planned Parenthood Is Guilty As Hell
Shady, shady, shady. But what do you expect from anti-choice activists?
-snip-
Despite what some Republican lawmakers and the people behind the CMP want you to believe, Planned Parenthood isn’t doing anything wrong.
But the Center for Medical Progress is.
Neither Dr. Nucatola nor Dr. Mary Gatter, the president of the Medical Directors’ Council at Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the medical director of Planned Parenthood Pasadena & San Gabriel Valley who was questioned in the second video, was aware that they were being filmed. Under California law, recording a conversation that involves confidential information requires the consent of both parties. As RH Reality Check explains, not only can those who were secretly recorded sue for financial loss, “they can also sue to enjoin, or block, future releases of private recordings.” And that’s hardly the only way The Center for Medical Progress can be sued six ways to Sunday.
As Amanda Marcotte at Slate reported, the CMP is essentially a front for a notorious anti-abortion group, Live Action, and is connected to James O’Keefe, a right winger known for creating similar sting videos that attack liberal organizations and politicians. Although the CMP has been around since 2013, it hasn’t done much to make itself credible to the outside world, and its social media presence is quite nascent.
And yet, in 2013, the IRS granted the organization tax-exempt status as a 501(c)3 nonprofit, due to its stated purpose that it was a biomedical charity “concerned about contemporary bioethical issues,” as it says on its current website. Its original “about us” page, viewable via the Internet archive site Wayback Machine, said it focused on “the latest advances in regenerative medicine, cell-based therapies, and related disciplines,” and asked for donations to keep it running. But, according to the Huffington Post, groups that support criminalizing abortion have their own IRS classification code. Bruce Hopkins, an attorney who specializes in nonprofit law, told the Huffington Post that “a nonprofit misleading its donors about the nature of its work” is fraud, both civil and criminal.
“The authorities have the right to shut down the charity, and the individuals behind the fraud can go to prison or pay a substantial fine,” Hopkins said.
The CMP is actually part of a network of anti-abortion groups and politicians, ... and in case anyone doubts the political intentions at work, at least two anti-choice Republicans were made aware of the videos weeks before they were publicly released.
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