Planned Parenthood’s response to the infamous video revealing its senior director for medical services Deborah Nucatola discussing the sale of fetal organs with undercover reporters demonstrates, once again, the logical fallacies upon which the nation’s largest abortion provider is based.

The statement, released by Planned Parenthood’s vice president of communications Eric Ferrero, adopts the language of scientific progress to claim that harvesting organs from aborted fetuses is an act in service of “lifesaving scientific research”:

“At several of our health centers, we help patients who want to donate tissue for scientific research, and we do this just like every other high-quality health care provider does -- with full, appropriate consent from patients and under the highest ethical and legal standards.”

Unlike proponents of embryonic stem cell research, who argue that fertilized eggs not implanted in a womb are in effect not human and therefore not deserving of human rights, Planned Parenthood seems entirely unconcerned by the fact that abortionists must kill and dismember a developing fetus in order to harvest its organs. They do not need the “full and appropriate consent” of the fetus, therefore, because, supposedly, it is not yet human.

Yet the “clump of cells” argument clearly does not apply here. In the video, Nucatola describes these fetuses (she uses an example of one at 19 weeks) in distinctly human terms:

“We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver. … The kind of rate-limiting step of the procedure is calvarium. Calvarium—the head—is basically the biggest part. Most of the other stuff [body parts] can come out intact.”

Live Action, which first reported the incident, points out that what Nucatola goes on to detail is “an almost exact medical description of partial-birth abortions which are illegal in the United States.”