The third undercover video released by the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) includes several recorded conversations suggesting that Planned Parenthood makes a tidy profit selling fetal body parts, a federal felony. Biomax, a shell organization set up by CMP to negotiate a contract with Planned Parenthood to harvest fetal body parts, approached Planned Parenthood’s Dr. Savita Ginde at a Colorado location. A draft contract was then created and negotiations begun. Pretty damning on the surface, but now Planned Parenthood insists the contract merely provided for payment of its costs, not any profits. However, in the video, a screenshot of Biomax’s Fees for Services Schedule is shown, and there are prices for fetal body parts listed — all quite generous.

Planned Parenthood tells Politico the contract was changed after the initial version by lawyers for its Rocky Mountain division, and provided the media outlet with a copy of the modified contract. Politico reports that Planned Parenthood “added a half page of text, spelling out in legal terms that nothing in the contract amounted to ‘generat[ing] a profit’ or getting ‘valuable consideration’ for the transfer of tissue and organs.” The Politico story continued: “The lawyers wrote that Biomax would cover only the cost of ‘transportation, processing, preservation and storage’ of the samples. They also cited the federal laws that prohibit the sale of fetal tissue.”

Notably, Planned Parenthood did not provide Politico with a copy of the metadata, which would reveal when the changes to the contract were made and by whom. It is quite easy to obtain the metadata from a Word document nowadays in order to get a snapshot of that information. If Planned Parenthood had made those changes early on in the negotiating procedures, why not provide the metadata to Politico? Even Politico admits the changes “could not be independently verified.”

The timing, however, may be a relatively minor consideration beside the substance of the changes themselves. CMP’s David Daleiden told Politico that a video will be coming out soon demonstrating that the changes to the contract were specifically for the purposes of disguising illegal profits:

They were very careful to phrase the contract in a way that would look on paper like they were not making a profit. We discussed that strategy at length with [Dr. Savita] Ginde on video where she explained how PPRM attorneys will craft the contracts in a way to make it look like there was no profit motive, in order to not ‘get caught,’” he said. “The full Colorado tape will be ready for release soon.

If the Colorado tape does reveal this, it seems like more of the behavior we’ve seen from Planned Parenthood since the undercover videos started being released. The organization says one thing out of one side of its mouth, and another thing out of the other side, and expects the public to believe one but not the other. The skeptical interpretation of all this would be that Planned Parenthood is trying to have it both ways by giving itself generous profits but, when pressed, retreats to legalese that says the profits are not profits.

It all seems more than a little Orwellian — fitting given the Orwellian nature of trafficking in aborted baby parts.