Planned Parenthood is not 'illegally' selling body parts from aborted fetuses

During the second Republican presidential debates the night of September 16, candidate Carly Fiorina dragged a controversial video about Planned Parenthood back into the public spotlight.

Planned Parenthood is a non-profit organization that offers affordable healthcare to low-income men and women. It recently came under fire after The Center for Medical Progress, an anti-abortion group, released a video claiming to have "caught" higher-ups casually chatting about how the organization profits from illegally selling body parts from aborted fetuses.

Several GOP nominees made a point to express their outrage over the allegations in the video during the debate. An emblazoned Carly Fiorina implored Hillary Clinton to "watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while somebody says, 'We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain!'"

But there's no evidence Planned Parenthood did anything illegal. In fact, the footage alluded to by Fiorina shows something completely different than what she and other critics claim, according to The New York Times.

The Times' editorial board suggests the full video was edited to cast the organization in a negative light. It's so severely manipulated, the Huffington Post reports, that it would never hold up in a court of law.

In a piece for Vox.com, Sarah Kliff watched all 12 hours of unedited footage that The Center for Medical Progress cut into five 10-minute-long segments. Kliff came to the following conclusion: "The videos are edited to make Planned Parenthood look bad. But that doesn't mean Planned Parenthood didn't do anything wrong," she wrote in her piece.

Planned Parenthood is allowed to sell fetal tissue to researchers for use in scientific studies that could eventually benefit women, and abortion clinics are allowed to receive compensation for the time it takes to collect the tissue, transport it, and store it.

Nowhere in the video did the Planned Parenthood employees boast about the money the organization was receiving in exchange for the tissues. In fact, they mostly gushed about the medical advancements the research would promote.

However, Kliff does note some parts of the video tripped her moral sensors, including a section in which the higher-ups appeared to be haggling over the amount a buyer should pay Planned Parenthood for the tissue.

And in a swift response to the GOP nominees, the organization shot back a response that appears to have won this particular debate: