The "abortion" video that
only Carly Fiorina has seen has purportedly been released, so now Fiorina can say she hasn't been lying. Except that this video
shows absolutely nothing that she says it does. Gregg Cunningham, the founder of the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, who collected the footage, released it Tuesday morning, but left some big holes.
Cunningham, an anti-abortion activist, declined to identify the date, location or authors of the video in an interview with TIME Monday night, saying his group makes agreements of confidentiality in an effort to acquire images of abortions. He also made no claim that the images shown in the video had anything to do with Planned Parenthood, the organization that Fiorina and others have targeted for federal defunding. "I am neither confirming or denying the affiliation of the clinic who did this abortion," Cunningham said.
Is it Planned Parenthood? Probably not, or Cunningham would have said it was.
The full source video, which is extremely graphic, lasts about 13 minutes, and shows a fetus being extracted from the mother, placed in a metal bowl, prodded with medical instruments and handled by someone in the room. At times the fetus appears to move, and at other times it appears to have a pulse. There are no images on the full video of any attempt to harvest the brain of the fetus, and there is no sound. Cunningham said the jump cuts in the video are the result of the camera being turned off and on.
Cunningham says he is confident the procedure was an abortion, and not a miscarriage, owing to the lack of medical treatment offered to the fetus. He said he estimated the age of the fetus at about 17 and a half weeks. "It is unimaginably more horrifying than the clip that we licensed for CMP to use and that Carly Fiorina made reference to in the debate," Cunningham said.
Cunningham is a retired Air Force Reserve colonel and former Pennsylvania state representative. He is not a medical doctor, which might be why he thinks medical treatment could make any difference with a 17-week fetus. It couldn't. A fetus only has
less than a 10 percent chance of surviving if delivered at
22 weeks. Of course there was no medical treatment for it.
This video adds nothing to confirm Fiorina's story, but that's sure not going to stop her from repeating it.