Jindal to screen Planned Parenthood videos outside mansion

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal will try to counter a pro-Planned Parenthood rally scheduled to take place outside his mansion on Thursday by running a loop of the secretly recorded videos that they plan to protest.

Jindal announced Thursday that he is setting up an outdoor movie screen and speakers outside the governor’s mansion to show the controversial videos, which he said too many of Planned Parenthood’s supporters have refused to watch.

{mosads}The showing will take place at the exact time of a scheduled protest by Planned Parenthood supporters.

“Planned Parenthood has a right to protest today, but Governor Jindal’s office will ensure that anyone who shows up will have to witness first-hand the offensive actions of the organization they are supporting,” Jindal, who is also a Republican presidential candidate, wrote in a statement.

“We hope the protesters will take a minute to watch them so they’ll have an opportunity to see first-hand our concerns with Planned Parenthood’s practices,” he added.

Planned Parenthood dismissed Jindal’s move as a political “stunt.”

“Governor Jindal isn’t even in Louisiana today, but he’s made sure to prove that he’s always ready to put politics before Louisianan’s health. This stunt is proof he doesn’t have any real answers for the people of Louisiana,” Melissa Flournoy, the Louisiana state director for Planned Parenthood, wrote in a statement.

Louisiana is one of 11 states that have launched investigations into Planned Parenthood in light of undercover video footage from an anti-abortion-rights group that scrutinizes the health provider’s fetal tissue donation program.

The group says the footage shows Planned Parenthood illegally profiting from fetal tissue donations, among other claims. Planned Parenthood has countered that each of the allegations is falsely manufactured from highly edited footage.

Some of the footage, taken from inside clinics, is gruesome, showing aborted late-term fetuses and fetal organs in petri dishes. Several top Republicans have called the videos difficult to watch, including Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who said the footage made him “want to vomit.”

The group behind the videos, the Center for Medical Progress, put out its seventh video this week. Each is about 10 minutes long.

That amounts to more than an hour of material to be screened.

This story was updated at 2:02 p.m.