AMY GOODMAN: Cecile Richards, the Republican attack on women’s reproductive rights coincides with the release of this series of undercover videos aimed at discrediting your organization, Planned Parenthood. The campaign has been compared to a similar attack on the community group ACORN in 2008 that relied on deceptively edited videos secretly recorded by James O’Keefe. One undercover recorded video was recorded in New York, appears to show a worker at Planned Parenthood counseling a male client and a young woman on how to get abortions for child prostitutes. It was released by the anti-choice group Live Action, which conducted a sting operation at 12 Planned Parenthood clinics in six states. Can you talk about what this whole video campaign, led by Lila Rose, is all about?

CECILE RICHARDS: Sure. Thanks for asking, Amy. This is—actually, for the past four years, this organization, Live Action, has been going undercover and using this sort of sting operation technique to try to entrap Planned Parenthood clinicians all across the country, then using fake and doctored tapes to try to ruin or damage our reputation. And you’re exactly right. The same folks who trained these people are the ones who trained the folks that were arrested trying to tap the phones of Senator Mary Landrieu in Louisiana, who trained the folks who went in and entrapped ACORN. It’s exactly the same playbook that we’ve seen on the right. And, you know, it is a very deceptive organization. Their tapes cannot be trusted. And they have no interest or any concern about the welfare of young women or women in general. Their whole stated goal is to end legal abortion in America, to overturn Roe, and to put Planned Parenthood out of business. And that’s really—that is really their purpose.

As soon as we saw that there were folks posing as these people, as pimps, as prostitutes, claiming that they were underage, sex-trafficking rings, we reported not only to the local authorities, but we went to the U.S. Attorney General, to General Holder, and said, "A crime may be being committed. We don’t know who these people are, but you need to investigate." And they’ve been very helpful in doing so.

AMY GOODMAN: ... the sequence is very clear. First the videos are made - heavily edited. They go on Andrew Breitbart’s website. Fox picks them up. And then a huge campaign is launched by Republicans in Congress. That’s what happened with ACORN, and they succeeded in completely destroying the ACORN organization, even though afterwards the General Accountability Office said that—vindicated ACORN totally, saying that no federal funding was used ...