The little girl who grew up to sell murdered baby parts
She is one of the most reviled women in America today among a large swath of the population, infamous for her casual "Lamborghini" joke while discussing the harvesting of aborted unborn babies for their organs in an undercover 2015 video exposé, yet Planned Parenthood executive Mary Gatter was once a small girl in pigtails precociously gazing at the camera on a sunny day.
Gatter is back in the news after a new video from the Center For Medical Progress finds her doubling down on her shockingly callous remarks of two years ago. "I did it in L.A. I'm committed to it, I think it's a great idea," she says of trading the organs of murdered babies for cash in the new video.
"What kind of volume do you need and what gestational ages?" Gatter, who now serves as Planned Parenthood, Pasadena, Calif. medical director, coldly asks after being notified that a would-be customer is looking for liver, lung, and brain parts from unborn babies.
Gatter has been pilloried for haggling over the price paid to Planned Parenthood to collect intact fetal specimens, with her tossed off joke, "I want a Lamborghini," marking her as especially unfeeling in the eyes of an outraged public.
In the new video, the bargaining continues, with her casually dismissing a price of $50 per specimen as outdated.
"Yeah, fifty's on the low end," Gatter says. "Fifty was like 12 years ago."
Yet in a blog titled "The Landis-Foster-Hutton Family Tree," we see a more human side of Gatter in an array of pictures, starting with her as a smiling two-year-old sitting atop a pony "in 1948 or 49" and ending with her working in a clinic or hospital in Iran in 2008.
It's interesting to see this same woman as the small girl holding a kitten while posing for a long-ago photo with her mother and sisters, or as the fresh-faced college student with a promising future ahead of her.
Gatter's own writing on the blog post hints at a turbulent upbringing:
I was born in New York City in 1946, the eldest of three daughters of L.Stewart Gatter and Julie Coady, his second (or possibly third or even fourth, by inconsistent family legend) wife. She was 30 years younger than he, and had met him when she went to work as his secretary, right out of Julia Richmond High School. I never really knew my father, as he died (at age 62) when I was 6, leaving my mother with the three girls, aged 6, 5 and 2.
While she expresses admiration for a mother who raised her and her siblings pretty much on her own, her appreciation of her father is rather different:
What I know about my father is that he was born in 1890 or so in Newburgh, NY and was an only child. This was fairly unusual for the time, so I am left to wonder what that was about. He graduated from Princeton in 1912 and then NYU Law School. He was commissioned as a lieutenant in the FIRST World War, but sat i[t] out in Washington D.C. Thereafter he became a divorce and patents lawyer in New York, and apparently was quite the Bon Vivant and man-about-town. He had 'falling-outs' with many people apparently [….] Also, I guess he had a little problem with alcohol.
She adds, "My father, for all of his wonderful élan and joie-de-vivre, apparently was a really poor money manager, and left her (my mother) with basically nothing."
As for her own development, Gatter writes:
In terms of my life, my mother moved us all to what had been the summer vacation home in Montauk, New York, so I grew up there. I went to college and then spent two years in the Peace Corps (in Uganda) and then went to Medical School. I am now a gynecologist, working for Planned Parenthood in Los Angeles.
It is a path that has taken her to peddling the body parts of murdered unborn children for money.
Real people make news, both good and bad. This family tree pictorial gives a curious if brief glimpse at the little girl who grew up to be an abortionist.