On Tuesday, the Center for Medical Progress released an eighth video in a series of undercover videos highlighting the barbarity of fetal organ harvesting by Planned Parenthood. Tuesday’s video shows StemExpress’ CEO Cate Dyer discussing the sales of “intact specimens,” which are “likely to be born-alive infant[s],” and highlights the magnitude of StemExpress’ demand for fetal parts.
Several revelations have come out of the release of these videos by CMP, many of which reveal illegal, as well as immoral and unethical, practices by the hands of Planned Parenthood and StemExpress, a California-based company that partnered with Planned Parenthood to supply human blood, cells, and tissue products to biomedical researchers. Videos have featured Planned Parenthood officials admitting to altering abortion procedures to procure fetal tissue, as well as the sale of fetal tissue for profit. A video last week also revealed that StemExpress did not always obtain consent from mothers to use their fetal tissue, a practice that Fox News notes would be “a serious ethical breach.”
In Tuesday’s video, a CMP buyer inquires about “intact specimens,” to which Dyer responds, “Oh yeah, I mean, if you have intact cases, which we’ve done a lot, we sometimes ship those back to our lab in its entirety.”
Live Action News notes that Planned Parenthood leadership has admitted that the chemicals used to kill fetuses during abortion procedures are not used in tissue procurement cases, and therefore, intact fetuses/infants are likely to be born alive.
The latest video also underscores just how demanding the biomedical industry has been.
In the video, Dyer laments that the company cannot seem to obtain enough fetal livers to keep up with demand. The undercover CMP actor asks what number would make StemExpress “happy.”
“Another 50 livers a week,” Dyer responded. “We’re working with almost, like, triple-digit-number clinics, and we still need more.”
The undercover video series has successfully breathed life back into the anti-abortion movement and placed Planned Parenthood’s funding at the forefront of political debates as they have collectively captured the brutality of this particular industry from which Planned Parenthood profits.
The eight released tapes include secretly recorded comments from executives of Planned Parenthood and StemExpress, undercover footage from clinics — including footage of fetal tissue being handled by workers, footage of fetal tissue from aborted pregnancies, and on-camera interviews with Holly O’Donnell, a former StemExpress procurement technician.
In a video released on August 19, O’Donnell, who appears in a total of three videos, recalls encountering “fetuses” that still had beating hearts.
In last week’s video, O’Donnell provided graphic details about the treatment of intact fetuses, regardless of whether they have a heartbeat. “Usually they want both hemispheres intact with the brain stems, which usually doesn’t happen,” O’Donnell said. “They’ll take like a 70 percent intact or an 80 percent intact … and you have to contact them and see if that’ll be ok.”
The former technician went on to describe how her supervisor so callously referred to the beating heart of a gestated fetus as “cool.”
“Want to see something kind of cool?” O’Donnell says her supervisor asked her. She continued, “And she has one of her instruments and she just taps the heart and it starts beating … and I’m sitting here and I’m looking at this fetus and its heart is beating and I don’t know what to think.”
O’Donnell goes on,
It had a face, it wasn’t completely torn up. And its nose was very pronounced. It had eyelids and its mouth was pronounced and then, since the fetus was so intact, she said, “OK well this is a really good fetus and it looks like we can procure a lot from it. We’re going to procure brain.”
The moment I heard that I thought, that means we’re gonna’ have to cut the head open.
And she takes the scissors and she makes a small incision right here [points to her chin] and goes, I would say to maybe a little bit through the mouth and she says, “Can you go the rest of the way?” And I didn’t want to do this. And she gave me the scissors and told me I had to cut down the middle of the face.
The video also includes recordings from the heads of other prominent procurement companies who partner with Planned Parenthood, including Novogenix Laboratories, LLC, Executive Director Dr. Ben Van Handel, who admitted, “There are times when after the procedure is done that the heart actually is still beating.”
In response to public outcry following the release of CMP’s videos, StemExpress announced it would be severing ties with Planned Parenthood, but critics wonder if it’s just a little too late for that.
Shockingly, Planned Parenthood released a statement on August 4 wherein it claimed that the “extremists” who released the videos are in fact the ones who have a “total lack of compassion and dignity,” not, of course, the ones cutting open the faces of living fetuses.
Planned Parenthood executive vice president Dawn Laguens has defended the Planned Parenthood officials captured in the video, claiming they were in fact engaging in “standard medical practice to review tissue to ensure the health and safety of patients.”
Laguens insisted, “Planned Parenthood’s medical providers and staff are the best in the country,” adding, “We have the highest professional standards, and we take swift action if we are ever aware of an instance where those standards aren’t being met.”
Public reaction to the videos has compelled lawmakers in Washington to attempt to defund Planned Parenthood, so far with no success. Conservatives are now eyeing the upcoming Continuing Resolution as a means by which to defund the organization, which is the country’s largest abortion provider.
According to David Daleiden, founder of the Center for Medical Progress, there are four more videos to release, “give or take,” and it is his intention to release them once a week to maintain the political firestorm that has resulted from the videos. That schedule would ultimately take the Planned Parenthood debate right to the deadline for the Continuing Resolution.
Daleiden emphasizes that his intentions behind releasing the videos in this manner are to allow the public the proper amount of time to absorb and analyse all that the videos expose. “For a topic this complex and multilayered, it’s important that each piece of evidence have a chance to be examined individually and so the current presentation format is geared towards that,” Daleiden told Politico.
