Wednesday, August 19, 2015

StemExpress and the Beating Heart

The Center for Medical Progress has released the most gruesome video yet. There are no shots from the pathology lab of picking through mangled fetuses. (The video clips used to illustrate a fetus of the approximate age Holly is discussing are of a 19-week baby, Walter Fretz, who subsequently died from extreme prematurity.) The grisly parts of the video are those in which former StemExpress procurement technician Holly O'Donnell talks about the handling of a live-born premature boy. CMP project leader David Daleiden stresses what we've learned from previous videos: that a fetus who has been killed with a chemical injection prior to being extracted or expelled is useless for fetal tissue research, so every intact fetus is one that was delivered alive.

Everything Holly says, everything said by others shown in the video, is consistent with other reports I've encountered over thirty-plus years of prolife research, which includes abstracting medical journal articles, reports from autopsies performed on aborted fetuses, legal documents, clinic inspection documents, and medical board documents. Yes, some information I have encountered is testimony from former abortion workers, but there is a lot of third party, very credible, verification that these sorts of things do indeed happen.



Holly describes an incident in which she was working with another StemExpress worker, Jessica, at the Planned Parenthood in Alameda. Jessica called her over, saying, "I want you to see something kind of cool, it's kind of neat." -- an aborted baby ("the most gestated, the most like a baby that I've seen," Holly says) whose heart began beating when tapped with an instrument (around 4:06). CMP cuts to a recording, purportedly of Dr. Ben Van Handel, Executive Director of Novogenix Laboratories, saying "So you know there are times when after the procedure is done that heart is still beating." They cut back to Holly, who describes how stunned and confused she was, trying to process whether this fetus really is still alive. She describes being taught how to cut through the aborted baby's face in order to harvest the brain. "I remember sitting there and thinking, 'What did I just do?' And that was the moment I knew I couldn't work for the company anymore." She describes her anguish as she packed away the baby, a little boy who was so big that it was difficult for her to stuff him into the biohazard container. Holly describes cupping that baby in her hands, crying and reflecting that she would be the only person ever to hold him.

You can't tell from this video how much the Planned Parenthood staff knew about what was going on. People are very good at hiding unpleasant truths from themselves. This video, thus, is primarily an indictment of StemExpress. But it doesn't say very good things about Planned Parenthood. The doctors, at least, know that these are live-born, albeit fatally premature, infants being sent to the lab for dissection. And since Holly refers to there being "people," not just her fellow StemExpress worker Jessica, in the lab, there had to be Planned Parenthood employees there to witness Jessica tapping the baby's heart to make it beat before she started coaching Holly on how to cut his little face open to get to his brain.

Watch the video and you will totally understand why StemExpress filed to try to keep these videos from ever being released. I really wish that StemExpress was getting as much bad press over this as Planned Parenthood is getting -- and I wish Planned Parenthood was getting more.

CMP includes some footage of Planned Parenthood staff as well, such as Melissa Farrell, Director of Research for Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, admitting that they alter their abortion process in order to "obtain intact fetal cadavers." Remember, these fetuses are being delivered alive and dying from either extreme prematurity or from being dissected for organs.

I am guessing that eventually CMP is going to release the entire video of Holly O'Donnell describing her work at StemExpress. They are, they say, going to release more videos. So far each has been more horrible than the one before it. It boggles even my jaded mind to think what can be coming next.




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