The Center for Medical Progress, under fire for their undercover videos exposing Planned Parenthood's alleged trafficking in unborn baby parts, released a video Tuesday featuring the testimony of a former procurement technician for StemExpress, Holly O’Donnell, who was sent to Planned Parenthood to procure fetal tissue.
In the video, O’Donnell tells CMP’s David Daleiden that Planned Parenthood gave StemExpress access to their patients’ private medical information in order to fulfill procurement orders, a violation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (‘HIPAA’) privacy rule.
“At the beginning of the day, we would let them know what we were looking for,” O’Donnell tells Daleiden. “There was a lot of coordination.”
“We’d open up the Task Page, which, it shows you what the researchers want, how many specimens they want for that day or that week.” O’Donnell explains, citing the StemExpress Task Page, which CMP obtained a copy of, listing customer orders for fetal livers, brains, kidneys.
“It was like a grocery list of what to get for that day,” she explained.
“We’d go to the head nurse, let the nurses know, hey this is what I’m looking for today,” she said, revealing that Planned Parenthood nurses would then provide “a sheet of the appointments, which women were coming in, and it would tell you how many patients, what time they were coming in, their name, and if they knew how far along they were.”
“They would even let us look at the charts,” O’Donnell said. “They let us look at the physical charts outside of the room. I was even asked to write on the charts at one point.”
O’Donnell claims Planned Parenthood also gave StemExpress access to the clinics’ computer network to download patient schedules for the entire Planned Parenthood affiliate. The video shows emails from StemExpress management instructing procurement technicians: “EVERY Friday – please provide schedules for all the clinics you work in,” and, “All computers have access to other clinics.”
This testimony lines up with the House Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives referral of StemExpress, Planned Parenthood Mar Monte, and Planned Parenthood Northern California to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for five years of “systematic violations” of the HIPAA in their fetal tissue procurement program last year.
“The key to understanding the HIPAA and consent violations that we’ve referred to HHS is that there’s a business contract between StemExpress and the abortion clinics under which both sides make a profit from the baby body parts inside the young woman’s womb,” they wrote to HHS at the time. “The contract changes the way both entities view the young woman: her baby is now a profit-center. This betrayal of a young woman’s trust should disgust us all. It takes financial advantage, obtains consent through coercion, and deceives the woman, all in violation of federal privacy laws.”
The House Panel on Infant Lives referred StemExpress and several Planned Parenthood affiliates to the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice for further investigation and criminal prosecution in December. The FBI confirmed that the criminal referrals have been sent to multiple field offices for action.
David Daleiden commented on the latest video, “Planned Parenthood Mar Monte and Planned Parenthood Northern California together see approximately 300,000 patients each year. Over at least five years of operation, the StemExpress-Planned Parenthood scheme to sell baby body parts put the private health information of hundreds of thousands of pregnant women at risk.”
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