The Center for Medical Progress released its seventh video today, detailing the graphic procedures used by StemExpress procurement technicians to acquire fetal tissue. Holly O'Donnell, a former blood and tissue procurement specialist at StemExpress, described in detail the events that made her leave her job. O'Donnell described seeing a late-term fetus with a beating heart, and then was instructed to cut through the face of said fetus to harvest its brain tissue.
(Graphic image warning)
O’Donnell describes the harvesting, or “procurement,” of organs from a nearly intact late-term fetus aborted at Planned Parenthood Mar Monte’s Alameda clinic in San Jose, CA. “‘I want to see something kind of cool,’” O’Donnell says her supervisor asked her. “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.”
The San Jose Planned Parenthood does abortions up to 20 weeks of pregnancy. Referring to the beating heart of the aborted fetus, O’Donnell remarks, “I don’t know if that constitutes it’s technically dead, or it’s alive.”
State and federal law require that the same treatment be given to an infant born-alive after an abortion as to a normally delivered baby (1 U.S.C. 8, CA Health and Safety Code 123435). California law also prohibits any kind of experimentation on a fetus with a discernible heartbeat (CA Health and Safety Code 123440). StemExpress has been cited in published scientific literature as a source of fetal hearts used for Langendorff perfusion, which keeps a heart beating after it is excised from the body: http://www.hindawi.com/journals/omcl/...
O’Donnell also tells how her StemExpress supervisor instructed her to cut through the face of the fetus in order to get the brain. “I can’t even describe what that feels like,” she says.
Just awful.