Undercover Antiabortion Video Showed Images of Stillborn — Not Aborted — Fetus
On Friday, the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), the antiabortion activist group that has been releasing undercover videos targeting Planned Parenthood, the practice of fetal tissue donation, and later-term abortion, has admitted that images shown in its most recent video of a fetus of approximately 19 weeks gestational age was not taken at a Planned Parenthood affiliate clinic, as heavily implied in the video.
The Center for Medical Progress posted a new link on the video’s YouTube page late Thursday, adding that one of the images was actually of a baby named Walter Fretz, born prematurely at 19 weeks.
In the video, Holly O’Donnell, a former employee of StemExpress — a middleman company that provides fetal tissue, among other forms of donated tissue, to biomedical researchers — discussed a fetus she sees and works with following an abortion done at almost 20 weeks gestational age. O’Donnell describes seeing the fetus move in a voiceover that overlies video footage of a postabortion fetus that seems to move. She then describes the process by which she was instructed to dissect the fetus to remove its heart for use in medical research. Fetal tissue research is a long-standing, legal, and critical component of contemporary biomedical research in the United States.
The image shown while O’Donnell describes the fetus she saw and worked with was not a recently aborted fetus from any Planned Parenthood affiliate clinic, but rather an image of the stillborn Walter, a preterm fetus delivered two years ago by a Pennsylvania woman and used without her permission. The woman whose fetus is shown in the video believes that the Center for Medical Progress’s use of the image is illegal, though she does not plan to pursue any legal action.
“YES, the photo at the end of the newest video about Planned Parenthood is Walter. NO, they did not ask for permission to use the photo and YES that is illegal. NO I am not going to do anything about it,” according to the woman’s announcement, as posted in a screengrab by ThinkProgress.
In a statement to Yahoo Health, the Center for Medical Progress argues that the image was credited to the Daily Mail “from the very beginning. It illustrates what an intact delivered 2nd-trimester fetus looks like.”
And new inconsistencies between what is purported in the CMP videos and the truth continue to emerge.
Holly O’Donnell (Photo: Center for Medical Progress video)
Holly O’Donnell worked for StemExpress for just 34 days
Today, a representative from StemExpress confirmed to Yahoo Health that O’Donnell had in fact been an employee there. However, while O’Donnell said in an earlier CMP video that she had applied to the company for a phlebotomist position and was unwittingly assigned to fetal tissue procurement work, the StemExpress representative states that she explicitly applied for a procurement technician position. O’Donnell was employed by StemExpress for just 34 days of work as a contract employee, working part-time during the period between December 2012 and April 2013. Upon leaving the company in April 2013, O’Donnell sent StemExpress a letter of resignation detailing that her only reason for leaving was because she was not working as many hours as a procurement technician for the company as she had hoped and that she was sorry to have to leave the organization and the position.
In the CMP videos featuring O’Donnell, she repeatedly states her pro-life stance and discomfort with having been assigned procurement technician work.
Why the aborted fetus’s heart began beating
The video also features a clip of a moving, late-term fetus, as O’Donnell describes an incident where a technician shows her how, if you tap on a recently aborted fetus’s heart, it will begin beating. To the everyday viewer — no matter what your views on abortion are — this clip is very disturbing.
The footage of the moving fetus was obtained from the Grantham Collection, an antiabortion resource website. An obstetrician-gynecologist who performs abortions and is a fellow with the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and who asked to not be identified by name, tells Yahoo Health that at that gestational age, it is important to remember that, just like following the death of an adult human, there can still be involuntary movement of a fetus — especially if it’s stimulated, as it would have been, according to the procedure O’Donnell describes. “That’s just how nerves work,” the physician says. “That type of reflexive movement and involuntary movement can happen and continue to happen, even in adult humans, for a good bit of time after death. It’s not purposeful and it’s not painful.”
She adds, “At the gestational ages at which abortions are done, the nervous system is not developed enough to have there be any cognitive sensation.” She notes that in the often-politicized conversations regarding “fetal pain,” “the data is overwhelmingly around that not being proved through the early third trimester. It’s just not possible. The argument is often, ‘Oh, well, you do this and it moves’ — but that is involuntary movement. Yes, the nervous system is starting to develop, but it’s not at a point where it can be perceived and responded to. The body of literature around this is pretty consistent, scientifically.”
Regarding O’Donnell’s claims that, after removal, the fetus’s heart began to beat, the physician comments, “It’s totally possible that the heart would beat. I understand how someone could see that and that it might be alarming to them, but I can’t stress enough how much these are involuntary movements. The heart is a muscle — and muscles respond even outside of their normal [physiological] context. You can study muscle tissue in a petri dish, and it is going to twitch. It’s totally possible she saw movement — but that has nothing to do with life. … I understand how she … didn’t understand what it was, but [seeing the heart beat] doesn’t have any implications for life or pain.”
Read this next: Understanding Fetal Tissue Donation — and Why It’s Such a Divisive Topic
