Fact-Checking the 8th Fetal Tissue 'Sting' Video
Yet another “sting” video targeting the practice of fetal tissue donation has been released today (Aug. 25) by the anti-abortion activist group the Center for Medical Progress (CMP).
The video shows footage from a lunch meeting in California attended by Cate Dyer, the CEO of StemExpress, a biomedical tissue and material procurement company that provides tissue products to researchers. The latest video implies that Dyer and StemExpress frequently and regularly procure and ship intact fetuses for research purposes. Dyer is heard saying in the video: “I mean, if you have intact cases, which we’ve done a lot, we sometimes ship those back to our lab in its entirety.”
However, StemExpress provided Yahoo Health with a transcript of the unedited footage from the meeting, which shows that Dyer is not discussing intact fetuses, but rather intact fetal livers in this meeting.
In the video, Dyer is heard talking to a woman known as “Susan Tennenbaum,” who has been featured in past “sting” videos. She’s an actor hired by the CMP posing as CEO of BioMax, the shell company established by the CMP to conduct undercover meetings under the guise of legitimate business transaction.
In the transcript of the unedited video, “Tennenbaum” and Dyer’s conversation is explicitly about intact liver tissue.
Cate Dyer: Yeah, on specifically liver tissue because that’s such an area of demand for us.
“Susan Tennenbaum”: Right. So what about intact specimens?
Cate Dyer: If you have intact cases, which we’ve done a lot, we’ve sometimes shipped those back to our lab in its entirety and that would also be great if you have those.
Neither the full footage of the CMP tape nor its transcript has been made public thus far.
A representative for StemExpress tells Yahoo Health that the company has never received an intact fetus from any of its partner health care providers, nor shipped an intact fetus to any of its research partners. The representative also explains that only the specific tissue part needed for a specific research project is ever procured or shipped.
Related: Understanding Fetal Tissue Donation — and Why It’s Such a Divisive Topic
Late last week, the Los Angeles Superior Court ruled that though the CMP and its head, David Daleiden, likely violated California criminal law that prohibits the illegal recording of private conversations without the consent of both parties, the injunction against the anti-abortion group from StemExpress filed late last month would not be renewed. The court’s ruling does not prohibit the Center for Medical Progress from continuing to release these “sting” videos.
Some past CMP videos have featured a former part-time StemExpress employee named Holly O’Donnell, who worked at the company between December 2012 and April 2013 in different Planned Parenthood clinics in California. O’Donnell has spoken in the CMP videos about how she saw fetal tissue specimens being collected without patient consent, which would be illegal. However, StemExpress tells Yahoo Health that is completely untrue, and that the company even went back to do an audit to make sure every specimen had an accompanying consent form.
Related: Why Women Do (and Don’t) Choose Fetal Tissue Donation After Abortion
In addition, certain details of O’Donnell’s employment don’t seem to align with StemExpress’ records. She has claimed in videos that she applied for a phlebotomist position at the company (even saying so in an interview on Aug. 12 on the podcast “Splintered Caucus”), but StemExpress tells Yahoo Health that she had actually applied for a procurement technician position, replying to a job ad posted on Craigslist.
O’Donnell received her phlebotomy license just a month before applying for the StemExpress opportunity, and she allowed her license to expire more than a year after she resigned from StemExpress (she left the company due to “financial difficulties”).
CMP founder David Daleiden recently told Politico that while he considers O’Donnell “a dear friend,” she has no working or volunteer relationship with CMP, and that the two first spoke only after she had already left StemExpress. It remains unclear how Daleiden and O’Donnell were introduced, the circumstances under which Daleiden learned of O’Donnell’s past employment with StemExpress, and how she was recruited to participate in the CMP’s “sting” videos after her StemExpress employment had already concluded.
The newest video comes out just six days after a seventh CMP video purported to show O’Donnell being asked to dissect a recently aborted, intact 19-week old fetus, appearing to be moving, while working at a Planned Parenthood facility. In the video, O’Donnell says she was asked to procure the heart as a fetal tissue donation specimen, and describes seeing the fetus moving and the heart beating after it was removed.
But the image of the fetus was later revealed to be an image — used without permission — of a Pennsylvania woman’s stillborn son. Plus, a physician who is an abortion provider and a fellow of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told Yahoo Health that the movement described by O’Donnell is “an involuntary movement [that] can happen and continue to happen, even in adult humans, for a good bit of time after death.”
“The heart is a muscle — and muscles respond even outside of their normal [physiological] context,” that physician said. “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.”
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