StemExpress: 'We still need more'

Despite the high volume of aborted babies provided by Planned Parenthood, the demand for fetal tissue samples remains unmet, according to a procurement company executive featured in the latest video from the Center for Medical Progress (CMP).

The eighth video released by the pro-life group features two actors posing as fetal tissue buyers during a lunch meeting with StemExpress CEO Cate Dyer. Today’s release comes less than four days after a Los Angeles judge lifted a temporary restraining order against any footage featuring StemExpress executives. The company is suing CMP, claiming it broke California wire tapping laws to procure its undercover footage.

StemExpress partnered with Planned Parenthood from its founding in 2010 until Aug. 14, when the company broke ties with the abortion giant over fallout from the CMP videos.

But the partnership between StemExpress and Planned Parenthood proved lucrative for both while it lasted, the latest video indicates. StemExpress obtained a high volume of specimens and Planned Parenthood benefited financially.

“Do you feel like there are clinics out there that have been burned, that feel like they’re doing all this work for research and it hasn’t been profitable for them?” one actor asked.

“I haven’t seen that,” Dyer said.

Though Dyer couldn’t parse the percentage of Planned Parenthood specimens versus specimens from independent facilities, its partnership with Planned Parenthood was beneficial due to the high volume its affiliates could provide, she said. But the demand for tissue samples still exceeded the supply.

“We’re working with almost like triple-digit number clinics,” Dyer said. “And we still need more.”

When asked how much more, Dyer says she could use 50 livers per week—2,600 livers from aborted babies each year.

The pressure to procure perfect samples for researchers casts further doubt on the legality of Planned Parenthood’s practices. Dyer says many abortionists think they can procure tissue, but can’t, appearing to indicate the procedure must be adjusted to obtain useable tissue. Altering the abortion procedure for tissue procurement violates federal law.

But an intact fetus can insure pristine samples.

“If you have intact cases, which we’ve done a lot, we sometimes ship those back to our lab in its entirety,” Dyer says. “The procurement for us, I mean it can go really sideways, depending on the facility, and then our samples are destroyed. … So we started bringing them back even to manage it from a procurement expert standpoint.”

CMP notes a dead baby delivered intact for organ harvesting “is likely to be a born-alive infant” because abortionists cannot use feticidal chemicals like digoxin for tissue procurement cases.

Dyer claimed in a press release today that “intact cases” refers only to “intact livers” and StemExpress has “never requested, received, or provided to a researcher an ‘intact fetus.’”

In the video, Dyers says StemExpress technicians must separate the tiny body parts so that nothing they send to researchers looks like an actual baby: academic labs don’t want to see them. Some lab technicians at universities “freak out and have meltdowns,” Dyer says.

“It’s almost like they don’t want to know where it comes from,” she says. “I can see that. They’re like, ‘We need limbs, but no hands and feet need to be attached.’”