Congressional contempt vote looming on baby-body-parts buyer

The U.S. House Select Panel on Infant Lives has a vote looming on whether to find one of the buyers in the Planned Parenthood baby body parts scandal, revealed in an extensive series of undercover videos over the course of 2015, in contempt.

The company in questions is StemExpress, and its owner, Cate Dyer.

It was revealed to have been part of the business dealings with Planned Parenthood, whose executives were caught on video negotiating for higher prices for the body parts of unborn babies aborted in their abortion businesses.

Operation Rescue, whose chief, Troy Newman, was on the board of the Center for Medical Progress, which captured and release the videos, including one where a Planned Parenthood executive, in discussions over her compensation for body parts, said, "I want a Lamborghini," reported the special congressional committee is making a decision on the contempt charge as early as Wednesday.

"Dyer and her organ procurement company have repeatedly stonewalled subpoenas issued by the Select Panel for financial information that would prove not only that Planned Parenthood profited from the sale of fresh aborted baby body parts to Stem Express, but also how much it profited," Operation Rescue reported this week.

Read the tested and proven strategies to defeat the abortion cartel, in "Abortion Free: Your Manual for Building a Pro-Life America One Community at a Time."

The issue is that profiting from those transactions violates federal law.

"This is the piece of the puzzle we hoped the Select Panel would uncover," said Newman. "As with many white collar cirmes, the financial data is the key piece of evidence. That fact that Dyer is risking contempt charges to keep this information out of the Select Panel's hands indicates it must be strongly incriminating to her, her company, and her business partners at Planned Parenthood."

WND previously reported when StemExpress and its officials refused to cooperate with Congress.

In May, WND reported Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., said in a letter to the company, "The Select Investigative Panel was forced to issue a subpoena on February 12, 2016, which required the production in an unredacted form of 12 items. Despite that explicit legal instruction, StemExpress' production was replete with [redactions]. Your firm flatly refused to produce one item, and produced an attorney-created accounting report, rather than required accounting documents."

The panel was assigned by Congress to investigate the evidence from the undercover videos.

The case focuses on the videos released throughout 2015 by the Center for Medical Progress. CMP released a dozen videos last year showing Planned Parenthood doctors and managers discussing the fetal body part trade and how they could increase their profit from it. They also discussed how they could alter procedures to salvage requested body parts.

Both actions violate federal law.

Since then, the abortion industry has retaliated, bringing lawsuits and charges against the investigators, David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt.

The congressional panel previously released documents confirming that the abortion industry profits from the sale of body parts.

StemExpress came into the investigation as a purchaser that resells fetal tissue to researchers and others.

One of the videos features Cate Dyer, CEO of Stem Express, admitting Planned Parenthood sells fully intact aborted babies.

"We have made numerous attempts to acquire business and accounting documents from StemExpress that are necessary to complete our work," Blackburn told the company. "All of these requests have been met with verbal and written objections from your attorneys."

Blackburn said the evidence already available suggests that "in order to get to the bottom of StemExpress involvement in the fetal tissue industry it would require" banking records, a forensic accounting review and a complete production of unredacted business records.

"We have yet to receive accounting, banking and other business documents, for which subpoenas were issued to StemExpress," Blackburn wrote, "Instead, we have received attorney created estimates and summaries without back up materials. These summaries provide insufficient information to complete the panel's review of the fetal tissue industry and they ignore the advice of the experts who testified."

Further, she said StemExpress' "objections" were of no account.

"I find all of StemExpress' objections to the subpoena to be invalid and without legal merit."

Blackburn explained the financial statements are needed to document whether there was a profit from the sale of the body parts of unborn infants.

The subpoenas from Congress were ignored, she said.

"You outright refused to fully comply with the subpoena issued to you personally," Blackburn told Dyer.

Read the tested and proven strategies to defeat the abortion cartel, in "Abortion Free: Your Manual for Building a Pro-Life America One Community at a Time."

A short time after the videos were released, StemExpress announced it was disassociating from Planned Parenthood.

But the entire issue remains under investigation in Blackburn's panel, and in others.

Revelations from the House Select Panel generated further negative publicity for Planned Parenthood.

"This barbarism degrades our nation and violates federal laws against such profiteering. We commend the Select Panel for its investigative work thus far and call on the Department of Justice to take immediate action," Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony List, said earlier.

"The abortion industry sells baby hearts, livers, brains, hands and other organs procured by a middleman company inside their facilities at no cost or effort to the facilities themselves," she continued. "The facility receives upfront fees that can amount to five-figure sums every month and then the procurement companies resell organs for tens of thousands more – depending on the child's characteristics.

"Was the developing baby 18 weeks old? 24 weeks? Was the mother a smoker? What is the child's ethnicity? All of these factors might make the heart, foot, eyeball or limbs more expensive," she said in a statement.

The SBA List linked to documents posted online by the U.S. House, including copies of promotional materials promising that the baby body trade is "financially profitable."

"Join the [blanked out] partner program that fiscally rewards clinics for contributing to the advancement of life-saving research with a solution that is easy to incorporate into your clinic practice," the organization said.

The marketing materials promise the promotion of biomedical research while "also providing a financial benefit to your clinic."

Crushing babies

In the first undercover video released by CMP, Deborah Nucatola of Planned Parenthood commented on crushing babies.

"We've been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I'm not gonna crush that part, I'm gonna basically crush below, I'm gonna crush above, and I'm gonna see if I can get it all intact," she said.

See the first video:

In the second video, Planned Parenthood's Mary Gatter discussed how her compensation for organs could rise when she said, "I want a Lamborghini."

See her comments:

The fifth video released shows Melissa Farrell of Planned Parenthood's Houston clinic discussing "intact fetal cadavers":

The seventh video has the testimony of a Planned Parenthood worker who tapped an aborted infant's heart and saw it start beating.