Once again national pro-life leaders are urging members of the House leadership to eliminate abortion business Planned Parenthood’s taxpayer funding based on what they say is “serious criminal and patient care violations and betrayal of the public trust.”
The leaders assert in a letter that the House’s Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives has worked to uncover Planned Parenthood’s fetal tissue trafficking program and its “turn-key business relationship” with biomedical procurement company StemExpress. The outcome, they say, is that the panel has “established probable cause that federal law prohibiting the for-profit exchange of fetal tissue had been violated.”
The American people overwhelmingly support the continued investigation and oversight of Planned Parenthood by Congress and the Select Panel: 76% of Republicans, 72% of Independents, and 64% of Democrats all back continued investigations,” the letter states. “Moreover, while the outrages and abuses in Planned Parenthood’s barbaric abortion program continue to be scrutinized, 56% of Americans want to see taxpayer funding reduced or eliminated from the organization.
The letter continues that three former Department of Justice prosecutors, who testified at a hearing in April, confirmed that evidence presented by the panel showed “probable cause that Planned Parenthood and StemExpress had conspired and aided and abetted each other in violating the federal statute against fetal trafficking.”
The letter states:
Planned Parenthood’s contracts with StemExpress provided that Planned Parenthood would share pregnant women’s private medical information “as necessary to obtain patients’ consent for use of POCs,” the “products of conception,” or fetal organs. Because “the disclosures of patients’ PHI made by the abortion clinics, and received by StemExpress, were neither required nor permitted under HIPAA,” as the Panel has noted, “Each time that an abortion clinic employee shared a medical chart with a StemExpress employee, both violated the HIPAA privacy rule…
And each time StemExpress was able to successfully harvest a “usable” fetal organ from an aborted baby, they paid Planned Parenthood $55 for that fetal organ. With approximately 25,000 patients seeking abortions and pregnancy tests at Planned Parenthood Mar Monte each year, this single Planned Parenthood affiliate exposed the private medical information of hundreds of thousands of women during the course of its relationship with StemExpress.
The letter’s signers also cite the Select Panel’s discovery that the patient consent form used by Planned Parenthood to obtain alleged “permission” from pregnant women to harvest their aborted babies’ organs “was grossly insufficient.”
“The fact that Planned Parenthood produced a coercive and fraudulent ‘consent’ form to persuade patients to ‘donate’ their aborted babies’ body parts is bad enough, but it is unconscionable that Planned Parenthood did so for their own financial benefit—$55 for every ‘usable’ body part,” write the pro-life leaders.
The signers ask House leadership to eliminate Planned Parenthood’s taxpayer funding and redirect it to the 13,000 federally qualified health centers (FQHCs) that provide more comprehensive health care to those of limited income without providing abortions. FQHCs outnumber Planned Parenthood facilities by 20 to 1, and they can be located at the website GetYourCare.org.
Democrat members of the Select panel have urged House Speaker Paul Ryan to disband the investigative panel, calling it a “witch hunt.”
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