A whistleblower describes extracting brain tissue from a fetus whose heart was still beating, in a seventh undercover video targeting Planned Parenthood that was released Wednesday morning.
Holly O’Donnell used to help collect aborted fetal tissue from Planned Parenthood clinics as a former lab technician for the California-based biomedical company Stem Express. She appears in past footage released by anti-abortion investigator David Daleiden, and in the latest video, she says she was asked by a colleague named “Jessica” to handle an aborted fetus whose heart was still beating.
“[Jessica] taps the heart and it starts beating,” O’Donnell says. “I’m sitting here and looking at this fetus and its heart is beating.”
The footage also contains interviews with officials from Planned Parenthood and two other human tissue companies, Advanced Bioscience Resources and Novogenix Labs, who discuss the practice of injecting fetuses with a drug called digoxin. Digoxin results in the death of the fetus before the abortion is performed, so that doctors can’t be accused of violating the federal ban on partial-birth abortion.
Ben Van Handel, executive director of Novogenix Labs, says that sometimes a fetus’s heart is still beating after the abortion, although it’s unclear whether that’s with the use of digoxin or without.
“So you know there are times when after the procedure is done the heart is still beating,” she says in the video.
Daleiden has prompted several congressional investigations into Planned Parenthood with his series of videos where he and another actor posed as human tissue buyers and discussed the practice of aborted fetal tissue donations with top Planned Parenthood officials.
The officials at time appearing to be haggling over the price of organs, although the group has said it has not profited from the donations, which would be illegal.
