House Republicans released an interim report Thursday from their fetal tissue panel, marking the year anniversary of Planned Parenthood-targeted videos that prompted the creation of the special committee.
They have not been able to prove that abortion clinics or middlemen biotech companies illegally profited off aborted fetuses, but they insist they have amassed significant evidence pointing that direction.
Republicans also said they have found that three abortion clinics, including two Planned Parenthood centers, violated patient privacy laws by sharing women’s private health information with the tissue company StemExpress.
“This business is nothing more than a fetal corpse market,” said Rep. Joe Pitts, R-Pa., a member of the Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives, headed by Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn.
The 88-page report released by Blackburn and her colleagues discusses how fetal tissue is obtained from pregnant women and supplied to medical researchers in the U.S. Federal law says profits can’t be made off fetal tissue, but doesn’t specifically regulate fees. Charges are allowed to cover the cost of supplying the tissue.
But the Republicans also included plenty of zingers making clear their intent is to prove that Planned Parenthood, other abortion clinics and human tissue companies exploited women to turn a profit off their aborted fetuses.
“Based on what the panel has found so far, everything continues to point to abortion clinics and middlemen breaking federal laws to profit from the disgusting practice of selling baby body parts,” said House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, who isn’t on the panel but said GOP leadership strongly supports its work.
Republicans started their investigation after abortion foe David Daleiden released a series of undercover videos last year showing that a number of Planned Parenthood clinics provide aborted fetal tissue to human tissue companies for about $55 per tissue sample.
After Planned Parenthood came under heavy public fire for the practice, the women’s health and abortion provider banned its clinics from getting any compensation for the fetal tissue. But Republicans seized the opportunity to further hammer Planned Parenthood and draw more attention to how fetuses are provided for medical research after abortion.
Blackburn said Thursday that her panel will complete its work by the end of the year with a final report, but said she’s not sure what the result will be, as the committee is still requesting documents from abortion clinics and biomedical companies.
“Our charge is not to authorize anything, it is not for anything other than to get facts,” she told reporters. “It would be inappropriate to predetermine where those facts are going to take us.”
The six Democrats on the 14-member panel have asked Republicans to disband it, saying they’re politically motivated by opposition to abortion and not a true desire to ascertain the facts.
“Once again Republicans are making inflammatory claims that they cannot substantiate and relying on manufactured documents and fraudulent videos that have been thoroughly discredited,” said Rep. Jan Schakowsky, the panel’s top Democrat. “Never before have I witnessed such a disconnect between allegations and the facts.”
The report reviews federal laws related to fetal tissue, how abortion clinics obtain consent from women for the tissue, how StemExpress and other biomedical companies obtain it and sell it to researchers and how fetal tissue is used in research.
It says that from 2010 to 2015, three abortion clinics allowed StemExpress employees to see private medical information of women donating fetal tissue, thereby violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. The panel has asked the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights to investigate.
The panel hasn’t found evidence that Planned Parenthood or other abortion clinics were paid more than $60 for each specimen, a sum the clinics have said covered only the overhead costs of supplying the tissue.
But StemExpress, whose president Cate Dyer was featured prominently in the Daleiden videos, increased the price dramatically when selling the tissue to researchers, charging $595 to $910 for each tissue sample, according to the panel’s report.
“A comparison of invoices, attorney-created accounting documents and productions from multiple StemExpress customers shows that the firm may have made a profit when procuring and transferring fetal tissue,” the report says.
Advanced Bioscience Resources, another human tissue company the panel investigated, collected $191,984 from its top six fetal tissue customers last year and paid five abortion clinics $93,932 for tissue, the report says.
