The Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives, a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, is forging ahead in the crucial investigation of fetal organ harvesting and trafficking in the United States. The Panel was established, “to gather information and get the facts about medical practices of abortion service providers and the business practices of the procurement organizations who sell baby body parts.” However, their goal of information accrual has been thwarted repeatedly by a lack of cooperation from parties involved in harvesting aborted babies’ bodies.
Harrowing revelations about the inhuman practice of harvesting fetal body parts were a bombshell to many Americans. Citizen journalists from the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) went undercover in America’s abortion cartel to expose the heinous abuse of women and preborn children in the abortion industry’s frenetic quest to perpetually widen profit margins.
CMP investigators found that the sale of aborted children is ubiquitous within the industry. The organization’s exposés shed light on the cunning method that allows abortion mills to profit off of the children they kill over and above their fees for the actual abortion: they partner with scientific researchers who are in search of fetal body parts (or entire fetal cadavers) for their projects.
Serving as the middleman in most of these exchanges are tissue procurement organizations (TPOs), which facilitate the exchange between the researchers and abortionists by negotiating fees and the transport of the body parts, and sometimes even going into the abortion mills to harvest the body parts themselves. Throughout the course of their undercover work, investigators at the Center for Medical Progress posed as a TPO to gain invaluable insight into the inhuman world of fetal tissue harvesting and trafficking.
Now, multiple TPOs have been subpoenaed by the chairwoman of the Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives, Marsha Blackburn, to appear in court with documents that were requested in a series of more than forty letters. According to a press release from Representative Blackburn’s office:
The subpoenas were issued to StemExpress and related persons; individuals with relationships to the University of New Mexico; BioMed IRB – an online Institutional Review Board service that purports to provide IRB clearance for research on human subjects and for the transfer of fetal tissue; and Ganogen – a company that is involved in the use of aborted fetuses for research involving transplantation of human organs into animals.
The Panel asked for TPOs and other tissue traffickers to furnish documents voluntarily, but was met with unresponsiveness or a series of documents redacted beyond intelligibility. The press release continues:
The Select Investigative Panel is working in a thoughtful and thorough manner to find the facts about what exactly is going on at these abortion businesses and procurement organizations,” Chairman Blackburn said. “Unfortunately, some of these organizations have so redacted documents — even after being subpoenaed — that it is impossible for us to get the complete picture of what is actually going on. Others have refused to produce documents required under previous subpoenas, and have threatened to withhold additional subpoenaed information.
“There should be no resistance to letting all the facts come out — but some abortion supporters seem to be clearly rattled with basic facts coming to light. Therefore, in the interest of completing our investigation pursuant to H. Res. 461, we will continue to issue subpoenas when necessary to ensure information can be gathered in a timely fashion.”
Among those subpoenaed is the notorious TPO StemExpress, whose disturbing business practices came under scrutiny after a whistleblower from the company revealed harrowing details of her daily work to members of the Center for Medical Progress.