The Patriot Post® · The Character of a Nation

Holly O'Donnell is hardly a household name. If the GOP-controlled Congress had an ounce of political backbone, she’d be the most famous woman in America.

Ms. O'Donnell is a former procurement technician at StemExpress, one of Planned Parenthood’s (PP) most reliable customers, until they cut ties with the organization in August. “We value our various partnerships but, due to the increased questions that have arisen over the past few weeks, we feel it prudent to terminate activities with Planned Parenthood,” the company said in a statement at the time. “While we value our business relationship with Planned Parenthood, that work represents a small percentage of our overall business activity and we must focus our limited resources on resolving these inquiries.”

Perhaps that prudence was animated by StemExpress CEO Cate Dyer's exchange with actors posing as biotech company reps, captured on video number eight, released by the Center for Medical Progress (CMP). Dyer was concerned that a lack of fetal “tissue” might put a crimp in her business, and was hoping to increase her supply. “What would make your lab happy?” one of the actors asked. “Another fifty livers a week,” Dyer responded. “We’re working with, you know, almost triple digit number of clinics. So it’s a lot on volume, and we still need more than what we do. So it’s a lot,” she said. And up until the time the relationship was severed, Dyer noted that StemExpress did about half their business with PP “because they’re a volume institution.”

Volume, as it were, necessitates some “business decisions” O'Donnell explains in graphic detail, recalling an exchange that took place at Mar Monte’s Alameda clinic in San Jose between O'Donnell and a co-worker named Jessica. Jessica brought O'Donnell the most fully developed baby she had ever seen. “‘Hey Holly, come over here, I want you to see something kinda cool. It’s kinda neat,’” O'Donnell insists her coworker told her. “So I’m over here, and the moment I see it I’m just flabbergasted. This is the most gestated fetus and the closest thing to a baby that I’ve seen. And she’s like, ‘Okay I want to show you something.’ And she has one of her instruments and she just taps the heart and it starts beating and I’m sitting here and I’m looking at this fetus and its heart is beating and I don’t know what to think.”

O'Donnell continued. “It had a face. It wasn’t completely torn up,” she said, adding that she didn’t know if a beating heart “constitutes it’s technically dead, or it’s alive.”

As far as Jessica was concerned, such “technicalities” were apparently irrelevant. “This is a really good fetus, and it looks like we can procure a lot from it,” Jessica states — just before asking O'Donnell to remove the baby’s brain with scissors thrust through the baby’s face in order to do so. “I can’t even describe what that feels like,” O'Donnell said. “That was the moment I knew I couldn’t work for the company anymore … even if it was the cure for some disease.”

An exaggeration? Not according to Dr. Ben Van Handel, the executive director of Novogenix Laboratories, LLC, another organization that describes itself as “your source for human primary tissue-specific stem cells for medical and life science research" on its website. "So you know there are times when after the procedure is done that the heart actually is still beating,” Van Handel says in the same video. A video that also includes a baby that appears to move its arms and legs after being aborted. That portion of the video was provided by the Grantham Collection and Center for Bio-Ethical Reform. It is not new undercover material obtained by CMP.

O'Donnell also undercuts PP’s statement released Aug. 4 in which they accuse “extremists” of “a total lack of compassion and dignity for women’s most personal medical decisions.” She alleges that getting a mother’s consent to use the tissue did not occur on a consistent basis. 

Other CMP videos have shown PP officials admitting abortion procedures are altered to procure fetal tissue, intact fetuses have been delivered to customers, and fetal tissue for has been sold for a profit, all in violation of federal law.

Sadly, even now, most Americans are only vaguely aware of this entire scandal. That’s because, despite the release of more than 16 hours of CMP videos beginning on July 14, ABC, NBC and CBS combined have dedicated all of one minute and 13 seconds to informing the public about them. Moreover, none of the coverage included any graphic images, even pixilated ones. Such “coverage” stands in stark contrast to that provided by the same “news” organizations that dedicated ample time to the killing of Cecil the Lion, and the graphic coverage of a three-year-old baby who drowned off the coast of Turkey. In fact, the latter image became the face of the European “refugee” crisis, as the mainstream media likes to frame it.

How are they framing this crisis? As an assault on Planned Parenthood and women’s health. Nothing made this clearer than the coordinated effort following GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina’s statement during the second GOP presidential debate aired last Thursday. “As regards Planned Parenthood, anyone who has watched this videotape, I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these tapes,” Fiorina stated. “Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain. This is about the character of our nation, and if we will not stand up and force President Obama to veto this bill, shame on us.”

The Washington Post led the charge. “Fiorina might have trouble finding this video to show to Clinton,” it stated. “No video has surfaced showing the scene Fiorina describes taking place inside a Planned Parenthood facility.” Vox hack Sarah Kliff insisted Fiorina was disseminating “pure fiction” and that she had watched all of the CMP videos — until she added a correction to her article admitting she had not seen “more recent footage shot outside Planned Parenthood clinics.” The Washington Post “updated” its article as well, noting the The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, a pro-life organization headquartered in Lake Forrest, CA, had supplied CMP with a video that “depicted an intact delivery abortion” at an abortion clinic. 

The Center’s executive director, Gregg Cunningham, told The Federalist exactly what he provided. “The video clip we provided to CMP depicted an intact delivery abortion,” he explained. “It was filmed at an abortion clinic. It was not a miscarriage. Mothers don’t go to abortion clinics to miscarry. Had this case been a miscarriage, the mother would have presented at a hospital and her baby would have been rushed to an Isolette for appropriate neonatal care — not abandoned to writhe and eventually expire in a cold, stainless steel specimen vessel.”

The rest of The Federalist’s editorial cuts rights through the media-orchestrated b.s.:

“The media have consistently failed to cover the Planned Parenthood footage, and now they are covering up the truth. The reality is that babies of the same gestational age are having their organs harvested every day. These videos feature graphic footage of abortionists mangling babies to harvest organs to sell. They feature abortionists admitting that babies often survive those abortions. They show high-level Planned Parenthood officials encouraging this organ-harvesting scheme, acknowledged that it is happening, and attempting to skirt scrutiny from it. The videos Carly Fiorina referenced do indeed exist, and they reveal the barbaric realities of the abortion industry.”

Nonetheless, the GOP-controlled Congress doesn’t have the stones for a fight, just the appearance of one. Last week the House approved legislation aimed at blocking Planned Parenthood’s federal funding for one year, giving an investigation time to take place. The vote was 241-187 with nearly all Republicans and two Democrats getting on board with a plan that also added further restrictions on abortion doctors who violate infant protections. During a sub-committee hearing prior to the vote, Republicans showed the PP videos — even as Democrat committee members tried to prevent it from happening.

In the Senate, Democrats will try to prevent a vote, just as they did in August when the GOP tried and failed to break a Democrat filibuster on the defunding issue. The vote was 53-46, and while that means Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) could invoke the nuclear option to force a vote on the issue, putting a bill on Obama’s desk and forcing him to veto it, rest assured he will preemptively surrender.

Apparently the “character of the nation” is not high on Mitch’s list of priorities.

What would a real opposition leader do? Issue congressional subpoenas to every relevant actor shown in the videos. Hold high-profile congressional hearings showing the videos to those actors and requiring them to testify under oath as to the videos’ accuracy or lack thereof. While this process is unfolding, orchestrate a campaign disabusing Americans of the pernicious assertion made by Democrats and PP that defunding these butchers will undermine women’s access to healthcare that is easily replaced by supporting local clinics with the same funding. 

In addition, they could further educate Americans on the twisted rationale of PP’s founder Margaret Sanger and her contempt for the “mongrel races” she wished to abort into non-existence. Remind people Hillary Clinton was proud to receive the Margaret Sanger award in 2009, praising the eugenicist as for “her courage, her tenacity, her vision.” Inform Americans that the reason the media coverage has been virtually non-existent might have something to do with the reality that, while these tapes were being released, 16 “journalists” were thrilled to accept Planned Parenthood’s Maggie Awards for Media Excellence.

In describing an aspect of his documentary, Memory of the Camps, project director and general editor Geoffrey Megargee scoffed at the notion the German people were unaware of Hitler’s ongoing atrocities. “The regime wanted people to know about the concentration camps,” he explained. “It wanted people to know that if they misbehaved, that’s where they were going to go. So these were no secrets, and beyond that, when you have tens of thousands of camps and millions of forced laborers and POWs and concentration camp prisoners everywhere doing every kind of work imaginable, it’s pretty hard to say that you’re not aware of this system.”

There have been more than 55.7 million abortions performed since Roe v. Wade became the law of the land in 1973. And while the overwhelming majority of Americans are "aware of this system,“ they remain largely in the dark about the sick, seamless transition from the wholesale devaluation of life, to the horror of cultivated casualness demonstrated by the butchers at Planned Parenthood and their equally twisted allies in the media and the Democrat Party. And all their calculated obfuscations about women’s health can’t obscure the reality they have all reduced human beings to commodities — and turned Aristotle’s idea that the "whole is greater than the sum of its parts” on its head. No one can pretend “another fifty livers a week” means anything else.

The GOP must make Holly O'Donnell a household name. The character of a nation demands it.

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