Undercover Anti-Abortion Video Showed Images of Stillborn — Not Aborted — Fetus
Jennifer Gerson Uffalussy
Contributing Writer
Yahoo Health
August 22, 2015
( You're being tooled by a bunch of propaganda and lies, Dave. )
yahoo.com
On Friday, the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), the antiabortion activist group that has been releasing undercover videos targeting Planned Parenthood, the practice of fetal tissue donation, and later-term abortion, has admitted that images shown its most recent video of a fetus of approximately 19 weeks gestational age was not taken at a Planned Parenthood affiliate clinic, as heavily implied in the video.
The Center for Medical Progress posted a new link on its video’s YouTube page late Thursday, adding that one of the images was actually a baby named Walter Fretz, born prematurely at 19 weeks.
In the video, Holly O’Donnell, a former employee of StemExpress, a middleman company that provides fetal tissue — among their forms of donated tissue — to biomedical researchers, discussed a fetus she sees and works with following an abortion done at almost 20 weeks of gestational age. O’Donnell describes seeing the fetus move in a voiceover that overlies video footage of a post-abortion fetus that seems to move. She then describes the process by which she was instructed to dissect the fetus to remove its heart for use in medical research. Fetal tissue research is a long-standing, legal, an critical component of contemporary biomedical research in the United States.
The image shown while O’Donnell describes the fetus she saw and worked with was not a recently aborted fetus from any Planned Parenthood affiliate clinic, but rather an image of a stillborn named Walter Fretz, a preterm fetus delivered two years ago by a Pennsylvania woman and used without her permission. The woman whose fetus is shown in the video believes that the Center for Medical Progress’ use of the image is illegal, though she does not plan to pursue any legal action.
“YES, the photo at the end of the newest video about Planned Parenthood is Walter. NO, they did not ask for permission to use the photo and YES that is illegal. NO I am not going to do anything about it,” according to the Pennsylvania woman’s announcement, as posted in a screengrab by ThinkProgress.
Related: As 7th ‘Sting’ Video Is Released, a Look at State Investigations Into Planned Parenthood’s Fetal Donation Practices
In a statement to Yahoo Health, the Center for Medical Progress argued that the image was credited to The Daily Mail “from the very beginning. It illustrates what an intact delivered 2nd-trimester fetus looks like.”
And new inconsistencies between what is purported in the CMP videos and the truth continue to emerge.
Holly O’Donnell (Photo: Center for Medical Progress video)
Holly O’Donnell Worked for StemExpress for Just 34 Days
Today, a representative from StemExpress confirmed for Yahoo Health that O’Donnell had in fact been a employee there. However, while O’Donnell said in an earlier CMP video that she had applied to the company for a phlebotomist position and was unwittingly assigned to fetal tissue procurement work, the StemExpress representative states that she explicitly applied for a procurement technician position. O’Donnell was employed by StemExpress for just 34 days of work as a contract employee, working part-time over the period from December of 2012 to April of 2013. Upon leaving the company in April 2013, O’Donnell sent StemExpress a letter of resignation which detailed that her only reason for leaving was because she was not working as many hours as a procurement technician for the company as she had hoped and that she was sorry to have to leave the organization and the position. |
