Marsha Blackburn: “The select investigative panel was formed to investigate areas that, prior to the revelations of undercover journalists…”

“The select investigative panel was formed to investigate areas that, prior to the revelations of undercover journalists, received too little attention. For most of us, it is nothing short of an outrage that Planned Parenthood and other abortion clinics supplement their budgets by selling the leftover parts of babies they have aborted. This Chamber charged the panel with investigating fetal tissue trafficking, second and third trimester abortion practices, the standard of care for infants who survive abortions, and the role our taxpayer dollars play in this sector of society. Over the last year, we have held hearings that explored the bioethics surrounding fetal tissue use, and that revealed the sobering reality of how fetal tissue is priced. Our investigation revealed four models by which the subjects of our investigation implicate serious public policy concerns. The first, the middleman model, comprises a middleman and tissue procurer that obtains tissue directly from a source such as an abortion clinic or hospital and then transfers the tissue to a customer, usually a university researcher. As the example of StemExpress illustrates, the procurement company would embed a lab technician inside an abortion clinic, where the technician would receive the day's orders for body parts at specified gestation periods, access patient files in violation of women's HIPAA privacy rights, and collect the tissue.…”