Former Planned Parenthood fetal harvesting partner StemExpress should be held in contempt of Congress, according to Republicans on a panel investigating the fetal harvesting industry.

The House Select Panel on Infant Lives’ vote was based upon a report Republicans say outlines cause to hold StemExpress and its CEO Cate Dyer in contempt for not responding to the Panel’s subpoenas and other requests and demands for information, including accounting records. The recommendation for contempt was successful, 8-0, after the Panel’s six Democrats staged a walk-out.

“Nearly one year ago our Panel was established and given the important task of investigating very disturbing allegations that some abortion clinics and middleman procurement organizations, including StemExpresss, were violating federal law by profiting from the sale of human fetal tissue,” said Panel Chair Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) in a statement after the vote. “In order to determine if these entities were in violation of federal law or if the relevant statute needs to be updated, our Panel must review all accounting and banking records.”

The Panel issued requests, then subpoenas, to StemExpress, starting in December 2015. Subpoenas were issued starting in early 2016, according to a timeline provided to the press by the Panel. A final attempt to contact StemExpress’ lawyer was made in early September.

“Nine months is enough time for an entity to produce accounting documents,” said Blackburn. “A subpoena is not a suggestion. It is a lawful order that must be complied with. If StemExpress continues to obstruct, then we will work with House leadership to determine the necessary next steps.”

For its part, StemExpress said in a statement that it has complied with the Panel’s investigation. “StemExpress offered to testify before the Select Panel, but this offer was ignored. Several House and Senate Committees have reviewed our accounting records and closed their investigations. We have provided hundreds of documents to the Select Panel, including accounting records, both voluntarily and in response to subpoenas.”

A spokesperson for StemExpress did not answer The Stream’s follow-up question about whether the company had explicitly provided the accounting information demanded by the Panel. The harvesting company’s former bank, Five Star Bancorp, likewise did not respond to a request for comment.

Press staff for the House Panel did not answer The Stream’s follow-up question about StemExpress’ claim about testifying before the Panel.

StemExpress has been in Republicans’ sights since the Center for Medical Progress’ undercover videos showed the company possibly engaging in illegal harvesting of fetal organs and other body parts. While Planned Parenthood and StemExpress parted ways shortly after the videos were made public, the Panel’s investigations show that StemExpress was providing Planned Parenthood clinics with profit in exchange for fetal parts.

It is the profit that concerns the Panel, since it violates a 1993 federal law authored by former Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman of Massachusetts. However, StemExpress said it could not cooperate with the Panel, claiming it was “gravely concerned about the safety and security risks of identifying StemExpress personnel involved in the procurement of fetal tissue.”

Blackburn and Panel staff say StemExpress’ concerns are unnecessary. “The Panel staff and the Chairman have represented publicly and to StemExpress counsel that the Panel’s policy was to keep the names of lower-level staff and researchers redacted from any public documents or reports. Indeed, the directions to such subpoena recipients provide a methodology to protect the identities of persons in functional positions.”

All of the Panel’s Democrats walked out before yesterday’s vote. In a press release, top Panel Democrat Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) said, “Chair Blackburn has manufactured a controversy over information that she does not need,” accusing Blackburn of making a “McCarthyesque threat. …” (For more from the author of “Congressional Panel Recommends the House Hold StemExpress in Contempt” please click HERE)

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Republicans on a special House panel are recommending that StemExpress and its CEO be held in contempt of Congress for refusing to hand over accounting records. The company came under scrutiny after last year’s undercover videos of Planned Parenthood, the nation’s top abortion provider.

Republicans on the panel, which is investigating the market for tissue from aborted babies, see the accounting records as crucial for the investigation.

“To date, the panel has never received a single accounting record from StemExpress,” Republicans on the Select Investigative Panel said in a new staff report. “No names of key personnel have been provided by [StemExpress CEO] Ms. Dyer so that the panel might conduct interviews, and the cost estimates have been ambiguous and inadequate.”

StemExpress is a for-profit biotechnology company that procures tissue from abortion clinics such as Planned Parenthood. StemExpress then transfers that tissue to medical researchers.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn, chairman of the Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives, will hold a procedural vote on Wednesday to hold the biotechnology company in contempt of Congress. Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee, is aiming to force StemExpress and its CEO Catherine Dyer to comply with congressional subpoenas by using the force of the U.S. Justice Department in order to make the company release its full accounting records.

Before the Justice Department would take action against StemExpress, several more steps would need to occur after Wednesday’s vote. The House Energy and Commerce Committee will also need to hold a procedural vote before it can advance to the full U.S. House of Representatives. It is unclear when Republicans would schedule those votes with the House planning to recess at the end of September or earlier.

The Daily Signal reached out to StemExpress, which claimed it has already complied with congressional records requests.

“StemExpress offered to testify before the select panel, but this offer was ignored,” a spokesman for the company said. “Several House and Senate committees have reviewed our accounting records and closed their investigations. We have provided hundreds of documents to the select panel, including accounting records, both voluntarily and in response to subpoenas. All Americans should be concerned that a congressional panel can use the threat of contempt proceedings to support a narrative that flies in the face of the facts.”

Republicans claim that StemExpress has failed to provide investigators complete copies of accounting records in an attempt to slow walk or stonewall their efforts.

Instead, as they outlined in their latest staff report, StemExpress has provided investigators summary documents of the company’s financial records that “fell far short of actual accounting documents.” Throughout the investigation, StemExpress has maintained that releasing documents with personal information could put individuals at risk.

Questions about whether middleman companies such as StemExpress profit off the sale of fetal tissue were raised in a series of undercover videos produced by the pro-life group Center for Medical Progress. The videos featured employees at StemExpress and Planned Parenthood discussing the sale of fetal tissue. Both companies have denied illegal activity, and Planned Parenthood has since stopped taking reimbursements for fetal tissue donations.

Accounting documents, Republicans say, are needed to determine whether StemExpress profited from the sale of fetal tissue, which the 1993 National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act prohibits. However, it is legal to provide and accept payment to cover reasonable costs for “transportation, implantation, processing, preservation, quality control, or storage of human fetal tissue.”

The panel’s ranking member Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a Democrat from Illinois, blasted Blackburn and the select panel for attempting to hold StemExpress in criminal contempt of Congress.

“Chair Blackburn has manufactured a controversy over information that she does not need,” Schakowsky said in a press release. “Her threat to punish a small biotechnology company and its owner is particularly outrageous given the company’s compliance with her unilateral subpoena demands. The McCarthyesque threat that StemExpress ‘name names’ of all employees or face congressional contempt is disgraceful.”

Republicans sent StemExpress multiple document requests—including subpoenas—since the panel was established on Oct. 7, 2015. On Sept. 8, 2016, Blackburn “provided one last offer to Stem Express and Ms. Dyer to comply with the subpoenas.”

“Having exhausted its efforts to obtain compliance from the subpoena recipients,” the majority’s staff report reads, “Chairman Blackburn recommends that StemExpress, LLC, and Catherine Spears Dyer be held in contempt for their willful failure to fully comply with the panel’s subpoenas issued to them.” (For more from the author of “Amid Fetal Tissue Investigation, Republicans Seek Legal Action Against StemExpress” please click HERE)

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Will seeing the dismembered body of an aborted child cause people to oppose abortion? According to a new study in Canada, showing people graphic images of abortion victims convinced some to be more pro-life. And while many claim that the use of what is called “abortion victim photography” makes people react against the pro-life movement, the study found that it had the opposite effect.

Seeing pictures of the unborn victims of abortion was linked to an increase in both the pro-life worldview and pro-life political views, and made many feel more negatively about abortion and thus favor less permissive abortion laws, according to the study. This was true of everyone from those who identified themselves a completely pro-life to those who were completely pro-abortion.

Pro-abortion sentiment dropped by about seven percent, according to the study’s executive report, which also claims that the use of such images is now “scientifically established as an effective tool.”

The study, commissioned by the group Created Equal and analyzed by Jacqueline Harvey, an associate scholar at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, was sponsored by the Canadian Center for Bioethical Reform. Both the institute and the center are openly pro-life. Harvey also teaches political science at Tarleton State University in Texas.

A Split Movement

The study was conducted using postcards with graphic images of abortion victims distributed at mailboxes across an entire zip code and before and after phone surveys. “Most of the items were statistically significant,” Harvey told The Stream, explaining that term means that the study “rules out the possibility that the random sample interviewed the second time just ‘happened’ to be more pro-life.”

Harvey noted that the pro-life movement has long been split on whether graphic images of abortion victims sway minds in a positive way. The respondents “indicated that the change they reported was due to the images,”she said, adding that “this confirms that the images were responsible for the change.”

“The graphic images are powerful and effective,” Human Life Review’s Ifeoma Anunkor told The Stream. “I attended the National Sidewalk Counseling Symposium in August. During a training session, a leading sidewalk counselor shared that in order to make the ideal pamphlet for abortion-minded women, she asked the abortion-minded women themselves, what pictures made them change their minds about abortion. The majority of the women said the picture of an aborted fetus.”

Former Planned Parenthood clinic director Abby Johnson, however, was more critical. “This study does not look at the effectiveness of graphic imagery in front of abortion facilities, which is where I do not support their use,” she explained in an e-mail to The Stream.

In my experience, and the experiences of almost 300 former abortion workers, we find them to be counterproductive in front of abortion facilities. They appear threatening and only present the abortion facility as a safe haven from the protestors outside. The majority of women who have abortions have already had children. They aren’t having an abortion because they think it’s a “mass of cells.” They are having an abortion because they lack resources or support.

Graphic images have been effectively used in other human rights campaigns, such as when fighting to end slavery in the United States. However, some pro-life advocates say showing images to children is inappropriate, and that post-abortive women could face PTSD and other issues when seeing the images.

According to Johnson, “I believe we should obtain consent before ever showing any graphic material. I do not oppose people using graphic imagery in some situations, but only where the person using the images has gained consent to show them.”

Though the debate within the pro-life movement over the wisdom of using such images will continue, the study establishes that they do move people to become more pro-life and less supportive of abortion. Indeed, the study found that people who identified as “liberal” shifted more in favor of life than conservatives. (For more from the author of “Study: Graphic Abortion Victim Images Swayed Pro-Abortion Views” please click HERE)

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Dismembering a child in the womb is not merely ghastly, it should be punished with potentially crippling financial damages and multiple years in prison, according to one of the nation’s foremost pro-life leaders.

Earlier this month, Sen. James Lankford, R-OK, introduced a nationwide ban on dismemberment abortions (S. 3306).

The proposed law would make it illegal for an abortionist to “knowingly dismembering a living unborn child and extracting such unborn child one piece at a time from the uterus through the use of clamps, grasping forceps, tongs, scissors or similar instruments that, through the convergence of two rigid levers, slice, crush or grasp a portion of the unborn child’s body in order to cut or rip it off.”

Any abortionist found guilty of performing the procedure, commonly known as dilation and evacuation, or dilation and extraction (D&E) abortion, would be subject to fines and up to two years in prison.

The mother, or her parents if she is a minor, could also file a lawsuit in civil court against the abortionist, opening the door to massive fiscal settlements. (Read more from “US Senator Introduces Bill to Ban Dismemberment Abortions Nationwide” HERE)

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