Did Court Testimony Prove a Biotech Company Harvests Organs from Live Fetuses?
tulc(thought this was interesting)The anti-abortion website LifeSite published a story containing a headline that said the CEO of the biotech company StemExpress admitted in court to “selling beating baby hearts, intact baby heads.” That headline was not only false, but it presented a security risk to a witness in a criminal trial, according to a report from an investigator with the California state Department of Justice.
The LifeSite story is based on an ongoing preliminary hearing in the criminal case against David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, the anti-abortion activists behind the making of controversial, heavily edited “sting” videos targeting Planned Parenthood in 2015.
The videos, which were produced by Daleiden’s non-profit organization Center for Medical Progress (CMP), attempted unsuccessfully to show that Planned Parenthood was illegally trafficking in fetal tissue. But while Planned Parenthood was cleared in resulting investigations, Daleidon and Merritt were criminally charged and are currently facing 15 counts of felony invasion of privacy in California.
The LifeSite story presents readers with a horror movie-like scenario taken, as it claims, from the testimony of a woman the court identifies only as “Doe 12” but whom LifeSite says is the “CEO of StemExpress”: Beating hearts are being snatched out of live babies in an organ-harvesting scheme. It’s a sensational, graphic claim that reflects cultural tropes. But it’s not true.