In the recent reports about Planned Parenthood’s selling of baby body parts, a particular research group at the forefront of using human cells for scientific research has come to our attention. That company is StemExpress.
StemExpress describes itself as “a multi-million dollar company that supplies human blood, tissue products, primary cells and other clinical specimens to biomedical researchers around the world to fuel regenerative medicine and translational research. Founded in 2010, we offer the largest variety of raw material in the industry, as well as fresh, fixed and cryopreserved human primary cells.”
Among other news reporting agencies, National Catholic Register followed up on the explosive undercover video report of last week, telling readers that, while the discussion in
the video appears to discount a profit motive, StemExpress, one of the recipients of fetal material from Planned Parenthood mentioned in the exchange, sells vials of fetal liver cells from anywhere between $488 and $24,250.
However, StemExpress marketed its program on its literature and website as “financially profitable” to participating clinics, and it carried an endorsement from Dr. Dorothy Furgerson of Planned Parenthood Mar Monte.
A representative of StemExpress informed the Register on July 14 that the company is aware of the video and will be following up with a response. However, the Register received no reply to its follow-up calls and later found the company’s website temporarily shut down for “maintenance.”
Judging from the nebulous statement StemExpress issued and the hesitancy of company officials to discuss its practices publicly, we can surmise that something is amiss. Perhaps the millions in profit earned by the company derive from scientific experiments similar to those of a previous era.
The difference between those tragic human experiments documented in the history of the United States’ involvement with such things and those revealed during this past week resides solely in the age of the individual whose bodies are rendered more valuable to the market than their dignity as human beings.
Document logs posted by the Center for Medical Progress are evidence of the economic value. An entry dated January 13, 2013, reads:
This is a Procurement Log of baby parts harvested from Planned Parenthood Mar Monte’s flagship abortion clinic in San Jose, CA, on January 10, 2013. A total of 9 specimens were harvested from 8 different fetuses by StemExpress. At the time, StemExpress paid Planned Parenthood $50/specimen, so this one day of procurement at one clinic yielded $450 for Planned Parenthood Mar Monte. StemExpress also harvests from PPMM clinics in Sacramento, Fresno, and Stockton, and so a similar yield at those clinics just one day per week means at least $1800/week, $7200/month, and $86,400/year for this Planned Parenthood affiliate.
There are many more such examples. The unifying theme among these is that, quite clearly, the value of the human parts equals a sum deemed to be greater than the sum of those parts within a human being’s body.
