It’s a funny thing about investigations, you start down one path and the next thing you know you are in an entirely different place from where you intended. Texas passed House Bill 2 which requires that abortion doctors have admitting privileges at a hospital near where they perform abortions. It also requires that abortion clinics meet the standards of ambulatory surgical centers.

Clinic operators maintain that the ambulatory surgical center requirement would close most clinics because to upgrade the existing clinics would eat into their profit margin  would be too expensive. This would pose a hardship to women in rural areas. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Texas law.  The Supreme Court has issued a stay.

On an entirely different issue, within the abortion controversy, the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) began releasing undercover videos of discussions between abortion providers, their associates and CMP undercover operators. Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist Blog provides a digest of the videos released by the Center for Medical Progress (below).

8) Planned Parenthood Baby Parts Buyer StemExpress Wants “Another 50 Livers/Week”

This video features Planned Parenthood organ buyer StemExpress’s CEO Cate Dyer talking about “consistent growth” in the industry. She says, “Planned Parenthood has volume because they’re a volume institution.” Asked what would make her happy, she says “another 50 livers a week.” She says they work with almost triple digit numbers of clinics. They discuss intact cases, though the company later claimed it was just referring to intact organs, not entire bodies.

The discussion with Stem Cell Express’s CEO Cate Dyer, near the end is almost an afterthought but should take on major significance when considered in conjunction with the Texas law requiring clinics to meet ambulatory surgical center standards. Dyer also discusses the lack of sanitary conditions at some clinics, which makes it difficult to get human organs that are not contaminated.

“I’ve seen really rampant, rampant problems with bacteria in certain clinics,” Dyer said. “I’ve seen staph come out of clinics. I mean, I’ve seen all sorts of things come out of clinics.”

Stem Cell Express is in business to make money.  They are not going to pay for a product that is unusable.  That means there is a paper trail that will describe individual instances where a particular lot was contaminated, the nature of the contamination, the origin (which clinic) and a credit for the damaged goods. Nobody has asked the question, were the shipments to Stem Cell Express contaminated in the lab or were they contaminated in the treatment room where the abortion procedure took place? All hospitals are engaged in a constant battle against infection.

According to Planned Parenthood, many patients are poor, and travel long distances to obtain Planned Parenthood services. I suspect many may be secretive about the fact that they procured an abortion.  If these women are infected during the procedure, that infection may not become obvious until they have returned home. It is not inconceivable that patients infected in Harris County (Houston) would not report the source of the infection when they  are treated in their home county.  This means that Public Health practitioners both in Harris and outlying counties  would have no way to identify the source of the infection.

The infection rates for clinics under Planned Parenthood control can be easily established by comparing the lot numbers and date of delivery of tissue subsequently rejected by Stem Cell Express. I suspect there is a spreadsheet already existing at Stem Cell Express that could be generated in 30 seconds, just waiting for a subpoena from a sufficiently motivated District Attorney or Texas Assistant Attorney General.

The next step would be to identify clinics with an infectious disease control problem.  A check of clinic records would likely identify patients seen during a particular time period.  This would enable public health investigators to determine if any of those patients were infected.  At the very least, such an examination could indicate the source of the infection, treatment room or lab.  It would probably be a straightforward process to determine if Planned Parenthood Clinics, as currently constituted, meet standards for acceptable infection control.

Such an investigation could go a long way to support the Texas law requiring that abortion clinics meet the standards of ambulatory surgical centers.  It may also uncover a problem that is unrecognized but poses a substantial risk to patients using Planned Parenthood services.