StemExpress, Buyer of Aborted Babies, Says It Will Fight Congressional Subpoena

By The Stream Published on February 12, 2016

StemExpress, the company exposed for buying baby body parts from Planned Parenthood in the Center for Medical Progress’s undercover videos, has indicated that it will fight a subpoena to be issued next week by the House committee investigating the illegal sale of fetal tissue.

Chairman Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) announced Thursday that the committee will issue subpoenas to organizations that have yet to fully cooperate with document requests, specifically,  StemExpress, the University of New Mexico and Southwestern Women’s Options.

On Friday StemExpress pushed back, arguing that the committee is asking for confidential client information. The company hasn’t yet received the exact language that will be in the subpoena.

“Throughout this process, StemExpress has continued to protect its clients’ confidentiality, and to abide by its legal obligations,” the company said in a statement to Politico. “The Select Investigative Panel now seeks confidential client information and the identity of individual scientists and researchers through the issuance of a subpoena.”

Blackburn revealed that the Select Committee has sent out over 30 letters requesting information to aid the investigation. She told Politico that “StemExpress brought the subpoena upon themselves by redacting critical information.”

Democrats on the panel said that they were not consulted on the subpoenas and protested their being issued. “We firmly believe that this is an abusive and unjustifiable use of the chair’s unilateral subpoena authority,” the Democrats on the panel wrote in a letter to Blackburn on Friday.

Blackburn said the subpoenas are necessary because the American people otherwise “would be left to speculate about what is going on in the fetal tissue industry.”

“By failing to fully cooperate with our investigation, these organizations have compelled our panel to subpoena these documents in order to acquire information that is vital to the completion of our work,” Blackburn said in a statement. “We cannot leave questions unanswered.”

In 2015, StemExpress went to court in an effort to prevent release of an undercover video exposing their role in the bartering of fetal baby parts. The effort failed. As The Stream reported at the time, the video is both explosive and damning.

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