In 2015, Planned Parenthood found itself embroiled in controversy, as undercover pro-life journalists David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt had been secretly recording top Planned Parenthood executives discussing the harvesting of organs and tissues from aborted babies. Some of these babies had been old enough to survive outside the womb, and some were alleged to have been born alive.
One of the whistleblowers in the story was Holly O’Donnell, who tragically died in 2018 at the age of 27, but her legacy lives on through her efforts to end the trafficking of aborted human body parts and to expose Planned Parenthood and its partners for their alleged participation. As a former employee of StemExpress, a tissue procurement company that partnered with Planned Parenthood affiliates, O’Donnell was able to provide a first-hand account of what it was like obtaining fetal body parts inside two Planned Parenthood Mar Monte facilities in California — Fresno and Stockton. Today, Planned Parenthood Mar Monte operates 34 centers in California and Nevada.
O’Donnell told the Center for Medical Progress what it was like during her first day on the job for StemExpress. “And [the trainer], she’s literally–she has tweezers and she’s like, ‘Okay, well this is the head, this is the arm, this is a leg, and she hands them over and she goes ‘okay, here you go, can you show me some of the parts I just showed you?’ And I grabbed the tweezers and I’m like—’cause I didn’t want to lose this job—I didn’t know—I was… stoked to get it—so I did what she said. And the moment I took the tweezers, I put them in the dish, I remember grabbing the leg, and I said ‘this is the leg,’ and the moment I picked it up, I could just feel, like, death and pain–like, I’ve never felt that before, like, shoot up, through my body, and I started to—I blacked out, basically.”
READ: Before her death, Holly O’Donnell exposed Planned Parenthood’s horrific secrets
O’Donnell shared multiple details, discussing a Planned Parenthood abortionist who was known to rush through abortions and become angry with women who were, what he considered, non-cooperative. O’Donnell alleged that he took a woman’s blood and baby without consent, and picked through the remains of aborted babies at the embryonic stage of life to find their legs and other body parts.
But one story stood out as one of the worst to come out of the Planned Parenthood fetal body trafficking scandal. It was horrible enough that it was the last straw for O’Donnell, who resigned shortly after:
The patient was upset, and the abortionist was growing angry. “Finally, the woman calmed down,” said O’Donnell, “and the doctor went in to perform the abortion. Takes a little while and I’m in the hallway, I see the jar come out, goes into the path[ology] lab, and Jessica [StemExpress employee], I can hear, is preparing it, rinsing out the jar, rinsing out the linen — the lining that catches it, dumping it in the strainer, rinsing it off, putting water in the pie dish, and getting it ready for the doctor. So then I hear her call my name, like, ‘Hey, Holly, come over here. I want you to see something kinda cool. It’s kinda neat.”
O’Donnell continued, “The moment I see it, I’m flabbergasted. This is the most gestated fetus and closest thing to a baby I’ve seen. And she’s like, ‘Ok, I wanna show you something.’ And she has one of her instruments, and she just taps the heart, and it starts beating. And I’m sitting here, and I’m looking at this fetus, and its heart is beating. And I don’t know what to think.”
Dr. Ben Van Handel, then the executive director of Novogenix Laboratories, LLC, explained, “[T]here are times when after the procedure is done that the heart actually is still beating.”
O’Donnell continued:
She was like, ‘Do you know why that’s happening?’ And I knew why that was happening; it was because of an electrical current, the nodes were still firing. And I don’t know if that constitutes it’s technically dead or alive.
It had a face. It wasn’t completely torn up, and its nose was very pronounced. It had eyelids, and its mouth was pronounced, and since the fetus was so intact, she said, ‘Oh, so this was a really good fetus, and it looks like we can procure a lot from it. We’re gonna procure a brain.”
So, the moment I hear that, I think, that means we’re gonna have to cut the head open. We’re gonna have to cut the head open.
[She said,] ‘So what you do is you go through the face.’ I’m thinking, no, I don’t want to do this. And she takes the scissors and she makes a small incision right here [points to chin] and goes to, I would say, maybe a little bit through the mouth. She was like, ‘Okay, can you go the rest of the way?’ And I’m like, [sigh] ‘Yes.’ And I didn’t want to do this. And she gave me the scissors and told me that I had to cut down the middle of the face. And I can’t even describe what that feels like. And I remember picking it up and finishing going through the rest of the face and Jessica picking up the brain and putting it in the container…
O’Donnell recounted that this was the moment she knew she couldn’t work for the company anymore.
She was tasked with cleaning up, and said she picked up the baby, who was a boy who was too big and heavy to keep in the pie dish. She put him in the biohazard container, which she described as “almost full.”
“I remember he got stuck on the lid and his buttocks was in the air and his two feet were dangling and I remember having to pick each one of his feet up and put them in the container and close the lid,” she said. “That was the hardest experience I had there. I remember crying… It’s hard knowing you’re the only person whose ever going to hold that baby… I wish I wouldn’t have done it. I don’t want to be that person.”
O’Donnell’s testimony recorded by the Center for Medical Progress was instrumental in helping to expose Planned Parenthood’s alleged crimes involving their patients and fetal organ harvesting. After her death, the Center for Medical Progress wrote, “Holly’s first-person experiences and primary source documentation from her time at StemExpress and Planned Parenthood, first provided to CMP in October 2013, were game-changing evidence that directly informed and guided CMP’s undercover work from 2013 to 2015. Information supplied by Holly helped launch Congressional investigations, criminal referrals of StemExpress and Planned Parenthood, and the U.S. Department of Justice investigation of StemExpress and Planned Parenthood Mar Monte and Planned Parenthood Northern California…”
The organization noted, “In an age of fear, stifled speech, and equivocal witnesses, Holly O’Donnell never backed down from her testimony of what she saw at StemExpress and Planned Parenthood. … Holly O’Donnell was clear about what she saw: StemExpress and Planned Parenthood sold baby parts.”
