{"id":212694,"date":"2019-10-18T17:34:14","date_gmt":"2019-10-18T22:34:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liveaction.org\/news\/?p=212694"},"modified":"2019-10-18T17:34:14","modified_gmt":"2019-10-18T22:34:14","slug":"court-planned-parenthood-body-harvesting-beneficial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/court-planned-parenthood-body-harvesting-beneficial\/","title":{"rendered":"Revealed in court: Planned Parenthood email calls body parts harvesting ‘mutually beneficial’"},"content":{"rendered":"
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During the eighth day of the Planned Parenthood v. The Center for Medical Progress<\/em> civil trial, employees of Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast (PPGC) took the stand, including Jeffrey Palmer (Chief Financial Officer of PPGC) and Bonnie Smith, a nurse practitioner who works at PPGC’s family planning clinic. In addition to those witnesses, videos of the depositions of Tram Nguyen (Director of the Ambulatory Surgical Center at PPGC) and Melissa Farrell (Director of Research for PPGC) were played. During Farrell’s video deposition, Peter Breen can be seen asking her about an email she sent to “Robert Sarkis” (David Daleiden) in which she wrote, “We have processes in place that will make a working relationship for a procurement project mutually beneficial.”<\/p>\n

Terrisa Bukovinac, founder and executive director of Pro-Life San Francisco, told Live Action News that Farrell testified that PPGC had been involved in many fetal tissue donation studies but that she had only taken part in two. Still, she told Daleiden (undercover as “Sarkis”) that providing fetal tissue to his company, “BioMax,” could be “mutually beneficial” — implying that PPGC would somehow benefit from donating fetal tissue and organs to “BioMax.”<\/p>\n

READ:\u00a0Attorney for Planned Parenthood investigators: Court is \u2018handicapping us in major ways\u2019<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

According to Bukovinac, Farrell also said during her video deposition that\u00a0while a confidentiality agreement was signed with undercover journalists from CMP, no one knew who signed the name “Susan Tennebaum” on the form because it was not signed in front of her and was not received by her until after the meeting. Farrell said she\u00a0expected to receive a non-disclosure agreement from “BioMax” the day “Tennebaum” (Sandra Merritt) and “Robert Sarkis” visited PPGC as a prerequisite to their meeting but did not receive it until later.<\/p>\n

Breen also brought up the seafood restaurant that Farrell visited with Merritt and Daleiden and asked if she recalled what they spoke about and she said she didn’t. Breen also asked Farrell about how Daleiden would have known what information was confidential and what information wasn’t and Farrell admitted, “I can’t interpret what his understanding would have been.”<\/p>\n

Farrell also said that she found it odd when “BioMax” asked for $750 per liver because there was a “knowledge of standard costs.” She said that the price was high and “the fact that per-specimen remuneration was listed” was strange to her because “you cannot pay for tissue specifically.” But Farrell’s statement contradicts what CMP investigators discovered in a StemExpress dropdown menu<\/a> order form of fetal body parts, which showed that there was a demand<\/a> for certain organs.<\/p>\n

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