Providing Amounts for Further Expenses of the Committee on Energy and Commerce in the One Hundred Fourteenth Congress

Floor Speech

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Mrs. BLACKBURN. Madam Speaker, the select investigative panel was formed to investigate areas that, prior to the revelations of undercover journalists, received too little attention. For most of us, it is nothing short of an outrage that Planned Parenthood and other abortion clinics supplement their budgets by selling the leftover parts of babies they have aborted.

This Chamber charged the panel with investigating fetal tissue trafficking, second and third trimester abortion practices, the standard of care for infants who survive abortions, and the role our taxpayer dollars play in this sector of society. Over the last year, we have held hearings that explored the bioethics surrounding fetal tissue use, and that revealed the sobering reality of how fetal tissue is priced.

Our investigation revealed four models by which the subjects of our investigation implicate serious public policy concerns. The first, the middleman model, comprises a middleman and tissue procurer that obtains tissue directly from a source such as an abortion clinic or hospital and then transfers the tissue to a customer, usually a university researcher.

As the example of StemExpress illustrates, the procurement company would embed a lab technician inside an abortion clinic, where the technician would receive the day's orders for body parts at specified gestation periods, access patient files in violation of women's HIPAA privacy rights, and collect the tissue. Then the technician would receive pay and even bonuses based on the tissue she secured.

A second model, the university clinic model, reveals the cozy relationship between abortion clinics and research institutions, most of them State universities funded by the taxpayers. The clinic provides the university the tissue used for research. The university adopts the clinic doctors as faculty members, giving them benefits regardless of whether they actually teach. And, in many cases, thanks to programs like the Ryan Fellowship, medical students are deployed to abortion clinics to be trained as the next generation of abortion providers.

The panel's investigation into a third model, the late-term abortion clinic, revealed the appalling absence of mechanisms or procedures to safeguard those infants who survive the abortion procedure. Put bluntly, even though we have the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act and the prohibition of partial birth abortion on the books, they are not enforced.

Fourth, the panel investigated the model by which Federal tax dollars make their way to abortion clinics, typically by Medicaid payments under title XIX, and fetal tissue researchers.

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Mrs. BLACKBURN. Madam Speaker, to provide just a snapshot of the 51 known external audits of Planned Parenthood clinics, nearly all found title XIX overpayments for family planning and reproductive health service claims. The overbilling totalled more than $8.5 million, and that is without counting several False Claims Act lawsuits that allege millions more in overbilling.

Consider all that our panel has identified, despite having just barely a year--even less by the time we were fully staffed--to conduct the investigation. It is now up to us to build on the work, to hold the government accountable, and to stop these affronts to human dignity.

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