Exclusive: Congresswoman Tells The Stream It’s Time for StemExpress to Come Clean

Rep. Marsha Blackburn also threatens "contempt proceedings" against the tissue procurement company that partnered with Planned Parenthood.

By Dustin Siggins Published on April 21, 2016

The Chairwoman of the House’s Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives has fired back at the CEO of StemExpress, which the committee is investigating for allegedly profiting off of fetal tissue and the body parts of unborn babies.

“I am appalled that Cate Dyer has hired attorneys who believe that obfuscation is the best way to deal with Congress,” Representative Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) told The Stream in her first response to accusations that the committee is “citing documents that courts have already found to be fabricated and falsified.”

The claims against Blackburn and the committee’s GOP staff were made by StemExpress CEO and founder Cate Dyer. Dyer told POLITICO that her company “has provided over 2000 pages of material to the Senate and House committees which clearly illustrate we do not profit from the provision of fetal tissue to researchers.”

“Unfortunately, the Select Panel continues to ignore the evidence” presented, claimed Dyer.

StemExpress has been at the center of a nearly year-long controversy over whether the company is helping abortion clinics profit off of the harvesting of aborted babies. Such a practice is illegal, but this week committee Republicans released a report they say shows the company doing just that.

The facts of the report have been disputed by both StemExpress and the committee’s Democratic Members. StemExpress told POLITICO it actually loses money on its fetal harvesting program. The company claims to have generated $26,000 in 2015 — about one percent of its total gross revenues — working with abortion clinics, but spent $33,000 gathering, processing, transporting and providing fetal tissue to researchers.

In her comments to The Stream, Blackburn urged CEO Dyer to “follow the advice of Democrat witnesses at yesterday’s hearing, respond to our subpoena, and turn over her accounting records.” In a later interview with The Hill, Blackburn went further, saying if Dyer refuses to comply with the subpoena and provide the committee with un-redacted copies of banking records, “we’ll move to contempt proceedings in the House.”

 

 

 

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