Whistleblower: Planned Parenthood took fetal parts without consent

A whistleblower for a human tissue company said that fetuses were taken for medical research purposes without the consent of some Planned Parenthood patients, in a sixth video targeting the women's health and abortion provider.

In the 10 minutes of footage released Wednesday morning, Holly O'Donnell, a former lab technician at Stem Express, talks about the process of gathering intact fetal body parts during the abortion process at several Planned Parenthood clinics in California. Stem Express contracted with clinics to obtain fetal tissue and organs the company could later sell to researchers.

The normal procedure was to first get the consent of patients to donate the tissue, as required by law. But O'Donnell said some of her coworkers — namely, a woman named "Jessica" — of sometimes taking the fetal parts anyway, even if a woman hadn't consented to it.

"If there was a higher gestation and the technicians needed it, there were times they would just take what they wanted and these mothers don't know and there's no way they would know," O'Donnell says in the video.

Unlike the previous five videos released by the anti-abortion Center for Medical Progress, this one doesn't feature any Planned Parenthood officials themselves. The videos have raised questions about whether Planned Parenthood illegally profits from fetal tissue donations or modifies the way abortions are performed in order to keep more body parts intact.

The group has said it has done nothing wrong or illegal but Republicans in Congress are conducting investigations into its involvement in tissue donations.

In the sixth video, O'Donnell also charges that the Planned Parenthood clinic she worked at in Fresno, California had a "morbid" environment. "You could hear screaming, you could hear crying," she said.

She mentions one abortion doctor— a man in his 70s named Ron Berman — who she said had a reputation for going "viciously fast" as he performed abortions, and described the other female healthcare workers as "cold."

"The women I worked for were cold, they didn't care, they just wanted their money," O'Donnell says. "They didn't care girls were throwing up in a trash can, crying."