Holly O’Donnell, the courageous young whistleblower who helped to exposed Planned Parenthood’s baby body parts trade, died this weekend. She was 27 years old.
The Center for Medical Progress, which worked with her to expose the abortion industry, described her as an extraordinary friend.
“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,” CMP said in a statement.
“No matter the lies and smears from corrupt establishment and Planned Parenthood-sponsored media, … and always with her own great love and humility, Holly O’Donnell was clear about what she saw: StemExpress and Planned Parenthood sold baby parts,” it continued.
The group said O’Donnell suffered from multiple severe medical challenges and was on life support before she died.
O’Donnell worked as a phlebotomist at StemExpress when she learned how the company and Planned Parenthood worked together to harvest aborted baby body parts. She later quit after being told that she was supposed to harvest body parts, too.
Human Life Coalition offered its condolences and praised her as a courageous heroine.
“Her legacy has already left a profound impact on the fight to make abortion unthinkable and unavailable in our lifetime,” the pro-life group said in a statement. “O’Donnell demonstrated profound courage and integrity in revealing the horrific acts she witnessed while working inside Planned Parenthood for StemExpress, a vendor of human body parts.”
SIGN THE PETITION! Congress Must De-Fund Planned Parenthood Immediately
Here’s more from the Center for Medical Progress:
An extraordinary friend and unforgettable companion, Holly O’Donnell was also in many ways an ordinary millennial young woman—who through no fault of her own found herself caught in the unimaginable circumstances of working as a procurement technician for StemExpress, harvesting baby body parts from abortions inside Planned Parenthood. Holly said it was “blood money”, and ultimately quit her job in disgust with how callously she saw StemExpress and Planned Parenthood treating unborn children, their mothers, and their families in the companies’ greed to make money off of aborted baby body parts.
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.
O’Donnell’s testimonies were included in several of the investigative videos. In one 2015 video, she gave eyewitness narrative of the daily practice of fetal body parts harvesting in Planned Parenthood abortion clinics, describing tissue procurement workers’ coordination with abortion providers, the pressure placed on patients, and disregard for patient consent.
As a procurement tech, O’Donnell’s job was to identify pregnant patients matching the specifications of StemExpress customers and to harvest the fetal body parts from their abortions. Based on her testimony, it appeared Planned Parenthood was violating federal law by not properly obtaining the consent from women to harvest their aborted baby’s body parts.
“It’s not an option, it’s a demand,” she said StemExpress supervisors instructed her about approaching pregnant women at Planned Parenthood. O’Donnell said the StemExpress techs sometimes harvested fetal parts without obtaining consent from the patients.
“If there was a higher gestation, and the technicians needed it, there were times when they would just take what they wanted. And these mothers don’t know. And there’s no way they would know,” she said.
In one situation she remembered, O’Donnell said her colleague told her, “You have to make sure you get her,” but O’Donnell said the woman having the abortion had refused consent.
She also said she fainted in shock on her first day of work in a Planned Parenthood clinic when suddenly asked to dissect a freshly-aborted fetus during her on-the-job training.
“I thought I was going to be just drawing blood, not procuring tissue from aborted fetuses,” she said.
She shared more about her experiences in a video series in 2017.
Other CMP investigations that featured O’Donnell include:
- In the third video: Holly O’Donnell, a former Stem Express employee who worked inside a Planned Parenthood clinic, detailed first-hand the unspeakable atrocities and how she fainted in horror over handling baby legs.
- In the sixth video: Holly O’Donnell described technicians taking fetal parts without patient consent: “There were times when they would just take what they wanted. And these mothers don’t know. And there’s no way they would know.”
- In the seventh and perhaps most disturbing video: Holly O’Donnell described the harvesting, or “procurement,” of organs from a nearly intact late-term fetus aborted at Planned Parenthood Mar Monte’s Alameda clinic in San Jose, CA. “‘You want to see something kind of cool,’” O’Donnell says her supervisor asked her. “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.”
