The latest video from the Center for Medical Progress takes viewers on the inside of a tissue-procurement competition between for-profit StemExpress and not-for-profit Advanced Bioscience Resources (ABR), Inc. Two discussions with undercover investigators demonstrates why the relationship with StemExpress undermines Planned Parenthood’s claims that they do not profit from organ harvesting in their clinics, but it also raises a question about live births from abortions. At one point, ABR procurement manager Perrin Larton describes how some abortions from mothers produce actual births — and the implication is that the babies then become intact cadaver specimens:

“The whole point is not to have a live birth,” Larton says. “Unless it’s somebody who has had six pregnancies and six vaginal deliveries.” The undercover investigator asks, “And then it just pops out?” “Yeah,” Lartonreplies, “they put lams in and she comes in the next morning, and I literally have had women come in, and they’ll go into the OR, and they’re back out it in three minutes. And I’m going, ‘What’s going on?’ ‘Oh yeah, the fetus was already in the vaginal canal. Whenever we put her in the stirrups, it just fell out.'”

“Lams” are laminaria, which are used to dilate a cervix overnight for two-stage abortions. They are used when overnight dilation is necessary to remove a larger fetus, but they do not cause the abortion itself or kill the fetus on its own. That requires the surgical abortion, which takes place after the overnight dilation. Small wonder some babies just fall out, but if they do, they may well be alive. Stacy doesn’t say what happens to the babies after that point. Are they kept alive, or are they killed to complete the abortion?

That has echoes of Kermit Gosnell’s clinic, and Larton even jokes about Gosnell in passing just before this exchange.

The larger point, though, is that the difference between ABR and StemExpress is that the latter pay money back to the clinics. StemExpress CEO Cate Dyer can’t grasp why any clinic would choose to work with ABR when they can get a revenue stream from StemExpress:

Cate Dyer, who used to work as a procurement technician for ABR before founding her own company StemExpress, shares some of the financial details of ABR: “They were funding places in Hawaii for themselves,” she divulges. “Some staff–not that I know so much on the Planned Parenthood side, but I wouldn’t be surprised–there are some staff in the past that have been on the payroll with ABR.” According to Dyer, ABR would pay an “advisor fee” to a clinic manager or director in order to preserve their exclusive right to harvest fetal tissue at that location. “There’s like, well enough known,” says Dyer, that “for a long time there were certain clinics that because they had paid advisors that were sitting on boards for these clinics, that were also an advisor to ABR, you were just never going to go anywhere with them, you know what I mean?”

Dyer makes the point more obvious later in the video. “I’m like, ‘So I want to pay you, she doesn’t want to.’ And I’m thinking, I’m like, ‘We’re trying to give money to you.'” Dyer emphasizes that ABR doesn’t “pay the clinics,” but StemExpress does, and wants to contribute to their bottom line.

It’s what the market will bear, right?

Update: Jeryl Bier noticed yesterday that StemExpress has deleted references to “financial profits” for clinics from its website.