On Monday, the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) announced on Facebook that Planned Parenthood whistleblower Holly O’Donnell passed away at age 27. In a Facebook post, CMP said that O’Donnell passed away following multiple medical challenges. CMP described her as “an extraordinary friend and unforgettable companion.”
O’Donnell gained national attention as a whistleblower exposing Planned Parenthood’s sale of body parts of aborted babies for profit. In several CMP videos, O’Donnell shared her experiences working as a procurement technician for StemExpress, which contracted with multiple Planned Parenthood abortion facilities. She was employed by StemExpress from December 2012 to April 2013, when she quit out of disgust with the unethical business model and callous treatment of human Life. O’Donnell corroborated CMP’s undercover investigations into the abortion industry’s sale of baby body parts for profit and even provided documents from her time as an employee.
The horrific descriptions O’Donnell gave of her work at a California Planned Parenthood became a key point of contention in the 2015 presidential primary. No one can forget the chilling incident when O’Donnell was instructed to cut through the face of an aborted baby to harvest his brain while the baby’s heart continued to beat. The inhumane and barbaric practices of harvesting body parts of aborted babies left O’Donnell traumatized and she said in an interview her soul was “damaged” by the experiences.
David Daleiden, the head of CMP, described how O’Donnell became an unlikely whistleblower for the abortion industry. He told Politico:
My first impression of Holly was that she was a normal twentysomething Millennial: intelligent, sensitive, and entirely unpolitical. She does not come to the issue of aborted baby parts sales from any kind of activist background — she comes to it solely from her personal (and completely unexpected) experience of working in that industry and I think she reacted to that experience exactly the way any normal person would.
Despite backlash from abortion activists, O’Donnell never wavered in her account of her time at StemExpress, a time that left her with nightmares. In a 2017 interview with Daleiden, O’Donnell again described the horrific practices of the abortion industry. Not motivated by partisan politics or a social agenda, O’Donnell wanted the truth to be known.
Her efforts to expose these abuses were instrumental in on-going criminal investigations into the abortion industry and the tissue procurement agencies allegedly profiting from this illegal activity. CMP wrote in a tribute to O’Donnell:
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. Information supplied by Holly helped launch Congressional investigations, criminal referrals of StemExpress and Planned Parenthood, and the U.S. Department of Justice investigation of StemExpress and Planned Parenthood Mar Monte and Planned Parenthood Northern California, whose final results we still await.
Perhaps even more importantly, O’Donnell’s courageously going public with her eyewitness accounts revealed abortion businesses for what they are. While abortion activists continue to market abortion as “women’s health care,” “reproductive rights,” and even “reproductive justice,” O’Donnell revealed to America that the abortion industry is predatory, violent, and inhumane.
Texas Right to Life extends our condolences to O’Donnell’s family and friends during this difficult time. Her courage and unflinching honesty in the face of evil will be remembered as we continue to fight for justice for the preborn.