WASHINGTON (AP) – House Democrats suggested on Wednesday that a special House panel investigating Planned Parenthood could be complicit in future assaults or even murders of abortion providers at the Republican-led committee’s first hearing on the ethics of fetal tissue research.
The investigative panel was created last year following conservative furor over secretly recorded videos showing Planned Parenthood officials discussing how they sometimes supply fetal tissue for medical research. In February, the panel subpoenaed documents from groups that GOP lawmakers said were withholding information. Those include abortion providers and a company that supplies fetal tissue from abortion clinics to researchers.
Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., the panel’s chairman, said the subpoenas are necessary as part of the investigation to answer questions “that the American people are asking.” The subpoenas seek information on people involved in procuring tissue, where it came from and where it was sent.
“There is something going on, something that deserves investigating and that demands our best moral and ethical thinking,” Blackburn said at the hearing.
The top Democrat on the panel, Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, repeated her call for the special committee to be disbanded and called the investigation a “partisan and dangerous witch hunt.” She also said there were no rules in place to protect the names of those subpoenaed.