The details are hideous, heinous, and revolting. On April 26, Edie Heipel at The Federalist compiled an extremely valuable, if nauseating, summation of the most shocking findings to come out of a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act request on the federal role in the harvesting of aborted babies for fetal tissue research. As Heipel notes, “the exposure of the U.S. government’s involvement in trafficking aborted baby bodies is now even more newsworthy” with the Biden administration’s April 23 announcement that it is reversing Trump-era restrictions on the use of fetal tissue in medical research funded by the federal government.
Among the information gleaned from the FOIA trove of emails as highlighted by Heipel:
- The Food and Drug Administration “agreed to pre-pay Advanced Bioscience Resources (ABR), likely the country’s largest fetal tissue trafficking firm, an estimated $2,000 for each aborted child, adding up to $12,000 per average box of tissue with shipping and packaging fees.”
- “One procurement log records the sale of a 21-week-old baby with Down Syndrome. This child’s limbs, organs, and skin were sold at hundreds of dollars apiece. ABR made $2,600 in total from the sale of this baby.”
- “The FDA demanded that tissue be in pristine condition. Their initial quote specifies that tissue must be ‘fresh, never frozen’ and harvested from babies 16-24 weeks old ‘free of known chromosomal abnormalities.’”
- “The FDA bought numerous body parts from babies up to 24 weeks old, a date at which many preemies survive and go on to live healthy lives.”
Your tax dollars at work, America.
Humanizing Mice Is ‘Gold Standard’
Fresh fetal tissue is especially prized for use in research involving humanized mice. As The New York Times wrote in reporting the Biden administration reversal, “[s]ince the 1980s, so-called humanized mice that contain fetal human tissue or organs have served as the linchpin for developing treatments and studying the immune response to pathogens like the coronavirus.”
This is the absolute consensus within the medical research establishment today. As Science magazine reported in December 2018, the National Institutes of Health calls humanized mice utilizing fetal tissue “the gold standard” for medical research in America:
“Biological scientists currently have no better alternatives to using fetal tissue to give mice humanlike immune systems, concluded scientists who convened yesterday at a National Institutes of Health (NIH) workshop to discuss the issue. Such humanized mice ‘remain the “gold standard”’ for many kinds of studies, the scientists said, and any alternative animal model should be tested against such mice before being widely adopted, according to a report on the closed-door workshop issued tonight by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), NIH’s parent department.”
“Fetal tissue remains essential and it is simply wrong to suggest otherwise,” Sally Temple, former president of the International Society for Stem Cell Research [ISSCR] and scientific director of the Neural Stem Cell Institute in Rensselaer, New York, told Congress at the time.
As the Trump administration reviewed the federal purchase of fetal tissue, Temple lamented the possibility of ending the research: “I have spoken to many of my colleagues and the word that they have used over [and over] again is devastating. That this will essentially cripple many of the important lines of investigation for therapy development that are ongoing.”
Friends in High Places
A closer look at ISSCR reveals just how entrenched the trafficking of baby body parts is in U.S. medical circles today.
ISSCR is one of the most active and zealous defenders of the use of fetal tissue. Last year, it helped spearhead a letter to then-President Trump calling on him to lift all fetal tissue restrictions due to the need for cutting-edge research to combat the coronavirus pandemic. Numerous top universities and medical associations were among the signers.
A far more telling indicator of ISSCR’s clout was revealed at its 2020 Annual Convention, held virtually due to the coronavirus. White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci, the man who appears to be running this nation’s federal response to the coronavirus, gave the opening address at the convention’s “COVID-19 Special Session.”
The session was moderated by Deepak Srivastava of the Gladstone Institutes, another organization that stoutly advocates the use of fetal tissue in medical research.
Here’s where it gets alarming. Dr. Fauci, the highest-profile doctor in America today, spoke at a convention held by an organization that had a previous annual meeting serve as a prime focus of the jaw-dropping 2015 undercover exposé of Planned Parenthood’s selling of baby body parts.
The ninth video in the series by David Daleiden’s Center for Medical Progress that stunned the nation just six years ago features Daleiden speaking with Perrin Larton, procurement manager of Advanced Bioscience Resources, the company Planned Parenthood utilized to ship its fresh aborted baby specimens to its medical researcher customers.
Last October, Daleiden testified about this meeting during his trial in California orchestrated by state authorities who sought to punish him for his reporting. Larton discussed how, at times, the babies to be harvested were delivered fully intact:
“Yes. Perrin Larton, as the procurement manager of Advanced Bioscience Resources, told me in my conversation with her at ISSCR at their booth in 2013 that as procurement manager, in her work inside the clinics that ABR harvested organs from, she had sometimes seen patients come in for an abortion. And they would get out of the abortion room — out of the operating room, very, very quickly, much faster than she was expecting, while she was waiting for the fetal tissue afterwards. And she would be told that the patient had actually suddenly delivered the fetus in the operating room.”
Shocking as it may seem, Advanced Bioscience Resources had a vendor booth at ISSCR annual meetings to ply its wares. An ISSCR program for its 2011 meeting lists the group among its “Exhibitors.” The description is as forthright as can be:
“Advanced Bioscience Resources procures and distributes human fetal tissue, full term umbilical cord blood, and adult peripheral blood for research. ABR can also provide tissue under cGTP guidelines.”
David Daleiden’s stunning exposure of Planned Parenthood officials haggling over the price of baby organs caused millions of outraged Americans to hope the retail abortion giant’s very future might be endangered. Fast forward six years, and those involved in selling baby body parts appear to be more secure than ever, emboldened by the vigorous new powers being wielded by a medical establishment riding high in America due to the coronavirus.
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Read more from Joe Schaeffer.
