Earlier this month, Judicial Watch and the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) announced that they had obtained new documents revealing taxpayer funding for a research program using baby body parts. The 252 pages from the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) show that millions of dollars from the federal government paid for the body parts of aborted babies.
Judicial Watch obtained the documents as part of a lawsuit on behalf of the CMP for the HHS’s failure to fulfill a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from April 28, 2020. According to Judicial Watch, the April 2020 FOIA request was “seeking among other things, the grant applications for a University of Pittsburgh ‘tissue hub and collection site.’”
The most recently obtained documents reveal a disturbing plan carried out at the University of Pittsburgh using nearly $3 million in federal grants. The proposal included payments of a staggering $3.2 million in federal tax dollars over a five-year period. According to Judicial Watch, at least the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded at least $2.7 million of that.
The goal of the program was to make the University of Pittsburgh a hub for human tissue to be used in scientific research. Judicial Watch reports that the purpose of this proposed “pipeline” was “the acquisition, quality control, and distribution of human genitourinary [urinary and genital organs and functions]samples obtained throughout development (6-42 weeks gestation). … [and]generate an ongoing resource to distribute fresh developmental human genitourinary samples from various stages (6-42 weeks) to the GUDMAP [GenitoUrinary Development Molecular Anatomy Project] Atlas projects.”
In the 2015 proposal, the University of Pittsburgh notes that the program had already been collecting human body parts taken from aborted babies for 10 years. The proposal states, “we have disbursed over 300 fresh samples collected from 77 cases. The collections can be significantly ramped up as material could have been accrued from as many as 725 cases last year.” In addition to bragging about possibility of increasing ten-fold the number of abortions from which the program procures organs, the University of Pittsburgh notes in the proposal the notes that they record the “warm ischemic time on our samples and take steps to keep it at a minimum to ensure the highest quality biological specimens.” Judicial Watch explains that this means that the time between the abortion and when the organs of the baby are harvested is likely minimal.
Disturbingly, the University of Pittsburgh proposed acquiring specimens from 6-42 weeks gestation. Although an abortion at any stage ends an innocent human life, even many anti-Lifers can understand the unethical killing of a child in the womb past the point of viability. By including “specimens” up to 42 weeks gestation, the University of Pittsburgh devised a program that would harvest body parts from babies at full-term. CMP made clear to the world that organs used in scientific research must come from intact babies, in some cases likely born alive.
The University of Pittsburgh program also included a racial quota for the “subjects,” otherwise known as the victims of abortion. According to the proposal, the babies used for organ-harvesting would be at least 50% minority.
As Texas Right to Life has previously reported, CMP’s investigation of the abortion industry for trafficking human body parts harvested from aborted babies brought to light horrific practices being funded by American taxpayers. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) signed a contract for “fresh” body parts taken from babies killed in abortion in order to create “humanized mice.”
HHS was also implicated in university research projects that relied on the body parts of babies killed in abortion. Abortion businesses like Planned Parenthood partnered with “tissue procurement” agencies, including the notorious Advanced Bioscience Resources, Inc., (ABR) and StemExpress, in order to profit off the sale of baby body parts stolen from innocent preborn children killed in abortion. Like the University of Pittsburgh proposal which brags about harvesting the organs shortly after the abortion, the tissue procurement agencies are able to harvest “fresh” baby body parts by setting up shop in the abortion mills themselves.
Under the Pro-Life Trump Administration, HHS shut down tissue-harvesting schemes like those proposed in the University of Pittsburgh documents. These anti-Life programs used taxpayer dollars to pay for the harvesting of baby body parts in the abortion industry. Unfortunately, under the anti-Life Biden administration, the Pro-Life protections have been reversed and there is nothing preventing anti-Life programs from buying and selling the body parts of innocent preborn children slaughtered in abortion.