Revelations continue in the disturbing story of how millions in taxpayer funding financed the trafficking of body parts of aborted babies. As Texas Right to Life previously reported, hundreds of pages of documents are now available following a lawsuit from Judicial Watch and the Center for Medical Progress after the University of Pittsburgh failed to fulfill a Freedom of Information Act Request last year.
As the Federalist notes, the University of Pittsburgh has been trafficking the body parts of aborted babies for years. In the documents obtained, “Pittsburgh claims it has been collecting fetal tissue in enormous volumes for more than a decade, including ‘liver, heart, gonads, legs, brain’ and ‘kidneys, ureters and bladders.’ In 2015 alone, it distributed ‘over 300 fresh samples collected from 77 cases’ and ‘as many as 725 cases’ the year prior. It’s reasonable to assume that this number exponentially increased, since their stated target goal is to have a minimum of five cases of tissue per week for ages 6 to 42 weeks. That’s at least one baby per day.”
The sheer volume of the University of Pittsburgh’s operation shocked the public. The program applied for $3.2 million in grants and received $2.7 million. Many people do not realize that current laws do not prohibit universities and research institutes from experimenting on preborn babies, even, as in the case of the University of Pittsburgh, up to birth. The program outlined in the newly released documents had the goal of creating a “hub” for baby body parts, including babies from every gestational age. A former employee said she was working to develop “a pull-down menu of baby body parts for researchers to choose from to submit to the tissue bank, so that we could send the body parts to them.”
The specific types of experiments in which the preborn babies were used are listed in other documents. One study from the University of Pittsburgh involved removing the scalps of preborn babies and grafting them onto rats and mice in order to study skin infections. Texas Right to Life has previously brought attention to the disturbing and unethical scientific practice of creating “humanized mice” using the bodies of aborted babies for experimentation. Other researchers have indicated that the baby body parts used in these types of gruesome experiments can only come from babies killed in abortion and not miscarriages.
The more the public learns about these grotesque experiments enhancing rodents with body parts from babies killed in abortion, the more many researchers are pushing for their continued use. The study from the University of Pittsburgh involving grafts from the scalps of babies proposed further, similar experiments. The authors write, “The co-engraftment of these human skin and immune system components into a single humanized rodent model could provide a platform for studying human skin infections.”
Following the backlash from the new publicly-available documents, the University of Pittsburgh has denied any wrongdoing, claiming that the institution followed all applicable laws. If this is true, then clearly stronger Pro-Life protections are needed. Trafficking the body parts of babies violently killed in abortion is an evil that should be outlawed and certainly is not something which taxpayers are funding.
“The allegations read like something out of a horror movie—gruesome and disgusting,” said Maria Gallagher, legislative director of the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation. “It is deeply disturbing to think that full-term babies could be treated in such an inhumane manner. We call on both federal and local authorities to conduct a thorough investigation of the University of Pittsburgh’s research practices.”
Despite the university’s claim of innocence, the new revelations have brought some questions about how the organs were obtained and if, in fact, the babies were born-alive and their organs were harvested while their hearts were still beating.
The body count in the university research programs should open the American public’s eyes to the atrocity of abortion. If not for the legalized killing of elective abortion, these innocent children would not be carved up and sold for parts, then grafted onto rodents for experimentation. Strong Pro-Life laws protect innocent human Life and prevent tax dollars from funding unethical, Life-destroying research.