The abortion industry is profiting by selling body parts from aborted babies to researchers, a gruesome practice that includes a Canadian connection, despite a federal moratorium on such experiments.
The Aug. 22 issue of Alberta Report examines a revealing tape from Life Dynamics Incorporated (LDI) and the magazine’s investigation found a Canadian, government-funded researcher who ordered baby parts from an abortuary for his experiments.
Using “spies” within the abortion industry, LDI found that abortuaries sell aborted babies and their parts to intermediaries who in turn sell them to “researchers.” In the August issue its video magazine, Life Talk, LDI chronicles more than 50 actual dissection orders (“protocols”) – requests from researchers seeking baby parts and how they want them dissected and delivered.
In what reads like a cannibal’s menu, LDI notes requests such as “Dissect fetal liver and thymus and occasional lymph node from fetal cadaver within 10 (minutes of death)” and “Arms and legs need not be intact” and “Intact brains preferred, but large pieces of brain may be usable.”
According to the Oct. 23 issue of World, there are “at least five U.S. organizations that collect, prepare and distribute to medical researchers fetal tissue, organs and body parts” resulting from abortion, although one of them, Opening Lines, suddenly cleared out its West Frankfurt, Illinois facility right after the story broke.
To evade regulations against such transactions, sometimes the intermediaries “lease” a part of the abortuary or charge a “service fee.” In one case LDI’s Mark Crutcher posed as a potential buyer. Brenda Bardsley of Anatomic Gift Foundation told him that “You don’t buy the tissue. I mean, yeah, it’s the way it works, but you’re not really buying the tissue … What you are buying is the service of us getting it to you the way you want it.”
The meticulous details of the trafficking in body parts are reported in the Life Talk video. LDI has an order form for a shipment of “lungs (trachea not required)” from babies of “16-24 weeks” gestation. The memo notes that the lungs are for studying “molecular mechanisms of fluid reabsorption in human fetal lung.”
The name on this particular request is the University of British Columbia’s Dr. Vanugram Venkatesh. The lungs are to be sent by Fedex, the package labelling saying only that it is “tissue.”
Dr. Vankatesh admitted to Alberta Report that he used such lungs in research paid for with a Medical Research Council grant, at the B.C. Children’s Hospital. Reporter Celeste McGovern asked Dr. Vankatesh if he had used human tissue, to which he replied, “Yeah,” before changing his mind and defensively asking, “Where are you getting your information?” He refused to answer any more questions.
Another researcher, Dr. Ivar Mendez of Dalhousie University in Halifax, has received a $90,042 grant from the Medical Research Council of Canada for 1999-2000 for his work in transplanting fetal brain tissue into the brains of Parkinson’s patients. There is also a fetal tissue repository in the University of Alberta Hospital in Edmonton, which collects aborted babies from abortuaries in Edmonton and Winnipeg, and sorts out the useable parts to send to researchers at the Universities of Toronto and British Columbia.
It is horrifying to consider the possible abuses this trade could encourage. One “spy” using the pseudonym “Kelly” said that at least one abortionist altered surgery to provide specified parts requested by the intermediary. She said that “before the procedures they [the abortionists] would want to see the list of what we wanted to procure.” She also said that abortionists would sometimes deliver a live baby and kill it to extract “better tissue.”
In one case Kelly remembers, a pair of tiny live twins were presented to the abortionist in a small pan; the abortionist poured sterile water into the pan to drown the newborns. Other times, “the doctor would either break the neck or take a pair of tongs and beat the fetus until it was dead.”
It should be noted that abortionists who already profit from taxpayers because abortion is government funded can increase their profits by selling the parts to an intermediary company who in turn sells them to researchers who are also themselves often government funded. Taxpayer money is paying for this grisly practice at every turn and putting money in the pockets of people who prey on vulnerable women or who flaunt the law.
The trafficking is indeed lucrative for the intermediaries. The fees schedule for the various body parts says a brain from an unborn baby eight weeks or older will fetch $999, with a 30 per cent discount “if significantly fragmented.” Researchers pay $325 for the spinal cord, $50-75 for ears and eyes, and $500 for an intact trunk, “with or without limbs.”
Campaign Life Coalition tried to get the media and MPs to take notice of the practice, but to no avail. Only Alberta Report covered the story. The national media and federal politicians ignored what would normally be a front-page story: the use of taxpayer money to flaunt a moratorium on immoral experiments.
