Doctors Confirm University Used Harvested Body Parts From Babies Born Alive, Left to Die

National   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Aug 12, 2021   |   9:11AM   |   Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Doctors who have analyzed documents obtained from the federal government have confirmed that aborted babies are being born alive and left to die so that their organs may be used for scientific research at the University of Pittsburgh.

As LifeNews.com has extensively reported, Judicial Watch and the Center for Medical Progress said they obtained 252 pages of new documents about the university’s practices from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. HHS provided the documents after the groups filed a Freedom of Information Act request and later a lawsuit when the agency did not follow through.

The documents show that the federal government gave the University of Pittsburgh at least $2.7 million in federal tax dollars over the past five years to become a “tissue hub” for aborted baby body parts for scientific research.

David Daleiden, founder and president of the Center for Medical Progress, said evidence in the documents suggests late-term aborted babies may be being delivered alive before their organs are harvested.

“Infants in the womb, some old enough to be viable, are being aborted alive and killed for organ harvesting, in order to bring in millions of dollars in taxpayer funding for Pitt and the Planned Parenthood abortion business it supports,” Daleiden said. “Law enforcement and public officials should act immediately to bring the next Kermit Gosnell to justice under the law.”

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Now, doctors are confirming that to be true.

According to a new report at Fox News, “multiple physicians have said Pitt’s statements indicate fetuses could have been alive during the tissue collection that fed GUDMAP research – something the university vehemently denies.”

Dr. Ronna Jurow, an ob-gyn who previously worked at Planned Parenthood and describes herself as “pro-choice,” told Fox News Thursday that “there’s no question” the fetus would be alive during tissue collection. Jurow hasn’t worked at Pitt but was basing her comments on what Pitt told NIH and Seldin’s statement to Fox News.

“The baby’s going to have to be either born alive or be killed immediately prior to delivery,” said Dr. Kathi Aultman, an ob-gyn who previously performed abortions but later came to oppose the procedure.

Dr. Christina Francis, who chairs the American Association of Pro-Life Gynecologists (AAPLOG), told Fox News she agreed with Daleiden. “If it says ischemia time starts after tissue collection, that means that the baby is still alive at the time that they’re harvesting the tissue,” she said, likening the practices to those of the infamous Kermit Gosnell. “It’s horrific and does not constitute good science or compassionate medical care.”

Ensuring “fetal demise,” as some put it, can involve dismembering the fetus or using a feticide like digoxin — both of which may render the tissue unusable.

“If Pittsburgh wants live tissue, they cannot use digoxin,” Jurow told Fox News.

“One thing is sure,” said Francis’ colleague, AAPLOG CEO Dr. Donna Harrison. “[T]hese babies would not receive a feticide procedure prior to the abortion, because induction abortion after feticide can take hours to days, and the baby’s tissue would be ischemic from the time of demise until delivery … [I]t is likely that these bab[ies] are being delivered by induction abortion, and likely that a substantial portion of these babies are actually alive at the time of organ harvesting.”

In the documents, the University of Pittsburgh mentions “labor induction” as a “procedure that will be used to obtain the tissue,” according to the Center for Medical Progress.

Labor induction abortions are basically what they sound like; the abortionist typically injects digoxin or another poison into the unborn baby’s heart to kill him/her and then induces labor so that the mother gives birth to her dead baby’s body. This method is used in later second- and third-trimester abortions.

If digoxin is not used – and the Center for Medical Progress found that scientists want “fetal tissue” without digoxin because the poison interferes with their research, there is a chance of the baby being born alive. Research indicates up to 50 percent of labor-induction abortions without digoxin can result in an infant born alive.

“These documents show taxpayer money is being used to turn the University of Pittsburgh into a one-stop human fetal tissue shop – from procuring the tissue from elective abortions, ‘subdividing’ the human remains, to distributing and shipping the harvested tissue,” Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said.

The Center for Medical Progress and Judicial Watch also noted that the University of Pittsburgh boasted about offering “rapid access to very high quality tissue,” including the freshness of the aborted babies’ body parts.

In the documents:

Pitt states that it records the “warm ischemic time on our samples and take steps to keep it at a minimum to ensure the highest quality biological specimens.” [The “warm ischemic time” refers to the amount of time an organ remains at body temperature after blood supply has been cut off. Warm ischemic time differs from cold ischemic time which refers to the amount of time the organ is chilled. Pitt’s statement suggests the time between the abortion and collection is minimal.]

The university also told the federal government in 2015 that it has been “collecting fetal tissue for over 10 years … includ[ing] liver, heart, gonads, legs, brain, genitourinary tissues including kidneys, ureters and bladders.”

“The collections can be significantly ramped up as material could have been accrued from as many as 725 cases last year,” the university stated in the documents.

It asked the federal government for grant money to “develop a pipeline to the acquisition, quality control and distribution of human” urinary and genital organs with the goal of “a minimum of 5 cases” each week, according to the documents.

The university’s proposal also included racial targets, Judicial Watch and the Center for Medical Progress discovered.

“Of its planned aborted ‘subjects’ Pitt desired 50% to be minority fetuses. The proposal suggests that the ‘subjects’ be diverse because Pittsburgh is diverse, the U.S. Census Bureau shows the city of Pittsburgh is close to 70% white,” according to Judicial Watch.

And the university has been using Americans’ tax dollars to pay for this. According to the documents, the University of Pittsburgh requested $3.2 million over a five-year period in 2015, and it has received at least $2.7 million so far.

The University of Pittsburgh is the same place where researchers implanted second-trimester aborted babies’ scalps onto rodents to study the human immune system. One of the experiments that may have been funded with that money involved scalping five-month aborted babies and then implanting their scalps onto rodents.

The information comes from a study that University of Pittsburgh researchers published in September 2020 in the journal “Scientific Reports.” It describes how scientists used scalps from aborted babies to create “humanized” mice and rats to study the human immune system.

Along with the study, the researchers published photos of their experiment – horrific images that show tufts of babies’ hair growing on the rodents.