LIFENEWS — President Trump’s pro-life administration showed transformative leadership this week, prohibiting government laboratories from trafficking in aborted baby parts and intensifying the protection of human subjects for any remaining outside “research” authorized by statute. This new, exacting oversight is crucial.
I speak from some personal experience, having participated in gathering the Center for Medical Progress’ undercover videos of top-level Planned Parenthood leaders, who admitted the organization’s involvement in the trade in baby body parts. These videos shocked the conscience of the American people in 2015, but the atrocity of government-funded fetal experimentation grows more horrifying the closer we look.
National Institutes of Health (Health and Human Services’ research branch) grantee Dr. Jörg C. Gerlach, an “experimental surgeon” at the taxpayer-funded University of Pittsburgh, has developed and published on a grotesque technique to harvest fresh, pristine livers from intact babies delivered alive in late-term abortions “at a gestational age of 18 to 22 weeks.” Gerlach’s liver-harvesting “protocol” is used for experimental stem cell transplants according to “current Good Manufacturing Practice,” or cGMP, guidelines developed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, another arm of HHS.
“The abortions associated with our protocol were performed by routine medical induction; the labor was induced by local prostaglandin administration,” wrote Gerlach and his University of Pittsburgh Medical Center team. “Because we obtained the tissue from intact abdomens and removed the livers surgically under cGMP conditions, the tissue could be obtained in a sterile manner.”
The FDA’s cGMP guidelines require sterile tissue transplantation products, which means the abortion must leave the fetus intact, with internal organs unexposed to external pathogens.
The step-by-step, clinical details of Gerlach’s experiments are surreal: “Fetuses were collected and transferred to the current good manufacturing practice (cGMP) facility for human cell processing.” How does an NIH-funded researcher “collect and transfer” a five-month old fetus? “The specimens were placed into sterile bags containing University of Wisconsin liver storage solution, and each specimen was transported on ice immediately after the abortion to minimize the transfer time until cell isolation.”
Immediacy was key: “The logistics of the transfer of the fetus to the cell isolation facility required no more than 1 hour, and our protocol excluded the use of cells that were isolated more than 6 hours prior to transplant.”
They even washed the babies: “Upon its arrival at the cGMP facility, each fetus was weighed, rinsed with an iodine solution, and placed onto a sterile surgical tray.”
Then they cut their livers out.
