Pro-life activists and former elected officials discuss the shocking details of the University of Pittsburgh's fetal tissue harvesting practices and how federal taxpayer dollars fund them.
It was reported earlier this year that the University of Pittsburgh used taxpayer funds, specifically grants from Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), to run barbaric experiments splicing lab rats with organs harvested from aborted children. In response, pro-life activists and elected officials have called for state and federal investigations into the university, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, NIAID, and the local Planned Parenthood, which supplies body pieces from aborted babies for experiments.
On Tuesday, a panel hosted in Pittsburgh by the Pennsylvania Family Council featured several of these pro-life activists and former Pennsylvania elected officials. They discussed the shocking details that have emerged over the last several months and what we now know about the funding and sourcing of Pitt’s fetal tissue harvesting.
Labor-Induced, Partial-Birth Abortions
The first panelist to speak was Center for Medical Progress founder David Daleiden, whose undercover videos have previously featured abortionists at Planned Parenthood of Western Pennsylvania and the abortion training director at the University of Pittsburgh.
Daleiden explained how, in grant applications to receive NIH funding, the University of Pittsburgh essentially advertised their facilities as the best location for the GUDMAP aborted fetal kidney harvesting program. Pitt described how aborted babies are still alive at the time their kidneys are cut out. This was a selling point for why Pitt should receive millions of taxpayer dollars.
“When they say they ‘track and record the warm ischemia time,’ that means they know the time at which fetuses lose their circulation and lose their blood supply,” Daleiden said reading from the grant application. “They specifically say labor induction, not just a forceps extraction abortion, but a labor induction abortion where they induce labor and the mom pushes out a baby at 24 weeks.”
Those two statements together – that they know how to keep the time of blood loss in the kidneys to a minimum and that they perform induced-labor abortion – show these are “clear, classic cases of partial-birth abortion or this is just straight-up infanticide,” Daleiden said.
Daleiden also explained how the fetal experimentation programs may have violated Pennslyvania state law and federal partial-birth abortion law, and how these potential criminal violations should be investigated by lawmakers. Pennslyvania’s Abortion Control Act includes “a felony prohibition on infanticide,” a ban on “any consideration whatsoever for fetal tissue,” and a specific prohibition on “any experimentation on a living fetus, whether inside or outside the womb.”
The federal statute against partial-birth abortion applies to “delivering the baby alive with the purpose of killing the baby after delivery through organ harvesting or through other means,” Daleiden said. “If they’re maintaining blood flow to the kidneys … extracting the baby up to the level of the kidneys and then kill the baby … it’s a clear pattern for criminal violation.”
Race Quotas and Race Targeting
Retired Pennsylvania Superior Court Judge Cheryl Allen spoke on Planned Parenthood’s history of racism, the abortion industry’s targeting of black people under the “guise of wanting to help poor, black women,” and Pitt’s racial quota for the babies used in their experiments.
Pitt’s grant application stated its fetal harvesting program would choose “individuals on the basis of sex/gender, race, and ethnicity,” setting quotas of 50 percent white patients and aborted fetuses, and 50 percent minority patients and fetuses, with 25 percent of those minority fetuses to come from black women.
Allen pointed out that in Western Pennslyvania, compared to other metropolitan areas like Philadelphia or New York, there are smaller Hispanic and Asian populations, “and so the largest minority population here would be African American.” Therefore, Allen said she finds it’s “disingenuous to even suggest” that black babies are less than 25 percent of the 50 percent minority patients and fetuses.
The study’s quotas could lead to abortion providers pushing women to have abortions depending on their race, one panelist suggested. “That’s what putting profits before people does,” Allen said.
Allen also pointed out the hypocrisy of the University of Pittsburgh, whose Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion issued an anti-racism statement claiming to “eradicate all forms of racism and ethnic oppression,” while it still works with Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry which were founded to eliminate black people.
Fauci Defends Fetal Tissue Experiments
Daleiden explained how in his initial reporting on publicly available documents, they concluded that researchers received $1.4 million from NIH in grants. After reviewing subsequent grant applications from NIH obtained by Judicial Watch, however, we now know that NIH actually granted the University of Pittsburgh twice that amount, more than $3 million.
In a House Appropriations hearing in May, Fauci was asked about the NIAID’s funding of Pitt experiments grafting scalps from 18- to 20-week aborted fetuses onto rats, and if the agency is aware of where the fetuses come from. Fauci replied that the study went through “all the appropriate guidelines and oversight.”
Daleiden skewered Fauci’s response as “outrageous” for two reasons. First, intact scalps used, which can be seen in pictures included in the study, are only obtainable at the size shown through a partial-birth abortion. “Intact heads” would not be obtainable through “dismemberment abortion where the skull is going to be crushed,” Daleiden explained.
Second, in terms of what oversight is being done, it was recently reported that the vice chair of the University of Pittsburgh’s Institutional Review Board, Dr. Beatrice Chen, is also the medical director of Planned Parenthood Western Pennsylvania and oversees Planned Parenthood’s abortion training fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh.
“Dr. Chen is a supervising participant in every single field citation study that is approved at the University of Pittsburgh, so she’s the one supposed to be in charge of making sure that the abortion doctors are not doing partial-birth abortions, are not delivering infants alive, that they are taking them to the NICU to get medical care … and she is the person who is in charge of all the abortions,” Daleiden said.
The panel discussion on Tuesday concluded with a call for more disclosure, more investigations, and more pressure on lawmakers and law enforcement to make sure “not a single dime of federal taxpayer money or Pennsylvania taxpayer money goest to any institution that is promoting the destruction of life,” said former U.S. House Rep. Keith Rothfus.
At the end of September, more than 100 U.S. congressmen and senators sent a letter to the heads of DOJ, NIH, and HHS demanding details and documentation on the federally sponsored experiments. The given deadline for their demands was Tuesday, Oct. 12.
