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JEFFERSON CITY, MO, October 12, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) — The nation was shocked when undercover videos of Planned Parenthood officials revealed that the country's largest abortion conglomerate also traffics in baby parts – some who may have even been born alive. In one video, St. Louis, Missouri, is specifically mentioned as a place to buy aborted baby organs.

Now, Catholic leaders are calling upon the lab contracted with Planned Parenthood to end its partnership with the infamous abortion business.

The Missouri Catholic Conference (MCC) has sent a letter to Pathology Services, signed by Executive Director Mike Hoey, urging the company to stop aiding and abetting the abortion industry. “By agreeing, in advance, to take the human remains of children aborted while in utero, you are facilitating [the] taking of innocent human life,” the group exhorts.

The MCC letter concludes, “Knowing this, your only moral recourse is to say, 'NO, we will no longer cooperate, we will no longer help kill unborn babies.'”

After an abortion is committed at the St. Louis Planned Parenthood, Missouri's surgical abortion center, the baby or baby parts are put in a container and taken to Pathology Services (PS).  PS fulfills state requirements by examining the body parts (“tissue”), and sending a report to both the abortion business and the state Department of Health.

Hoey and Missouri Catholic clergy say that in doing so Pathology Services makes its employees “part of the assembly line of the abortion industry.”

Even though their own officials are caught on camera citing St. Louis as a place to go to buy aborted baby parts, Planned Parenthood denies that any such sales are made in Missouri. State Attorney General Chris Koster has also said he has found no evidence of the trafficking in fetal body parts. But state senators are still investigating the allegations.

The attorney general concluded, based on invoices from Pathology Services to Planned Parenthood for “waste disposal,” that another company collects the examined dead babies and incinerates them.

However, as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports, a March inspection of the St. Louis abortion facility revealed that Pathology Services was not sending reports to the Department of Health, and, that state officials hadn’t cared to notice. State officials now claim the necessary reports are being made.

The Missouri Catholic conference's letter said Atty. Gen. Koster's report proves that the lab “systematically, under contract, facilitates abortion by accepting the remains of aborted children.”

“As a private business you have no legal obligation to cater to the needs of Planned Parenthood,” the letter to Pathology Services stated.

In a separate letter published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, John Ryan wrote, “Abortionists could not perpetrate this horror without the direct cooperation of Pathology Services. The law does not require this lab, or for that matter any lab, to participate in the horror of what an abortionist does to a human being.”

Ryan concludes, agreeing with the Catholic conference's letter:  “No matter how this pathology lab slices it, it is an abortion profiteer —a direct link in the chain of modern slavery we call 'abortion.'  Reprehensible.”