DETROIT, Michigan, January 2, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – A black market human body parts dealer about to stand trial had the bodies of four preborn babies in his warehouse in 2013, Reuters reported on December 28.
The intact bodies of the babies were found during a federal raid of businessman Arthur Rathburn's warehouse. The news agency said it had reviewed “confidential photographs” of four human fetuses that were kept in the warehouse. Rathburn and his wife are accused of selling and renting diseased cadavers.
“The fetuses, which appear to have been in their second trimester, were submerged in a liquid that included human brain tissue,” according to Reuters.
The preborn babies’ remains indicate that they may have been born alive during botched abortions, according to a top pro-life advocate.
“These babies’ bodies seem to be virtually intact,” said Lila Rose, President and Founder of Live Action. “If they were obtained through abortion, there’s a strong possibility that the babies were actually born alive and then killed or left to die before they were sold for parts.”
“That’s because in later-term pregnancies like these, the chemical often used to kill the child in the womb before inducing labor and delivering her would not be used, as it would taint the organs and make them unusable for experiments,” she explained.
According to the state of Michigan’s case against the Rathburns, they obtained diseased bodies and body parts that had been donated. Rathburn apparently used a chainsaw to cut up some of the bodies and received a “bucket full of human heads” in the mail while his wife “took orders from customers,” the Washington Post wrote of the case in 2016.
It seems that Rathburn’s possession of these remains of unborn children only came to light thanks to the Reuters report. Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-TN, who chaired the U.S. House Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives, said this case needs to be “reviewed.”
It does not seem that the Select Panel, which was formed in response to the undercover videos showing Planned Parenthood’s participation in the baby body parts trade, was aware of Rathburn’s possession of dead preborn children.
“Why did it take a leak to a news reporter to get this information into the hands of Rep. Marsha Blackburn, one of Congress’s leading investigators into the baby parts trade?” asked Rose.
“And why did this evidence get to her four years after its discovery and an entire year after her investigation concluded?” she continued. “Was this evidence suppressed by the Obama administration because of the administration’s close ties to Planned Parenthood and Planned Parenthood’s own participation in the barbaric baby parts trade?”
Rathburn and his wife “sometimes obtained diseased remains from their suppliers at a reduced cost, due to the fact that end users of human remains generally reject infectious bodies and body parts for use in medical or dental training,” the prosecution maintains. “It was part of the scheme that the Rathburns would provide human remains to [their] customers, falsely representing to those customers that the remains were free of certain infectious diseases.”
“How Rathburn acquired the fetuses and what he intended to do with them is unclear,” the Reuters report said. “Rathburn’s lawyers did not respond to requests for comment, and neither the indictment nor other documents made public in his case mention the fetuses.”