April 19, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) – Legal watchdog group Judicial Watch has released new revelations about the U.S. government’s involvement in purchasing the bodies and body parts of aborted babies for research.
Nearly 600 pages of documents published by Judicial Watch earlier this month detail the efforts of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to buy aborted babies’ bodies in order to test experimental drugs and create “humanized” mice.
Government officials often sought babies killed as late as 24 weeks gestation, by which time many unborn children are viable outside of the womb. The contract between the government and a fetal parts company investigated by Judicial Watch was terminated by Trump administration in 2018.
Between 2012 and 2018, the FDA spent tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to buy aborted babies from Advanced Bioscience Resources (ABR) a notorious California-based company that specializes in trafficking aborted babies’ bodies. ABR is known for buying potentially illegally harvested body parts from Planned Parenthood and has been probed by Congress.
Emails obtained by Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request depict federal researchers and ABR employees haggling over “fresh,” dismembered babies.
In 2012, an FDA official told ABR that the government was willing to spend $12,000 of taxpayer dollars up front for “tissue purchases,” like “one set of tissue (thymus/liver) approx. twice monthly.” She specifically requested babies killed between 16 and 24 weeks gestation and “fresh; shipped on wet ice.”
In a subsequent email, the same official emphasized the FDA’s preference for baby boys. “It is strongly preferred to have a male fetus if at all possible,” although “undetermined sex or female is better than no tissue,” she told ABR. “As you say, getting the tissue is most important so we don’t lose the animals in this surgery,” she said.
The late-term aborted babies sold by ABR frequently could not be identified by sex, however, due to the brutal nature of the abortion practices used to kill them. “I wanted to check with your records on the sex of the tissue we received today,” referring to a baby as “Liver #4505,” a researcher wrote to ABR in 2012.
“The techs were not able to identify the gender. We only can check external genitalia and if it's not there … due to the nature of the termination procedure … we have no way of telling,” an ABR employee replied.
Dismemberment abortion, the most common method of abortion in the second trimester, involves using a sopher clamp to break and tear off the bones of unborn children in the womb. “This process is repeated until the fetus is totally dismembered and removed. Usually the spine must be snapped and the skull crushed in order to remove them,” according to LifeFacts.
The head of the U.S. Bishops' Pro-Life office, Archbishop Joseph Naumann, is under attack for consistently calling out Joe Biden for the serious sin of publicly promoting abortion.
A petition has been launched against Archbishop Naumann because he continues to preach the truth that "Catholic" politicians who promote abortion are endangering their souls and causing grave scandal to the faithful.
We must now come to Archbishop Naumann's defense.
Please SIGN and SHARE WIDELY this petition which urges the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops not to demote or remove Archbishop Naumann from head of the Pro-Life Committee, but rather, to follow his lead in urging Joe Biden to repent of the terrible sin of promoting the murder the unborn human beings.
Archbishop Naumann has come under fire, from people who plainly know or care little about Catholic moral teaching, for stating the obvious in a recent interview with LifeSiteNews:
It is the responsibility of the Bishops of the United States to defend the most fundamental of all human rights, the right to life, and to protect the integrity of Catholic moral teaching. We cannot abdicate either of these responsibilities, even as we are eager to work with everyone to promote the common good...
We must continue to speak to President Biden, as well as all Catholics, and even all Americans, about the truth of what abortion is. Abortion is not something to be celebrated, and it is not healthcare. It is the intentional killing of a child. To participate in abortion or to promote abortion is a grave evil.
And, in an even more pointed statement made in an interview with Catholic World Report, Archbishop Naumann defended the Holy Eucharist against Biden's attack on human life, suggesting that Biden should not present himself for Holy Communion:
When Catholics receive the Eucharist, they are acknowledging the Real Presence of Jesus, and also belief in the teachings of the Church. President Biden doesn’t believe in the Church’s teachings on the Sanctity of Human Life, and he should not put the priest in the situation where he has to decide whether or not to allow him to receive the Eucharist. He should know that after 78 years as a Catholic.
But, again, by calling out Joe Biden for his public promotion of abortion, Archbishop Naumann is not doing anything out-of-the-ordinary.
He is only saying what the bishops should have all been saying, with a unified voice, since Biden won the nomination during the election campaign.
Indeed, in an open letter published on inauguration day, Archbishop José Gomez, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), warned that Biden’s pledge to pursue anti-life and anti-family policies would advance “moral evils” in the areas of “abortion, contraception, marriage, and gender."
Please SIGN and SHARE this petition to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops not to demote or replace Archbishop Naumann as head of the Pro-Life Committee, but rather, to follow his lead in urging Joe Biden to repent of the horrific sin of promoting the murder of the preborn.
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
'EXCLUSIVE: Bishop Naumann – US bishops must address scandal of ‘Catholic’ Biden championing abortion' - https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/exclusive-bishop-naumann-us-bishops-must-address-scandal-of-catholic-biden-championing-abortion
'Bishops need to ‘correct’ pro-abortion Biden for ‘acting contrary’ to Catholic faith: Abp. Naumann' - https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/bishops-need-to-correct-pro-abortion-biden-for-acting-contrary-to-catholic-faith-abp-naumann
Aborted babies solicited by the FDA in the emails obtained by Judicial Watch many times were killed well into the third trimester of pregnancy.
“The other doctors who staff this clinic don't induce fetal demise until 22 weeks,” ABR wrote in 2016. The employee noted four instances that week of babies aborted at 21 weeks who “all had been injected with digoxin,” making their tissue “unusable.”
Digoxin is a chemical poison injected into babies to kill them by destroying their cells and tissue. After a late-term baby is killed with digoxin, the mother delivers her baby dead, though so damaged as to be unusable for experimentation. If no digoxin was used, as was the case for some babies discussed by ABR, the babies may have been killed using illegal partial-birth abortion techniques.
In another email to the FDA, an ABR employee can be seen complaining about other “wonderful tissues” that were lost in shipping.
“[T]hey were wonderful tissues,” he wrote to the FDA. “I procured them! I’m training a new tech in Minneapolis and I told her how important it is to put the DO NOT X-RAY stickers on the package….” “Yes, we were absolutely heartbroken,” an FDA official responded. “They were beautiful tissues and to lose them like that was awful.”
The new revelations by Judicial Watch come as the Biden-Harris administration works to erase President Trump’s historic, pro-life bioethical research policies. Last week, the Department of Health of Human Services (HHS), led by Xavier Becerra, a radical Planned Parenthood ally, announced renewed funding for programs using aborted babies.
Judicial Watch has been suing the federal government since 2019 to obtain records about the use of aborted babies’ bodies in taxpayer-funded research. The group published hundreds of pages of emails and other documents from the HHS in 2020.
Last month, a federal court ruled in Judicial Watch’s favor and ordered the FDA to release previously withheld records, citing concerns about criminal activity. “There is reason to question the lawfulness of the transactions between the Government and ABR,” Judge Trevor McFadden ruled, adding that the relevant documents did not qualify as confidential business information.
“After tacking on fees for services like shipping and cleaning, ABR could collect over $2,000 on a single fetus it purchased from Planned Parenthood for $60,” McFadden found. “The federal government participated in this potentially illicit trade for years.”