By Micaiah Bilger
The University of Pittsburgh may have inadvertently provided more evidence this week that aborted babies may be being born alive and left to die so that their organs may be used for scientific research, according to the Center for Medical Progress.
As LifeNews.com has extensively reported, earlier this week, Judicial Watch and the Center for Medical Progress exposed evidence of babies potentially being born alive in abortions and other disturbing practices in documents they obtained from a Freedom of Information Act request to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The documents show that the federal government gave the University of Pittsburgh at least $2.7 million in federal tax dollars over the past five years to become a “tissue hub” for aborted baby body parts for scientific research.
On Wednesday, a University of Pittsburgh spokesperson defended its practices in an interview with Fox News. However, the Center for Medical Progress said the university’s statements confirm that aborted babies’ hearts still are beating while their kidneys are harvested for scientific research.
“Pitt is now admitting to the news media that the aborted babies are still alive at the time their kidneys are cut out for [National Institutes of Health] grant money,” said David Daleiden, founder and president of the Center for Medical Progress.
Daleiden continued: “Pitt’s grant application for GUDMAP advertised this to the federal government and that labor induction abortions, where the baby is pushed out of the mother whole, would be ‘used to obtain the tissue.’ The plain meaning of the GUDMAP grant application, and the University of Pittsburgh’s statement explaining it, is that Pitt and the Planned Parenthood abortion providers responsible for its ‘research’ abortions are allowing babies, some of the age of viability, to be delivered alive, and then killing them by cutting their kidneys out.”
The basis for this came from a statement university spokesman David Seldin made to Fox News about “ischemia time,” which he said “refers to the time after the tissue collection procedure.”
The Center for Medical Progress explained:
Ischemia starts when the organ (the kidneys primarily in Pitt’s GUDMAP project) is cut off from blood circulation. The NIH defines ischemia as “lack of blood supply to a part of the body.” The University states the fetal organs do not undergo ischemia—lose their blood supply—until “after the tissue collection procedure”. This means the organs are still receiving blood supply from the fetal heartbeat during the “tissue collection”.
In grant application documents provided by the federal government, the University of Pittsburgh mentions “labor induction” as a “procedure that will be used to obtain the tissue,” according to the Center for Medical Progress.
Labor induction abortions are basically what they sound like; the abortionist typically injects digoxin or another poison into the unborn baby’s heart to kill him/her and then induces labor so that the mother gives birth to her dead baby’s body. This method is used in later second- and third-trimester abortions.
If digoxin is not used – and the Center for Medical Progress found that scientists want “fetal tissue” without digoxin because the poison interferes with their research, there is a chance of the baby being born alive. Research indicates up to 50 percent of labor-induction abortions without digoxin can result in an infant born alive.
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The Center for Medical Progress and Judicial Watch also noted that the University of Pittsburgh boasted about offering “rapid access to very high quality tissue,” including the freshness of the aborted babies’ body parts.
In the documents:
Pitt states that it records the “warm ischemic time on our samples and take steps to keep it at a minimum to ensure the highest quality biological specimens.” [The “warm ischemic time” refers to the amount of time an organ remains at body temperature after blood supply has been cut off. Warm ischemic time differs from cold ischemic time which refers to amount of time the organ is chilled. Pitt’s statement suggests the time between the abortion and collection is minimal.]
The university told the federal government that it has been “collecting fetal tissue for over 10 years … includ[ing] liver, heart, gonads, legs, brain, genitourinary tissues including kidneys, ureters and bladders,” according to the documents.
Daleiden demanded accountability from the university and the federal authorities tasked with upholding the law.
“If Bill Barr knew about this as Attorney General and did nothing, he should be impeached and hauled before Congress to explain himself,” he said. “Merrick Garland even promised the Senate Judiciary Committee he would make decisions about fetal trafficking prosecutions based on the facts and the law. The fact pattern here in Pittsburgh and elsewhere demands that this Kermit Gosnell-like activity be brought to justice under the law.”
He urged the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee to call Barr, Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, NIH Director Francis Collins, Dr. Anthony Fauci and representatives of the University of Pittsburgh and Planned Parenthood “to face the same imperative scrutiny for the enabling of partial-birth abortions and infanticide in the government-sponsored human trafficking of aborted infants.”
The university has been using Americans’ tax dollars to pay for its “tissue hub” for aborted baby body parts for years. According to the documents, the University of Pittsburgh requested $3.2 million over a five-year period in 2015, and it has received at least $2.7 million so far.
One of the experiments that may have been funded with that money involved scalping five-month aborted babies and then implanting their scalps onto rodents.
The information comes from a study that University of Pittsburgh researchers published in September 2020 in the journal “Scientific Reports.” It describes how scientists used scalps from aborted babies to create “humanized” mice and rats to study the human immune system.
Along with the study, the researchers published photos of their experiment – horrific images that show tufts of babies’ hair growing on the rodents.