By CatholicVote | Created at 2024-11-26 22:16:26 | Updated at 2024-11-27 03:42:22
5 hours ago
The following article contains upsetting content related to unborn children. Reader discretion is advised.
CV NEWS FEED // Newly publicized emails reveal discussions involving Planned Parenthood and the University of California San Diego (UCSD) regarding “donated” aborted unborn children that the University planned to use for research.
“The emails discuss fetal tissue like any other commodity such as sugar or rice, nonchalantly negotiating for fetuses up to 23 weeks old from elective abortions,” the New York Post reports.
The organization Center for Medical Progress, which pro-life activist David Daleiden founded, requested the internal emails through a public records request.
According to a press release from the Center for Medical Progress, the email conversations “begin in a heavily-redacted Research Plan, submitted to the UCSD Institutional Review Board (IRB) and approved in 2018.”
In one of the now-public, partially redacted email exchanges, a party talks about dissecting unborn children.
“We were unclear as to whether you bring the fetuses back to your lab for dissections or if the dissections will be done in clinic,” reads a June 2017 email. “I can have my folks who are cc’d coordinate with whomever is doing the collection. THANKS so much!”
Another email in the June 2017 thread requests the other party to specify what age range of unborn children they are wanting to be “collected” and about whether actions like flushing the heart are necessary.
“Hi, not sure if you and ___ discussed further, but please let us know if you want us to try to collect for you this Thursday. If so, please specify the gestational age ranges (i.e. does 6-7 week mean 6 weeks 0 days through 7 weeks, 0 days….? And again, if you can be a little more flexible with these, it’ll be easier/faster for us to collect for you,” the email reads, continuing, “Also, if there are specific instructions (i.e. to flush the heart), please let us know, and if you want us to use a special solution for collection, please bring it over to my lab by Wednesday.”
In a January 2017 email thread, an unidentified party associated with UCSD wrote: “I spoke to ___ and she thinks that it would be feasible to collect as low as 6-7 weeks, which is good. She agrees with me that hearts should be pretty easy to collect. Do you have a collection buffer in which you have found that mouse hearts are stable? This would be important, as we don’t have room for dissection equipment in the clinic, so your folks would need to pick up the samples from the clinic and bring them back to the lab for processing.”
A September 2017 email thread also reveals one party referring to the unborn children’s hearts as “samples.”
“Also, just a quick question- how many samples total are you trying to obtain for your study? I have written down that your goal was possibly 12 samples, but we have now given you 27. How many more are you looking to get? No rush on this,” reads one email from September 15, 2017.
A reply from several hours later reads: “Hi ___ We are trying to _________ fetal heart samples, so we are collecting all the samples we can get for now (_________ for adult heart tissues). The study is more stage dependent than quantity dependent, so for that we would need more stages at 9 weeks (or less) and 15 weeks (or more).”
The partially redacted Research Plan, dated February 2018, specifies Planned Parenthood’s involvement in the research.
“We will collect tissues from fetuses ranging from 4 to 23 weeks gestational age from subjects undergoing elective surgical pregnancy termination at Planned Parenthood in San Diego,” the plan states. “Subjects will be consented according to the standard Planned Parenthood consent process. Subject with both viable nonanomalous and anomalous fetuses will be consented.”
According to the New York Post report, “Although selling fetal tissue is illegal, donating it is not illegal. The contract between UCSD and Planned Parenthood appears to allow Planned Parenthood to retain ‘intellectual property rights relating to the’ fetal tissue, although it also does not grant UCSD the independent right to ‘commercialize’ the tissue.”
In the press release, the Center for Medical Progress also accuses Planned Parenthood of racial discrimination through omitting a bullet point in the Spanish translation of the consent form for women participating in the study.
One of the bullet points in the English translation of the consent form reads: “I understand that the donated blood, tissue, or their derivatives may have significant therapeutic or commercial value. I consent to such uses.”
The Spanish translation does not include this bullet point.
The UCSD plan also states that: “The only clinical data to be collected will be 1) gestational age by ultrasound examination, which is performed as a routine part of patient care at Planned Parenthood, 2) evidence of fetal heart activity by ultrasound immediately prior to the dilation and evacuation procedure, and 3) karyotype and/or ultrasound findings in case of an anomalous gestation.”
The plan then goes on to explain the procedure of procuring the “tissues” derived from the dilation and evacuation practice. The paragraph concludes: “Unused tissue will be discarded as per usual Planned Parenthood procedure. We plan to consent and collect from up to 2,500 patients in this part of the study.”
The press release also highlighted concerns about the use of the chemical abortion pill Misoprostol when collecting “samples,” or unborn children.
A 2018 email from the records request, which the press release attributed to a harvesting worker, states: “Yes, is correct in saying that collections start around ___ however any sample greater than about 12.5w requires the use of a dilating medication which is given to the patients 3 hours ahead of their procedure (these are called ‘cyto’ patients).”
According to the press release, “cyto” is shorthand for Cytotec, or Misoprostol.
Daleiden commented in the press release, “The University of California’s documents show Planned Parenthood using labor-inducing chemical abortion drugs to deliver viable, healthy preemies with ultrasound-documented heartbeats in their taxpayer-funded abortion factories — and rather than rushing those preemies to the University hospital NICU, they cut out their hearts and other body parts to sell for patent royalty-generating experiments.
“These are not just the federal crimes of partial-birth abortion and selling body parts, but also of murder for hire — disparately targeted to Spanish-speaking minorities. State and federal authorities should act to protect the civil rights of mothers and infants immediately.”
