By The Daily Caller (U.S.) | Created at 2026-10-15 16:36:33 | Updated at 2026-10-16 19:55:37
1 day ago
A thin legal line separates taxpayers’ funding of the illegal purchase of human fetal organs from the legal procurement of research materials.
UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine Division of Hematology-Oncology appears to be perilously close to crossing that line. The school paid Cercle Allocation Services thousands of dollars to procure organs for research, according to a California Public Records Act request reported by the Center for Medical Progress. Cercle has been accused of trafficking in human fetal organs in the past.
New public records show that UCLA’s taxpayer-supported laboratory paid Cercle, a California company, $765 per specimen for 21 individual liver and thymus specimens in August and September 2023, totaling $16,065. The purchase orders list the specimens by organ type, sample number, and date. Examples include “THYMUS #3527 7/7/23” and “LIVER #3528 7/7/23,” according to purchase orders reviewed by the Daily Caller. None of the line-item descriptions on the orders use the terms “fetal,” “fetal tissue,” or “human fetal tissue.”
This is likely because federal law makes it a felony to sell or buy human fetal tissue. A company like Cercle can legally be reimbursed for the costs of handling, shipping, processing, and storing organs from aborted babies, but it does not allow the tissue to be sold. The Center for Medical Progress obtained emails between Cercle and UCLA showing the company demanding the university rewrite the original purchase orders that apparently included language that created an “improper implication that we are selling taxable items.” Cercle insisted the charges for the organs must be framed as fees for “procurement services” to avoid suggesting the orders, as written, “would imply that we are selling the items received (which are illegal to sell).” UCLA dutifully revised the documents. (Sign up for Mary Rooke’s weekly newsletter here!)
“The overriding issue is the use of terminology that we must not use due to their improper implication that we are selling taxable items, which we are not,” Cercle’s account manager wrote. “Due to the nature of our business we must be very careful and clear that we invoice fees for our procurement services (untaxable).”
A June Daily Caller report highlighted Cercle’s connection with the abortion industry and the procurement of organs from aborted babies. The parents of an aborted child told the Caller they believe records prove their roughly 20-week-old daughter, Clementine, was actually delivered alive at the Cherry Hill Women’s Center in New Jersey in March 2024 before being transferred to Cercle for organ procurement. The parents and the Center for Medical Progress documentary “What Happened to Clementine?” alleged that the New Jersey abortion clinic used large doses of misoprostol to induce labor and then did not administer a feticidal injection typically used to end the baby’s life.
“These new records from Cercle’s abortion side business harvesting baby body parts show the extreme financial incentives that exist for ‘research’ abortions to deliver whole, preemie-size babies alive—as appears to have been done to baby Clementine and her mother, and potentially thousands of others,” David Daleiden, founder and president of the Center for Medical Progress, stated.
Thomas Kearns, the father of baby Clementine, told the Center for Medical Progress that the UCLA orders reminded him “that these body parts came from children just like my daughter Clementine.”
“Looking at the prices on this page reminds me of what they claim my daughter Clementine’s life was worth. I’m reminded that these body parts came from children just like my daughter Clementine—children who were more than just a liver or a thymus. The value that Clementine and these children had to offer the world was not a price tag from a business exchange,” Kearns said.
“They are not just their body parts or organs. They had souls, they had families, they had their own lives if they were not interrupted by the abortion and organ harvesting industry. This is the same agency that took my daughter two years ago. Were the babies in these purchase orders harvested with the same partial-birth abortion methods as my daughter?” he added. ROOKE: Americans Finally Have A Good Reason To Praise The Press
While the UCLA records do not independently establish that the specific 2023 specimens were from aborted babies, the company is directly connected to the procurement of human fetal tissue. Cercle Allocation Services is the successor to Advanced Bioscience Resources (ABR), which a 2015 Center for Medical Progress undercover investigation found supplying fetal tissue for research and which later drew congressional referrals.
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