In reports that are as chilling as your worst nightmares, the University of Pittsburgh stands accused of conducting scientific research using organs harvested from aborted babies who were still alive.
Pitt has some serious explaining to do about the collection of the body parts of unborn babies used in its research. And there needs to be an investigation.
Documents uncovered through a public records request by Judicial Watch and the Center for Medical Progress have revealed grim details of fetal experimentation conducted by the University.
“Infants in the womb, some old enough to be viable, are being aborted alive and killed for organ harvesting, in order to bring in millions of dollars in taxpayer funding for Pitt and the Planned Parenthood abortion business it supports,” charged David Daleiden, founder and president of the Center for Medical Progress.
Pitt and the abortion providers it partners with must be investigated to determine exactly how and when these tissues are taken from the tiny bodies.
Pitt’s explanation of the procedures drew attention when it cited “ischemia time,” which describes when blood stops flowing to organs. It creates the real possibility that the babies were still alive, with a heartbeat, when the organs were taken.
If true, this is horrific and outrageous, and these are questions that demand answers.
Also unsettling were the racial overtones of Pitt’s plans, which included a desire for 50 percent of the body parts to be from minority babies, in an apparent nod toward the City of Pittsburgh’s racial diversity. In actuality, Pittsburgh is nearly 70 percent white.
But whatever it is that Pitt has been up to, it’s been going on for a long time and it has been lucrative.
The documents demonstrate that Pitt has received at least $2.7 million in federal Health and Human Services (HHS) funding to become a “tissue hub” for baby body parts for scientific research. And Pitt told HHS in 2015 that it has been “collecting fetal tissue for over 10 years.”
So, what does almost $3 million in federal funding buy?
Well, according to the documents, it bought Pitt a stockpile of fetal tissues, including “liver, heart, gonads, legs, brain, genitourinary tissues including kidneys, ureters and bladders.”
And if you feel like you heard something about these barbaric practices a few months ago, you probably did.
In May, some gruesome descriptions of Pitt’s experiments came to light during a hearing held by the Health Committee of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.
Researchers grafted the scalps from aborted babies onto laboratory mice to study reactions to pathogens and infections. The experiments also included attaching thymuses, livers, and spleens to the mice.
This is sickening stuff, straight out of Dr. Frankenstein’s lab.
The University insists it does not use state money for such research, although federal funds include taxes paid by Pennsylvanians, of course.
The study involving transplanting human baby body parts into rodents, incidentally, was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is run by Dr. Anthony Fauci, of whom you may have heard.
And whether coincidentally or not, at the very same time this has been going on at one of Pennsylvania’s most prominent institutions of higher education, Democrats have stepped up their promotion of the abortion culture of death.
On August 3rd, Gov. Tom Wolf tweeted in support of abortion and included the phrase “Abortion is health care.”
Three days later, Attorney General Josh Shapiro, perhaps unwilling to be beaten to the extreme left by anyone, tweeted simply, “Abortion is healthcare,” without further explanation or elaboration.
Left unanswered there is what kind of healthcare the aborted baby is afforded.
Those tweets make it appear that the word had gone out from the abortion industry that it expected cover from its dependable soldiers in the Democratic Party. And Wolf and Shapiro were happy to oblige.
It has been a long time since Bill Clinton used the phrase “safe, legal and rare” to describe his attitude toward abortion. Today’s leftists have moved from merely supporting the availability of abortion to endorsing it as a desirable outcome.
But the revelations from the University of Pittsburgh experiments ought to give everyone pause, no matter your personal opinion on abortion.
There must be a serious and unflinching inquiry into what is being done at a state school with public resources.
And I promise this: If public universities perform such obscene experiments with taxpayer dollars when I’m governor of Pennsylvania, they will be met with swift and decisive action and they won’t like it. We will treat every human life with the dignity and respect it deserves.
Former mayor and congressman Lou Barletta is a Republican candidate for governor of Pennsylvania.