What is happening to the countless babies that are aborted every year, and is the abortion industry even darker than we initially thought?

From The Christian Post. Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia sought answers this week about how the abortion industry handles the body parts of aborted babies, hearing testimony from activists who accused providers of violating federal law.

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On Tuesday, Greene led a hearing titled “Investigating the Black Market of Baby Organ Harvesting” alongside fellow Republican Reps. Chip Roy of Texas and Mary Miller of Illinois. David Daleiden of the Center for Medical Progress and Terrisa Bukovinac, founder of the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, testified during the hearing.

Greene said the purpose of the hearing is to begin making changes. She and her colleagues are not condemning women who have had abortions, Greene said, but attempting to answer what happens to unborn children after they are killed in an abortion.

“The biggest change that needs to be made is: there should be no baby slaughtered in their mother’s womb or partially born and slaughtered barbarically for their body to be sold,” Greene said. “I can’t imagine any American disagreeing with that.”

Here are three highlights from the hearing.

Greene plays CMP video footage

During the hearing, Greene played footage from several videos the Center for Medical Progress released in 2015, which drew national headlines and sparked a House probe into fetal tissue procurement practices at the time.

The videos purportedly show officials from the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood, agreeing to the illegal sale of aborted baby body parts. Planned Parenthood has maintained that the videos were deceptively edited.

Several of the videos shared during the hearing were some of the videos Daleiden and his colleagues secretly recorded at conferences with various abortion industry leaders, including facility directors and Planned Parenthood chief medical officers.

Daleiden alleged that the videos showed abortion industry workers discussing how much money they could make from selling tissue from aborted babies and expressing a willingness to skirt the law to obtain more intact aborted body parts to sell.

In one of the videos, a speaker at a seminar read various testimonies from abortion providers. One of the testimonies described an eyeball falling into the lap of the provider performing the abortion, prompting loud laughter from the event attendees.

The hearing also included a clip from a March 2022 recording that showed Bukovinac and her colleague Lauren Handy unboxing the human remains they obtained from the Washington Surgi-Clinic. In the clip, Handy and Bukovinac can be heard weeping after the former removed a fully-formed baby from one of the boxes.

In her opening statement, Bukovinac repeated the claim that she and Handy obtained the 115 remains after asking the driver of a Curtis Bay Medical Waste Services truck if they could take them and give them a burial.

The PAAU founder showed a picture of one of the five late-term babies her group named Harriet, arguing that the baby’s wounds suggest she may have been aborted illegally via a partial-birth abortion.

The activist also showed pictures of a Curtis Bay Medical Waste Services truck outside the Washington Surgi-Clinic on the day PAAU recovered the remains. The company has denied that it transports aborted remains and that its drivers handed over any boxes to the PAAU activists.

Bukovinac testified that the babies PAAU recovered were not to be used for research purposes, stating that their bodies likely would have been incinerated. The activist also noted during her testimony that Curtis Bay pleaded guilty last year to multiple charges, including failing to dispose of medical waste properly.

“They were not trash to be burned, spare parts to be experimented on,” Bukovinac said about the remains her group recovered. “They were human beings, just like you and me.”

Illegal activity

Daleiden and Bukovinac asserted throughout their respective testimonies that their work had uncovered illegal activity within the abortion industry.

The project lead at CMP called for subpoenas against the abortion workers featured in the footage his group recorded.

“The message that our civilization needs now more than ever is that the value of every human being is infinite,” Daleiden testified, calling it “imperative” for the House to reopen formal investigations into the harvesting of aborted baby organs.

The CMP president argued that investigations are necessary so “taxpayer-funded entities can never put a price tag on human beings.”

Likewise, Bukovinac wants a full investigation into Cesare Santangelo, the abortionist at the Washington-Surgi Clinic, and an autopsy of the five late-term babies. The activist cited undercover footage the pro-life group Live Action released in 2013 that allegedly shows Santangelo saying his facility would not provide medical care to an infant who survived an abortion.

The PAAU founder said Congress should hold “very thorough hearings” about Santangelo and his facility’s practices.

Experimentation

Another one of the issues discussed during the hearing is the use of body parts from aborted babies in scientific experiments.

Daleiden objected not only to using parts from aborted babies in research projects but also to what he described as an incentive for facilities to perform more abortions to meet the “experimental demand” for certain parts.

“So, it basically adds a second level of abortion quotas to the clinic’s operations,” Daleiden said.

Former abortion workers have claimed that Planned Parenthood sets abortion quotas for its facilities to meet each year. One former worker The Christian Post interviewed earlier this year claimed that a Planned Parenthood manager told her that abortion is how the corporation makes its money.

Daleiden highlighted recent reports from CMP, including documents obtained via a public records request that the group alleged earlier this month are proof Planned Parenthood violated federal law. The documents show Planned Parenthood agreeing to transfer “proprietary” aborted baby body parts to the University of California San Diego for “valuable consideration.”

CMP asserted in its report that transferring aborted human fetal tissue for “valuable consideration” is a federal felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison or a fine of up to $500,000.

According to the CMP founder, in the years since the contract’s establishment, some of UC San Diego’s financial backers began extending millions of dollars in grant support to Planned Parenthood. Daleiden cited this as an example of the “multiple streams of revenue” going to abortion facilities as a result of harvesting aborted baby body parts.

The pro-life activist also raised concerns about experiments using aborted baby parts at the University of Pittsburgh and how Planned Parenthood reportedly supplies the university with parts from abortions.

In a September 2020 study, researchers described using the parts of babies aborted at 18 to 20 weeks gestation to create humanized mice and rat models to analyze infections. Researchers grafted the aborted babies’ scalps onto the backs of rodents for the study.

During Tuesday’s hearing, Daleiden pointed to a December report CMP released concerning documents it obtained alongside the conservative activist group Judicial Watch. The documents appear to show that federal law enforcement officials opened an investigation into the university’s GUDMAP program.

In August 2021, CMP obtained a grant application with the help of Judicial Watch that the University of Pittsburgh submitted to the NIH to become a distribution hub for the GenitoUrinary Developmental Molecular Anatomy Project. Based on several statements the university made in the application, the pro-life group believes there is a possibility it may have harvested organs from aborted babies while they were still alive.

Daleiden noted during the hearing that there have yet to be any updates about the investigation described in the documents CMP released in December.

In 2021, the Washington, D.C.-based law firm Hyman, Phelps & McNamara released the results of its investigation into the university. The report stated that the University of Pittsburgh is “fully compliant with federal and state regulatory requirements” regarding fetal tissue research.

Pro-life advocates and Republican lawmakers, however, argue that the investigation did not go far enough.

At one point, Rep. Miller asked Daleiden if ethical alternatives are available, with the CMP founder pointing to blood from the umbilical cord as an alternative in certain cases.

Tara Sander Lee of the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute also asserted ethical solutions are available during a 2018 hearing titled “Exploring Alternatives to Fetal Tissue Research.” The scientist cited stem cells from cord blood in addition to fresh human tissue from adults as viable alternatives.

Another issue raised during the hearing is the amount of money the NIH spends on experiments using aborted baby body parts, with Daleiden voicing concerns about the NIH’s reporting. The pro-life activist claimed that the NIH “self-reports” how much it spends on funding such experiments.

The pro-life activist testified that the NIH did not list the baby-scalping experiment, which Daleiden noted was supported by NIH grants. According to the CMP founder, the NIH did not report those grants in its public database.

“It does not seem to capture all of the fetal experimentation money that is being spent,” Daleiden told lawmakers.

The unborn are under attack in our nation. In the comments, share with other intercessors your prayers for America’s most vulnerable.

(Used with permission. By Samantha Kamman from The Christian Post. Photo Credit: ninjaMonkeyStudio/Getty Images Signature via Canva Pro)