Young Frankenstein

No, not the Mel Brooks movie--the real thing.  Warning: if you have a weak stomach, this piece from 2006 will be a little too much.  Excerpts:

It’s the hidden side of medical research. A massive industry harvesting pieces of dead children for experiments, or transplanting into animals. IAN WISHART discovers the University of Auckland has imported body parts from American babies for a research project, and asks some hard questions...



According to former abortion clinic technician Dean Alberty, clinics were harvesting eyes, brains, hearts, limbs, torsos and other body parts for sale to the scientific market: laboratories wanting to test new drugs or procedures, or researchers trying to find the causes of genetic disorders or discover new ways of treating disorders like Parkinsons.

To make matters doubly embarrassing for authorities, the trafficking was taking place inside abortion clinics run by Planned Parenthood, the US affiliate of New Zealand’s Family Planning organization.

Alberty worked for a Maryland agency called the Anatomic Gift Foundation, which essentially acted as a brokerage between universities and researchers seeking body parts, and the abortion clinics providing the raw material. Alerted by the clinics about the races and gestations of babies due to be aborted each day, AGF technicians would match the offerings with parts orders on their client lists. Alberty and his colleagues would turn up at the abortions that offered the best donor prospects to begin dissecting and extracting what they needed before decay set in...

Alberty told of seeing babies wounded but alive after abortion procedures, and in one case a set of twins “still moving on the table” when clinicians from AGF began dissecting the children to harvest their organs. The children, he said, were “cuddling each other” and “gasping for breath” when medics moved in for the kill.

Alberty had been asked by a pro-life group, Life Dynamics, to provide information about activities in the clinics, and the issue caused enough national scandal to see an episode of ABC’s 20/20 devoted to it in March 2000...

...Pittsburgh-based researcher Suzanne Rini, who interviewed Ramsey and whose 1995 book Beyond Abortion: A Chronicle of Fetal Experimentation brought to light a body parts trade that’s existed since the 1950s, believes the very fact that scientists need the elixir of youth from fetuses may be the ethical catch-22 that kills the abortion industry. On the one hand, she says, medical researchers try to argue the foetus is not a live person. On the other, whether it’s a cure for Parkinson’s, diabetes, Huntington’s, MS or a range of other disorders, medical researchers claim the life in fetuses is the only thing that can save adults. But only if you kill the foetus first...

We asked ABR whether, for example, donating ‘mothers’ would be told their child’s organs would be used for eye studies, or for transplantation into animals for experiments?

“The law requires that we always state that it is possible that it may be used for important stem cell research, and if the patient asks specifically what it might be used for then that is explained to her verbally. The consent itself is somewhat generic except for the pluripotent stem cell use.” [our emphasis]

Based on Linda Tracy’s interview with Investigate, it now appears certain that no donating mother gave informed consent for her baby’s body parts to be transplanted into human/mouse hybrids, or injected into the veins of rats. Little wonder the US Government National Institutes of Health refused to release informed consent forms from ABR regarding those projects...

There's tons more where that came from. It's a long piece. It's also all unspeakable.