Graphic Congressional Hearing Puts a Face on Harvesting Aborted Baby Organs

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) speaks to reporters in Washington on Oct. 12, 2023. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) takes issue with calling abortion “women’s health care,” and to illustrate her point, she spent the first 10 minutes of a congressional hearing on Tuesday graphically describing the different types of abortions, and showing photos of the instruments used in the procedures.

That was only the beginning of a hearing filled with gruesome testimony, photos, and videos.

“We don’t really talk about abortion when we talk about abortion,” Ms. Greene said. “You usually see us … calling it women’s reproductive health care. I don’t think anything I described sounds like reproductive health care. As a matter of fact, it’s the exact opposite.”

Many people refuse to talk about abortion at all, she said.

“While we’re not condemning any woman at all—no women are being condemned today—we’re talking about what an abortion actually is; it’s the murder of a child. It’s the murder of a human being. And then, what happens to the human beings after they have been killed?” Ms. Greene said.

According to testimony, some end up as science experiments.

She was the host of the hearing, titled “Investigating the Black Market of Baby Organ Harvesting,” attended by Reps. Mary Miller (R-Ill.) and Chip Roy (R-Texas).

Ms. Greene said she invited every Republican member of Congress and every Democrat member on her oversight committee to the hearing, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio Cortes (D-N.Y.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.).

“None of them were willing to show up, in spite of the fact they constantly want to talk about so-called women’s reproductive rights, which is abortion. I think this is such an important issue to engage on. But if we’re going to talk about it, we have to really talk about exactly what it is in the goriest detail, because that’s what it is. It truly is gory, horrific, barbaric, but apparently very lucrative. And I think that’s the most disturbing side of it, other than it kills a human being.”

Biological Materials Transfer

David Daleiden, founder and president of the Center for Medical Progress and an investigative reporter, shared well-known clips of undercover videos he recorded in 2013 and 2015, showing Planned Parenthood employees talking about selling aborted baby body parts for research. And his group recently uncovered a contract between Planned Parenthood and the University of California, San Diego, a “Biological Materials Transfer Agreement” that exchanges access to “fetal and placental tissue, which are proprietary materials” of Planned Parenthood.

The university will give Planned Parenthood rights to patents and intellectual property developed by experimenting with them, the agreement said.

That could be worth millions of dollars in ongoing royalties, Mr. Daleiden testified.

“The abortion industry, led by Planned Parenthood, is a powerful special interest in our country. They fight to silence reporting on their black market of aborted baby organ harvesting,” he said. “The ongoing cover-up goes to the highest levels of our government. Kamala Harris, as the Planned Parenthood-endorsed attorney general of California in 2016, raided my apartment to seize hundreds of hours of unreleased undercover footage.”

Planned Parenthood went to court and won an injunction preventing the release of the remaining footage. Mr. Daleiden and his organization now face a $25 million fine in connection with this incident.

Box of Babies

Terrisa Bukovinac, a Democrat and founder of Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising (PAAU), talked about the March 25, 2022, incident at the Washington Surgi-Clinic, a late-term abortion business in the nation’s capital. She and PAAU’s director of activism Lauren Handy were there to engage in sidewalk counseling when they saw boxes being loaded onto a medical waste truck headed to a Maryland incinerator.

They told a worker there were aborted babies in the boxes and asked if they could have a box to give the babies a proper burial. Inside, they found the remains of 110 first-trimester babies and five later-term babies that appeared to have been in the second and third trimesters. They named each one, held a funeral mass with a Catholic priest, and buried the 110 first-trimester babies in a cemetery.

The women contacted the police through an attorney because the older five babies appeared to have been born alive or to have been subjected to partial-birth abortions.

During her testimony, Ms. Bukovinac showed a disturbing video of one of these babies being lifted out of a container. The infant boy was fully formed, with placenta and cord still attached. He was curled up roundly in the fetal position.

They asked police to take the babies, have an autopsy performed, and learn if they were legally or illegally aborted. While police did collect the babies, that same day, the FBI arrested Ms. Handy and charged her with a violation of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act for an October 2020 incident at the same abortion business, where pro-life activists held a sit-in. For that, Ms. Handy and others with similar charges were found guilty of violating the FACE Act and have been in federal prison for seven months, awaiting sentencing.

Each faces up to 11 years in prison for participating in that sit-in. No one has been charged in connection with the suspected partial-birth and late-term abortions.

“My colleagues are literally in jail right now under the FACE Act for totally nonviolent, peaceful sit-ins that are similar to many other social justice movements, and those [other] people are not facing these kinds of charges,” Ms. Bukovinac said. “We’re seeing the total weaponization of the law.”

She then talked about what she has learned about research on aborted babies, and showed that in 2022, the federal government spent $57 million on fetal tissue research.

“Lauren and I have literally seen the victims of abortion extremism,” Ms. Bukovinac said. “We have held them in our own hands. We have looked at them face to face. They were not trash to be burned. They were not spare parts to be experimented on. They were human beings, just like you and me.”

Baby Scalps

In 2021, Judicial Watch and the Center for Medical Progress announced that they received 252 pages of documents from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that showed nearly $3 million in federal funds were spent on the University of Pittsburgh’s quest to become a tissue hub for human fetal tissues, ranging from six to 42 weeks gestation. A baby is considered full term at 40 weeks.

The University of Pittsburgh has a long and well-documented history of performing research on aborted babies. In an often spoken of experiment there, scientists removed the scalps of babies who had been aborted at five months gestation and sewed the skin onto the backs of lab rats, which then grew the babies’ hair on their backs. The experiment was paid for with money from the National Institutes of Health.

Much of the testimony covered known but troubling information about the uncomfortable way abortion is monetized in the United States.

Ms. Greene said the hearing was meant to begin to make changes.

“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.”