WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) –– Pro-life activists who have taken the lead in exposing the abortion industry’s complicity in fetal organ harvesting in recent years testified on Capitol Hill March 19 about their efforts, which, they said, need the people’s elected representatives to bring the force of law to bear against.
Starting in 2015, the pro-life investigative group Center for Medical Progress (CMP) began releasing a series of secretly recorded conversations with officials from Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation that set off a firestorm of controversy and a string of revelations about the abortion industry breaking multiple federal laws against profiting off human tissue, altering abortion procedures for the sake of procuring better tissue samples, and potentially even committing partial-birth abortions or infanticide, as well as video examples of abortion workers displaying callousness toward the humanity of the children their work killed.
In his testimony, David Daleiden, founder and president of CMP, detailed the beginnings of the story while also highlighting some of the most recent developments, which have continued steadily in the intervening near-decade despite falling off the national headlines.
“I’ve watched the handling of dismembered babies inside some of the biggest Planned Parenthood abortion centers in the country, while their ‘research’ officials discussed how to disguise the sales. I’ve met with dozens of Planned Parenthood’s top abortion providers at their lavish commercial abortion trade shows—sponsored by companies buying baby parts,” Daleiden said. “Sometimes, I actually saw them start to tear up describing the tiny brains and hearts and feet of premature babies that they dismember and brutalize before selling them, only to then steel themselves and shake it off, as they tried to suppress the heresy of human feelings that the dogma of industrial-scale abortion cannot allow.”
“I’ll never forget when early on in my research, a whistleblower from fetal body parts company StemExpress, told me about the biggest liver her lab had ever sold—from a baby aborted at 5 months at the Planned Parenthood in Sacramento, California,” he recalled. “They took the stem cells from the liver, put them in a vial, and sold them for $17,000 to another taxpayer-funded laboratory. Planned Parenthood says 75% of abortions take place because of financial problems. $17,000 might have been somebody’s rent money for the next year. But for the abortion clinics selling and the government-funded laboratories buying, that 5-month-old baby was worth more dead than alive.”
Daleiden also highlighted emails CMP revealed in December confirming that the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ (HHS’s) Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued a subpoena in 2021 for information pertaining to the fetal organ harvesting program at the University of Pittsburgh, but OIG never updated Congress or the public about what happened afterward.
He further noted that earlier this month, CMP revealed Planned Parenthood maintained a relationship with the University of California San Diego (UCSD) to exchange the body parts of aborted babies for “ownership of the university’s ‘patents’ and ‘intellectual property’” created through experiments on them, a highly lucrative arrangement despite the illegality of transferring aborted human fetal tissue for “valuable consideration.”
Additionally, Daleiden called out current Vice President Kamala Harris, who was Attorney General of California at the time the original baby-parts scandal broke, for complicity in a “cover-up” of the abortion giant’s crimes. Instead of prosecuting abortion-industry figures for the crimes exposed in California, Harris raided Daleiden’s home to seize his undercover footage and prosecuted him. Emails were later uncovered indicating that Harris’s office coordinated with Planned Parenthood on the situation.
In the years since, Daleiden and CMP were hit with various lawsuits and felony charges on claims of trespassing, misidentifying themselves with fake driver’s licenses, and recording people without their consent. CMP argued that the federal Racketeer Influenced & Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act had been misapplied, but in December they lost its final appeal of a nearly $16 million judgment against them. The U.S. Supreme Court had declined to intervene in October.
“The abortion industry, led by Planned Parenthood, is a powerful special interest in our country,” Daleiden said. “They fight to silence reporting on their black market of aborted baby organ harvesting, and the ongoing cover up goes to the highest levels of our government […] Aborted babies are only valuable for Planned Parenthood to harvest and sell and for government-funded laboratories to buy precisely because they are human beings just like us. But the message that our civilization needs more than ever right now is that the value of every human being is infinite.”
“At a time when powerful government and media forces are trying to silence this message and well-meaning public officials sometimes struggle to find their voice, it is imperative for the people’s house to reopen formal investigations of the black market in aborted baby organ harvesting so that taxpayer-funded entities can never put a price tag on human beings,” he urged.
Terrisa Bukovinac, founder of Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising (PAAU), also testified. In 2022, PAAU discovered the remains of five aborted babies in a crate outside Washington-Surgi Center in the nation’s capital. While the authorities again refused to investigate, an initial medical examination indicated that some of them died by infanticide and partial-birth abortion, both of which are illegal.
Again, however, instead of investigating, the federal government took action against the pro-lifers who exposed them. Last August, a D.C. jury found the pro-life activists guilty of conspiracy against rights and violating the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, for blocking access to Washington Surgi-Clinic in October 2020. They face more than a decade in prison, though their attorneys have vowed to appeal.
“The DOJ is spending their time instead prosecuting and jailing my friends for totally peaceful, nonviolent direct action when instead they should be going after killers who are committing federal crimes,” Bukovinac told the panel. She too called on Congress to investigate, specifically by subpoenaing Washington Surgi-Clinic abortionist Cesare Santangelo.
“We must call on the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services to enforce federal law and stop Planned Parenthood from their illegal activities, and we must stop funding these centers of death,” said Rep. Mary Miller (R-IL). Other lawmakers involved in the panel included Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Chip Roy (R-TX).
Neither the Obama, Trump, nor Biden administrations took action against any of the implicated abortion organizations over the revelations.