Live Tissue Harvesting

This article contains graphic distressing content and is not for children to read.

Live fetal experiments and tissue extraction occurred from the 1950s to the present day for the purpose of general fetal tissue research. It is likely that some of the hundreds of fetuses that were used for vaccine research and development were amongst these, and subjected to tissue procurement whilst alive. Thus fetal tissue vaccines have caused special harm to such children, above and beyond their simple murder: they’ve been invovled in torture prior to murder. Sentencing in a criminal trial with an adult would reflect this.

Ethics & Cultural Background

The whole area is full of euphemism to conceal the barbarity of what happens, so I record some of the ethical mindset of the day and individual operators so you can know they don’t consider the baby a human life, and inhuman treatment inevitably follows…

Background and pro-life ethics

Prior to 1975, when many of the vaccine related abortions were undertaken, there is a wealth of dark material, because the culture of human experimentation was far gone:

“[T]he National Research Act of 1974 (Public Law 93-348) [was] prompted chiefly by two disturbing revelations: The U.S. Public Health Service’s decades-long involvement in the grossly unethical Tuskegee syphilis experiment, in which poor African-American men were deliberately left untreated to observe the progress of the disease; and grotesque experiments using children intended for abortion after the Roe v. Wade decision. The new law created a moratorium on federal funding of fetal research until the commission’s advice could help produce new regulations.”¹

In 1975 the US Department of Heath, Education and Welfare published a report entitled: “Research on the Fetus”. One of the commissioners, foreseeing problems both from the past happenings and future projections, wrote a dissenting opinion thus:

“No research should be permitted on a fetus-to-be-aborted that would not be permitted on one to go to term… The argument that the fetus-to-be-aborted ‘will die anyway’ proves too much. All of us ‘will die anyway.’ A woman’s decision to have an abortion, however protected by Roe and Doe in the interests of her privacy or freedom of her own body, does not change the nature or quality of fetal life… We do not subject the aged dying to unconsented experimentation, nor should we the youthful dying… Is it the mere youth of the fetus that is thought to foreclose the full protection of established human experimentation norms? Such reasoning would imply that a child is less deserving of protection than an adult. But reason, our tradition, and the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights all speak to the contrary, emphasizing the need of special protection for the young.”²

Concerning the three dissenting opinions of 1988 Human Fetal Tissue Transplantation Research Panel:

“They argued that the morality of such research could not effectively be separated from the moral issue of abortion, especially when researchers must collaborate closely with abortion providers to obtain tissue for research; that a woman deciding for her unborn child’s death cannot give morally valid consent to use of his or her remains for research; and that expanded research use and potential clinical use of such tissue would increase the number and public acceptance of abortions.”³

“Our continuing disagreements on fetal research, abortion or the nontreatment of seriously handicapped newborns result not from a lack of facts or want of shared principles, but from diverging visions of what it means to be human and of the nature and purpose of human life.”⁴

“The source of the medical dilemma surrounding live fetal research is the status of the living aborted fetus and the doctrine of informed consent. The situation may be viewed as a confrontation between the ethics of utilitarianism and humanitarianism.”⁵

Alternative Ethics, Alternative Practice

Dr Gaull’s Ethics: “Rather than it being immoral to do what we are trying to do, it is immoral — it is a terrible perversion of ethics — to throw these fetuses in the incinerator as is usually done, rather than to get some useful information.”⁶

Dr Gaull’s Practice: “[He] injects radioactive chemicals into fragile umbilical cords of fetuses freshly removed from their mother’s womb in abortions. While the heart is still beating, he removes their brains, lungs, livers, and kidneys for study.”⁷

“Since we know we are going to destroy, dismember and discard the fetus in a procedure known as abortion, it seems a small indignity to expose it to rubella vaccine just prior to that termination. The medical ethic ‘do no harm’ would, of course, be violated but we have already violated that principle when we accepted the concept of abortion. The ultimate harm of destroying the fetus trivializes that which precedes it.”⁸

“…with prostaglandins, you can arrange the whole abortion so [the baby] comes out viable in the sense that it can survive hours, or a day… It is not possible to make this fetus into a child, therefore we can consider it as nothing more than a piece of tissue.”⁹

“Once society’s declared the fetus dead, and abrogated its rights, I don’t see any ethical problem … Whose rights are we going to protect once we’ve decided the fetus won’t live?”¹⁰

Methodology constraints

In an ideal world, if you have no ethical concerns and are just after viable tissue, you’d remove the desired organs from a live fetus outside the womb every time. You’ll note this, and so don’t be surprised if it happens, and no one is too worried.

Fetal tissue must be taken within minutes

“Fetal tissue for transplantation must be ‘harvested’ within a few minutes of delivery… Drugs which reduce fetal physiological activity need to be avoided. The fetus is therefore in as alive and aware a state as possible when being opened.”¹¹

“In order to sustain 95% of the cells, the live tissue would need to be preserved within 5 minutes of the abortion. Within an hour the cells would continue to deteriorate, rendering the specimens useless.”¹² Dr. C. Ward Kischer, Embryologist and Emeritus Professor of Anatomy; Specialist in Human Embryology, University of Arizona College of Medicine (Tucson, Arizona)

“The correct way consists in having recourse to Caesarian section or to the removal of the uterus. Only in this way can bacteriological sterility be guaranteed. In either case, then, to obtain embryo cells for culture, a programmed abortion must be adopted, choosing the age of the embryo and dissecting it while still alive to remove tissues to be placed in culture media.”¹³

Fetuses are carefully selected

This also provides an additional incentive to be sure the fetus tissue does not degrade, significant time has already been spent selecting them, and for them to be ‘wasted’ by being killed whilst still in the mother’s womb is a compounding incentive to deliver them alive. How else can you be sure you’d get the babies remains out in time to access and harvest viable tissue?

“This fetus was chosen by Dr. Sven Gard, specifically for this purpose [genetic purity]. Both parents are known, and unfortunately for the story, they are married to each other, still alive and well, and living in Stockholm, presumably. The abortion was done because they felt they had too many children. There were no familial diseases in the history of either parent, and no history of cancer specifically in the families.”¹⁴

Abortion procedure adapts to the requirements for tissue

The creation of the cell strain WalVax-2 in 2015 led to concerns being raised over:

“Questionable complicity between the doctors who performed the abortion and vaccine researchers who benefited from obtaining freshly aborted fetal lung fibroblast tissue.

“Ethicists have universally insisted that, in the development of viral vaccines from aborted fetal tissue, there should be no collusion between the woman who has decided to abort her baby (and, by extension, the doctors doing the abortion) and the researchers…

“By extension, the involved physicians performing the abortion should not deviate from the normal method of aborting the fetus (in the case of a three month fetus, a D&C) just so they might provide ‘optimal fetal tissue’ for the vaccine researchers. But this is what the doctors did in aborting the 3-month old female fetus whose tissue eventually proved to produce the best diploid cell strain out of the batch of 9 aborted fetuses for the Walvax-2 cell substrate. They employed a special means of induction (the water bag method) so they or someone they delegated, could deliver to Bo Ma et al intact fetal cadavers with fresh organs which would facilitate, in turn, the ready harvest of the needed fetal fibroblast lung tissue from which they developed the human diploid cell strain conducive to the growth of the respective viruses (rabies, hepatitis-A and varicella [chicken-pox]).¹⁵

“In 2016 Dr. Goldstein said the morality of abortion itself is a separate matter because the tissue available afterwards ‘would otherwise be discarded.’ But that assumption now seems naïve in light of the videos released by David Daleiden and his colleagues, in which Planned Parenthood officials were pleased to make friendly arrangements with tissue retrieval companies in advance – including offers to change their abortion methods to obtain usable tissue and organs. The issue does not seem to be solely one of complicity after the abortion.”¹⁶

Sometimes babies are born alive and then dissected

The early years of research

“It was obtained under sterile precautions at the time of abdominal hysterotomy for therapeutic indications. Embryos of between 12 and 18 weeks gestation have been utilized. Rarely tissues were obtained from stillborn fetuses, or from premature infants at autopsy… Embryonic tissues were prepared in the following manner. Whenever possible the embryo was removed from the amniotic sac under sterile precautions, transferred to a sterile towel and kept at 5 C until dissected.” 1952, Nobel laureate polio researchers, Drs Enders and Wells¹⁷

“Human embryos of two and one-half to five months gestation were obtained from the gynaecological department of the Toronto General Hospital. They were placed in a sterile container and promptly transported to the virus laboratory of the adjacent Hospital for Sick Children. No macerated specimens were used and in many of the embryos the heart was still beating at the time of receipt in the virus laboratory.”¹⁸

“For example, he talks about how in Sweden they have been puncturing the sac of a pregnant woman at let us say 14 to 16 weeks, and then they put a clamp on the head of the baby, pull the head down into the neck of the womb, drill a hole into the baby’s head, and then put a suction machine into the brain and suck out the brain cells. And this is directly from his book. Healthy human fetuses from 7 to 21 weeks from legal abortions were used. This is in Sweden. The conception age was estimated from crown rump length and so on. Fetal liver and kidney were rapidly removed and weighed. Now at 21 weeks, what they were doing, or 18 weeks, or 16 weeks, was what is called prostaglandin abortions. They would inject a substance into the womb. The woman would then go into mini-labor and pass this baby. 50% of the time, the baby would be born alive, but that didn’t stop them. They would just simply open up the abdomen of the baby with no anesthesia, and take out the liver and kidneys, etc.”¹⁹

“Experiments were being performed on near-term alive aborted babies who were not even afforded the mercy of anesthetic as they writhed and cried in agony, and when their usefulness had expired, they were executed and discarded as garbage.” At the Karolinska Institute, Sweden – where the WI-38 abortion for the rubella vaccine was performed²⁰

In between times

There are too many horrors to document, but you may wish to read a chapter of Pietro Croce’s book online and weep. An excerpt:

“One morning four of them were born, one after another. They cried, but I didn’t have time to kill them at once because I had too much to do that morning. I am not a hard man but a realist. You need to be a man of science and unemotional if you want to avoid having your judgment clouded by sentiment.”²¹

Recent Times

Fetal tissue research is happening all the time: the US’ NIH alone funded 164 projects using human fetal tissue in 2014.²²

Planned Parenthood and Court Testimony

There is clear indication of abortion methods being adjusted to fit tissue requests, and living babies delivered and dissected. Watch each of the three videos by CMP, which have sworn court testimony. Two excerpts (amongst numerous):

Q: In a normal situation you said the surgeon certifies the completeness of the procedure and then the technician goes and procures the tissue. In a situation where the fetus falls out does the same thing happen?
A: Certainly
Q: When the fetus falls out is anything done to the fetus, by the surgeon in your estimation?
A: No.
Q: Is the entire fetus intact in the lab when the procurement technician enters the lab?
A: Yes.
Q: How does a tissue procurement occur in one of these situations where the entire fetus is intact in the lab.A: We do a dissection.
Q: And just to be clear, you do dissection to obtain the tissues that are on the list for the day.
A: We do dissection to get the tissues that the researchers have requested.
Q: They have a heartbeat, don’t they, at the point they would fall out?²³

Q: By not alive do you mean that they were not moving.
A: Correct.
Q: And do you mean that they did not have a heartbeat.
A: It would depend.
Q: And when you say it would depend, what do you mean?
A: There are, I can see hearts that are in, not in an intact POC²⁴ that are beating independently.²⁵

WALVAX-2 (2015)

This is a recent vaccine that was obtained immorally. The 3 month old baby was almost certainly delivered and dissected alive, this is hidden beneath euphemistic language, such as “water bag method”. It also demonstrates the care with which suitable fetuses are selected. To screen and select a baby so carefully only, then to risk the loss of viable tissue by ensuring the babies death before it comes out of the mothers womb seems less than likely when all the incentives lie in the opposite direction.

“We obtained 9 fetuses through rigorous screening based on carefully specified inclusion criteria (see Methods section). The Walvax-2 strain of cells met all of these criteria and proved to be the best cell line following careful evaluation. Therefore it was used for establishing a human diploid cell strain. Walvax-2 was derived from a fetal lung tissue, similar to WI-38 and MRC-5, and was obtained from a 3-month old female fetus aborted because of the presence of a uterine scar from a previous caesarean birth by a 27-year old healthy woman.

“The fetal material was provided by the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology of Yunnan Hospital, with legal and ethical agreements from the donator. Before the study, we made strict and comprehensive inclusion criteria in order to guarantee a high quality cell strain: 1) gestational age 2 to 4 months; 2) induction of labor with the water bag method; 3) the parents career should not involve contact with chemicals and radiation; 4) both parents are in good health without neoplastic and genetic diseases, and with no history of human tissue or organ transplantation in the families traced for 3 generations; and 5) no infectious diseases. The tissues from the freshly aborted fetuses were immediately sent to the laboratory for the preparation of the cells.”²⁶

Stories consistent with the above — but with limited references

“In March of 1973, Connecticut’s Attorney General testified before the United States Supreme Court that, at Yale-New Haven Hospital, a living, viable aborted baby boy had been dissected without anesthesia until he finally died.

“A Dr. Kekomaki would take late-term aborted babies and, while they were still alive, would slice them open and ransack their organs without even giving them an anesthetic. A nurse observed one case and said that:

‘They took the fetus and cut its belly open. They said they wanted its liver. They carried the baby out of the incubator and it was still alive. It was a boy. It had a complete body, with hands, feet, mouth and ears. It was even secreting urine.’ Asked to explain the reasons for this atrocious ‘experiment,’ Kekomaki replied that ‘An aborted baby is just garbage.'”²⁷

“Monkey fetuses were more precious, as there were fewer of them available than human fetuses.”²⁸

Conclusion

If you think live fetal tissue procurement doesn’t still happen today, you are entitled to your viewpoint — but given everything indicates otherwise, is it a reasonable position to hold? Do you have a priori motives for holding it?

It seems that if you are pro-life, then you must also be against using fetal tissue experimentation from abortions. A natural stillbirth where the mother grieves, but the baby has already died is one thing. But if a child is to be murdered, that body belongs not to the mother or those who would profit from its use. It seems a small thing to allow the infant some respect, and having decided to murder her or him, at least not to compound that with the further abuse and use of their body.

Further, it also seems inevitable that many of the hundreds of fetuses used in fetal tissue vaccines would have been subject to live torture. So if you are pro-life, you are also anti-fetal tissue vaccines.

1
2020-10-05; Doerflinger, Richard; Charlotte Lozier Institute; Federal Bioethics Commissions and Bias Against the Unborn; https://lozierinstitute.org/federal-bioethics-commissions-and-bias-against-the-unborn/
2
1974; Louisell, David; Research on the Fetus: Dissenting Statement; https://videocast.nih.gov/pdf/ohrp_research_on_fetus.pdf
3
2020-10-05; Doerflinger, Richard; Charlotte Lozier Institute; Federal Bioethics Commissions and Bias Against the Unborn; https://lozierinstitute.org/federal-bioethics-commissions-and-bias-against-the-unborn/
4
1984-01; Tiefel, Hans; Bioethics Reporter; Fetal Experimentation in Conflicting Perspectives.
5
1974; Haley, Jacqueline; Haunting shadows from the rubble of Roe’s right of privacy; https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Haunting-shadows-from-the-rubble-of-Roe%27s-right-of-Haley/ae6e2946bd4dd5d03ac235a02b321c990e8b9575?p2df
6
1973-04-19; Gaull, Jerald; San Francisco Chronicle, p20; Operations on Live Fetuses; https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015077925645&view=1up&seq=78
7
1973-04-15; Washington Post — no link found (yet), but beyond dispute as obvious also in San Francisco Chronicle article:
1973-04-19; Gaull, Jerald; San Francisco Chronicle, p20; Operations on Live Fetuses; https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015077925645&view=1up&seq=78
8
1975-06; Gaylin, Willard & Lappé, Marc; Atlantic Monthly; https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11688031_Fetal_Politics_The_Debate_on_Experimenting_with_the_Unborn
9
1973-04-21; Dr. Durt Hirshhorn of New York’s Sinai Hospital; National Observer
10
FIND LINK
11
1988-03; Alderson, Priscilla; Journal of Medical Ethics; Review: The Foetus as Transplant Donor: Scientific, Social and Ethical Perspectives; https://www.researchgate.net/publication/25178659_The_Foetus_as_Transplant_Donor_Scientific_Social_and_Ethical_Perspectives
12
Personal interview with Debi Vinnedge July 2002, ALL Conference
13
“To obtain embryo cells, embryos from spontaneous abortions cannot be used, nor can those obtained by means of abortions performed via the vagina: in both cases, the embryo will be contaminated by micro-organisms. The correct way consists in having recourse to Caesarian section or to the removal of the uterus. Only in this way can bacteriological sterility be guaranteed. In either case, then, to obtain embryo cells for culture a programmed abortion must be adopted, choosing the age of the embryo and dissecting it while still alive, in order to remove tissues to be placed in culture media.
Given these premises, we face the dilemma of whether the deliberate systematic destruction of a human creature to obtain cell material can be justified, when it is recognized that this is of great interest to fundamental research and for the diagnosis of some human diseases. Are research and diagnosis of such great value that they justify the destruction of human beings?
A declaration of the Permanent Committee of Medical Doctors of the European Community and of the World Medical Association, published in 1985, states: ‘A human embryo cannot be considered as laboratory material but rather as a potential human being. The respect which is due to it implies, in consequence, that any research should be subject to the Helsinki and Tokyo Declarations, adopted in 1975 by the World Medical Association.’ Here is an extract from those declarations: ‘Concern for the individual should always prevail over the interest of science and society… the medical doctor has the duty to protect the life and health of persons undergoing biomedical research.’
It does not seem to me that these principles are compatible with programmed abortions carried out to obtain cell cultures. I cannot think otherwise, even if the women themselves want a termination and despite the fact that scientific, diagnostic and commercial interests have combined to create a climate of opinion which makes it seem desirable. The Geneva Declaration affirms that the doctor has the duty to take the greatest care to safeguard the life of a human being from its conception and will not, even under threat, use his knowledge to infringe humanitarian laws. Human embryos are the weakest members of the human family. They are the object of unjust discrimnination in the case of abortion. In contrast with what happens to other minorities that are discriminated against, human embryos have hardly anyone to defend them.
My overall conclusion, therefore, is that since animal experimentation is fallacious and misleading, and it is unethical to use foetuses obtained by elective rather than spontaneous abortion, we are obiged to conclude that all in vitro cultures of human embryo tissues should be abandoned, recognizing nevertheless that this kind of research is scientifically valid.
1986-04-26; Herranz, Gonzalo; Il Sabato, no.15; A reply to a previous article in the same journal by Paolo Cucchiarelli and Marina Ricci
Professor Herranz was, at the time, president of the Committee of Medical Ethics of Spanish Doctors and vice-president of the Permanent Committee of Medical Ethics of the European Community
14
G. Sven, S. Plotkin, K. McCarthy, Gamma Globulin Prophylaxis; Inactivated Rubella Virus; Production and Biological Control of Live Attenuated Rubella Virus Vaccines; Amer J Dis Child Vol 118 Aug 1969; https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abstract/503195; https://cogforlife.org/AmJDisChildMcCarthyGard.pdf
15
2016-08-01; Nebraska Coalition For Ethical Research; The Ethics of teh WALXVAX-2 Cell Strain; ttp://ethicalresearch.net/positions/the-ethics-of-the-walvax-2-cell-strain/
16
2020-10-05; Doerflinger, Richard; Charlotte Lozier Institute; Federal Bioethics Commissions and Bias Against the Unborn; https://lozierinstitute.org/federal-bioethics-commissions-and-bias-against-the-unborn/
17
1952-12-01; Weller, Thomas & Enders, John; Journal of Immunology 1952;69;645-671; Studies on the Cultivation of Poliomyelitis Viruses in Tissue Culture : I. The Propagation of Poliomyelitis Viruses in Suspended Cell Cultures of Various Human Tissue; https://www.jimmunol.org/content/69/6/645
18
1952-06; Thicke et al; Cultivation of Poliomyelitis Virus in Tissue Culture; Growth of the Lansing Strain in Human Embryonic Tissue, Canadian Journal of Medical Science, Vol. 30, pg 231-245; https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.1139/cjms52-031
19
From Dr Peter McCullagh’s book, The Fetus As Transplant Donor the Scientific, Social, and Ethical Perspectives, as reported by Dr. Bernard Nathanson about the methods used in harvesting fetal tissue in Sweden; Conference on Love, Life and the Family, Irvine, CA, April 6-10-1994; https://web.archive.org/web/20081013060750/http://www.vidahumana.org/english/family/harvesting.html
20
Dr Ian Donald described the experiments he had personally witnessed at Karolinska – all in the name of science
1988-06-01; Marx, Paul; Confessions of a Pro-Life Missionary; https://www.amazon.com/dp/155922021X
21
1974; Lichtfield, Michel & Kentish, Susan; Bebets au feu; interview with an English gynaecologist while posing as a potential buyer
22
2015-12-09; Wadman, Meredith; Scientific American: Nature; The Truth about Fetal Tissue Research; https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-truth-about-fetal-tissue-research/
23
https://youtu.be/lHh5IFXao-4?t=249
24
POC = Proof of Conception = Baby
25
https://youtu.be/lHh5IFXao-4?t=359
26
2015-04; Bo Ma et al; Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics; Characteristics and viral propagation properties of a new human diploid cell line, walvax-2, and its suitability as a candidate cell substrate for vaccine production; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4526020/
27
Our Sunday Visitor; Cardinal Relates Horror Story About Human Fetuses; March 29, 1987
28
1988 July/August; Kahabka, Mark; Fidelity Magazine; Eugenics Revisited, p13
29
Such a year of publication far from making it out of date, places it nearer to the period during which most vaccine fetuses were killed, thus providing excellent coverage of the relevant issues.