Unethical Research on Preborn Babies at University of Pittsburgh

I. Scalping Babies

1) University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) jointly operate a Pitt Tissue Bank, which supplies aborted fetal organs and tissue to Pitt researchers

• Nature study: “Human fetal tissues were obtained from the Health Sciences Tissue Bank at the University of Pittsburgh.”²
• Pitt.edu website: “The Pitt Biospecimen Core (PBC, formerly the Health Sciences Tissue Bank, HSTB)”³ . . . is funded and operated through a partnership between the Department of Pathology within the School of Medicine, the Office of the Senior Vice Chancellor for Health Sciences and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC).”⁴

2) Pitt/UPMC has multiple Planned Parenthood abortion providers on staff performing abortions and trains medical students to do so.

• Pitt OB/GYN Annual Report 2019: The most recent annual report of the Pitt OB/GYN Department lists Planned Parenthood of Western Pennsylvania as one of the Department’s “contracted care” sites, with four faculty members providing abortions for PPWP: Dr. Sharon Achilles, Dr. Beatrice Chen, Dr. Colleen Krajewski, and Dr. Audrey Lance.⁵
  • Dr. Sharon Achilles serves on PPFA’s National Medical Committee and is principal investigator for the Society of Family Planning’s Abortion Clinical Trials Network, and “Laboratory Director” for PPWP.
  • Dr. Beatrice Chen is the Medical Director for PPWP⁶ and the Director of Family Planning, UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital.^7,8
• Pitt hosts Planned Parenthood’s Ryan Residency Training Program⁹ and Family Planning Fellowship¹⁰ for training new abortion doctors.

3) Planned Parenthood abortion providers admit on undercover camera that they provide fetal tissue to the Pitt/UPMC fetal tissue bank

• Dr. Audrey Lance at Society of Family Planning meeting:¹¹
  Q: “Have you guys ever participated in specimen donation in the past?”
  A: “There’s a tissue bank at Pitt that we offer patients to donate to.”

II. Extracting Organs from Potentially Live Babies

Many of these inhumane experiments at Pitt are being federally funded through multiple grants from the NIAID office, run by Dr. Anthony Fauci. Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request made by David Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress, we see in Pitt’s application for federal funding (i.e. your tax dollars) that Pitt is actually obtaining babies to experiment upon who have been killed and harvested through elective abortions. Harvesting organs and performing experiments on innocent human beings whose death was elective — aborted for convenience and without medical necessity — is unethical. Yet that is exactly what is happening at Pitt.

If that’s not alarming enough, Pitt has set racial quotas on their tissue orders. In their application, Pitt indicates their desire for half of the babies being experimented on to be minorities.

And finally, there is some evidence that labor is being induced and babies are delivered in manners where the baby can still be alive when organ harvesting occurs. In Pitt’s application for federal funding, they ask for three million dollars to “significantly ramp up” its fetal tissue collections. In explaining why Pitt would be the best “distribution hub” for supplying large numbers of aborted fetal body parts to researchers, Pitt chillingly wrote that “We record the warm ischemic time on our samples and take steps to keep it at a minimum to ensure the highest quality biological specimens. We get feedback from our users and utilize this feedback to tailor our collection processes on a case-by-case basis to maximize the needs of investigators.” Later in the application, Pitt describes “labor induction” as a “procedure that will be used to obtain the tissue.”

Additionally, David Seldin, assistant vice chancellor for news at the University of Pittsburgh, made a prepared statement in response to how the tissue is obtained, saying in part, that ischemia time “refers to the time after the tissue collection procedure and before cooling for storage and transport.”

It’s of grave concern that if the time blood flow is reduced or cut off to access organs and tissue is happening after those organs and tissue are being procured. “If it says ischemia time starts after tissue collection, that means that the baby is still alive at the time that they’re harvesting the tissue,” says Dr. Christine Francis in a recent interview.

It’s bad enough that a publicly-funded university is engaging in such grotesque experiments using aborted babies. But now we’re talking about the alleged use of aborted babies that were alive while their kidneys or livers or hearts were cut out of their body. It’s a horror movie playing out in real life attached to Pennsylvania’s higher education system.

Pitt’s own words should spark a full investigation. There are some elected officials calling for a full investigation, including Pennsylvania Congressmen Mike Kelly, Glenn Thompson and Guy Reschenthaler, as well as the Pennsylvania House Health Committee Chair, State Rep. Kathy Rapp (R-Warren). State Senators Michele Brooks (R-Crawford), Scott Hutchinson (R-Butler), Scott Martin (R-Lancaster) and Judy Ward (R-Blair) have even introduced a bill to call for investigations into Pitt’s fetal research.

Yet despite this evidence, those in the positions to act have thus far been absent. Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen Zappala has done nothing. US Attorney Stephen Kaufman declined to comment. Attorney General Josh Shapiro, an extremely pro-abortion politician that has Planned Parenthood as a campaign donor, has given no response, except to tweet out his support for abortion-on-demand.