Unholy Harvest

The sale of baby parts is big business in North America

BY CELESTE MCGOVERN

Elizabeth Woldemussie didn't want to discuss the gory details of her job. As a senior scientist with Allergan, Inc., a giant "technology-driven specialty health care company," she wouldn't even say what she does. For good reason.

Woldemussie's name appears at the top of an order form requesting "fetal eyes" from an abortion clinic. The "protocol," from a middleman firm that goes between clinics and researchers, specifically asks for "whole eyes - sterile," to be taken from aborted fetuses aged 20 to 24 weeks. The extractor is instructed to take the eyes from a "normal donor" and note age, sex and race.

"Ship on wet ice immediately by same day courier," it directs. "To be received by the researcher within 6 hours." The form provides both day and nighttime telephone numbers and informs that Woldemussie "will accept weekend deliveries."

Reached at her office in Irvine, Calif., Woldemussie confirmed that she was working with human fetal tissue a while ago, "but I'm not anymore." Asked where she got the tissue, she said, "I can't talk to the media. The company does not allow me to."

Will anyone at the company talk about this? "No, I don't think so." Did she ever order whole, sterile eyes? Dial tone. The order form with Woldemussie's name on it is one of about 50 forms obtained by Life Dynamics, Inc., a Denton, Texas-based pro-life group known for its renegade tactics and for recruiting "spies" in the abortion industry.

Life Dynamics was approached about two years ago by an abortion-clinic insider who uses the pseudonym "Kelly." In a videotaped interview with Life Dynamics taped last spring, Kelly appeared as a woman, with her back to the camera, wearing a wig, her voice electronically altered because, she said, she feared for her life.

Kelly is in fact a man who worked at the time for a Maryland-based private firm called the Anatomic Gift Foundation (AGF). His job was to procure fetal tissue for research. When babies started arriving alive for dissection, he went to Life Dynamics.

Kelly quit his job last spring after he provided Life Dynamics with more than 50 fetal-tissue order forms from researchers throughout North America, plus commercial price lists for babies and baby parts from two private companies that act as brokers between abortion clinics and researchers. Life Dynamics also taped interviews with Brenda Bardsley, AGF co-founder and president, as well as chief competitor Miles Jones, president and founder of Opening Lines.

Taken together, the evidence offers a glimpse into a world of vast, crassly competitive commerce in human tissue. It links abortion, especially late-term partial-birth abortion, to the booming industry in biotechnology and pharmaceuticals. The traffic in aborted babies flows worldwide into respected, even tax-funded, laboratories, including Canadian ones.

The research itself is usually for laudable goals, such as making vaccines or curing diseases such as Parkinson's, but it raises a myriad of ethical questions: Are some human beings killed to benefit others? Are women being exploited to support tissue collection? Who is profiting from the trade? And what are its social implications?

How Can it be Legal?

In both Canada and the United States, it is illegal to buy or sell any human tissue, including fetal tissue. But fetal-tissue brokers, the middlemen between abortion clinics and researchers, have schemes to circumvent the law (if they don't break it outright), and they know how to deceive couriers so that a package of dead babies ships more easily than a carton of cigarettes.

"How do I put this?" explained Bardsley to Life Dynamics president Mark Crutcher, who was pretending to be a buyer. "You don't buy the tissue. I mean, yeah, it's the way it works out, but what you're really buying is the service of us getting it to you the way you want it."

A glossy, color brochure from Opening Lines explains how abortionists can "turn your patient's decision into something wonderful" and offset overhead. The broker leases space from a clinic for harvesting tissue on site or trains clinic staff to harvest.

Miles Jones is especially eager to attract "fresh fetal tissue" consumers. His fees are "very attractive and lower than the industry average." An intact trunk (with/without limbs) costs $500, for example, $50 for eyes, and $999 for an eight- week brain. In a taped interview with Crutcher, Jones said he was actively pursuing fetal tissue sources in Canada where "I know where to get the bigger ones."

Bardsley said years of experience have taught her how to avoid "freak[ing] out" couriers; package labels are deceptively vague-"biomedical" rather than "fetal liver," for example. She's also advised abortion-clinic staff to take packages of baby parts home for pickup so as not to alarm couriers.

On the Record

The Life Dynamics exposé has already moved the U.S. House of Representatives to approve a "Sense of Congress Resolution" (H.R. 350) calling for "hearings concerning private companies that are involved in the trafficking of baby body parts." The House Commerce Committee is expected to begin hearings early this spring.

In Canada, politicians have preferred to ignore the issue. And champions of abortion-on-demand, like Joyce Arthur of the BC Coalition for Choice, have dismissed the material as unreliable because of Life Dynamic's reputation among pro-choicers and because the story was broken last August by the conservative magazine Alberta Report.

Investigation of the material provided by Life Dynamics confirmed the group's claims, however. Researchers named on nearly a dozen of the confidential forms confirmed that they ordered fetal tissue. Several, like Woldemussie, hung up or refused to explain their work, but a few spoke candidly.

One order form carries the name of a Canadian doctor, along with a request for an International Fedex shipment of "16- to 24- week lungs (trachea not required)" to study "molecular mechanisms of fluid reabsorption in human fetal lung." Significance: "Respiratory Distress Syndrome . . . a major cause of death in premature infants." The memo adds: "Bill our account."

Contacted last August at his office, this doctor confirmed that he was doing research on immature lungs two years earlier, with a Medical Research Council Grant. But he added, "I don't do that anymore. Asked if he used human tissue, he replied, "Yeah," then changed his mind. "Well, we were doing genetics mainly . . . Where are you getting your information? We were using cell lines." Asked if he had ever ordered fetal lungs from the U.S., he said, "I have to go," and hung up abruptly.

Medical Research Council grants to research with human fetal tissue account for several millions of tax dollars, according to the 1993 report of the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies." Another Canadian doctor reportedly has used fetal tissue in his lab where it is transplanted into the brains of Parkinson's patients. He allegedly received a $90,042 grant from the Medical Research Council for 1999-2000.

The report also notes that the largest traffickers in human tissue are pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms who use it primarily for vaccine manufacture, virus studies, and drug testing. The human polio virus was developed by Philadelphia's Wistar Institute in the 1950s using aborted fetal tissue, and the vaccine is still grown on cells from an aborted baby. One of the more current order forms provided by Life Dynamics is from the Wistar Institute. Two are from SmithKline Beecham, a major vaccine manufacturer.

Another protocol came from Dr. John F. Krowka, immunologist at the California Department of Health Services in Berkeley. He had ordered livers, thymus and/or skin of 18- to 24-week-old fetuses.

"I've been working with fetal tissue in the context of HIV since 1990," he said. Krowka explained that fetal liver and thymus are surgically implanted under the kidneys of "severe combined immuno-deficient mice" where the tissue grows into a human thymus that can be studied.

Fetuses of 18-24 weeks are used, he said, because "that provides the largest amount of tissue. We use the oldest possible tissue. By law we can't get anything greater than 24 weeks." Regarding the ethics of using aborted babies, Krowka said, "Naturally, we're concerned about the sensitive nature of the issue. We have great respect that this is human tissue. We get them through a broker so we don't influence the [woman's abortion] decision."

Gruesome Work

The order forms themselves suggest procurement horrors. Two from researcher Rosario Hernandez, now working in St. Louis, request "whole eyes" from fetuses nine to 24 weeks old. One specifies "Brain-dead, non-cadaver." George Dodge, a scientist at Thomas Jefferson University, requested a shipment of four to six "intact leg[s]," including "entire hipjoint" from 22- to 24-week-old fetuses, "to be removed from fetal cadaver within 10 minutes."

Kelly's testimony provides the gruesome details of daily work for AGF:

"We would get a generated list each day to tell us what tissue researchers, pharmaceuticals and universities were looking for. Then we would go and look at the particular patient charts-we had to screen out anyone who had STDs [sexually transmitted diseases] or fetal anomalies. These had to be the most perfect specimens we could give these researchers for the best value that we could sell for."

On another occasion, a doctor presented Kelly with perfectly formed 24-week-old twins, moving and gasping for air in a steel pan. When Kelly objected, he said, he watched the doctor fill the pan with water until it ran over the babies' mouths and noses.

"That's when I decided it was wrong," he said.

24-Hour Service

For 35 years Alan Fantel has operated the National Institute for Health's Laboratory for Embryology at the University of Washington at Seattle. The lab offers a 24-hour collection service at abortion clinics and hospitals throughout the country. Fantel wouldn't say how many "specimens" his lab picks up in a week, but he acknowledged that it has provided fetal remains to "thousands" of researchers over the years, including "many" Canadians.

"Certainly the demand for [fetal tissue] has grown," he said. "My suspicion is there's probably a lot more on the private side."

Kelly's allegations that babies are vivisected to provide research material are "absolutely false," Fantel said. "It just doesn't happen. You won't find anyone wanting tissue that late."

When read an order form requesting intact organs from late fetuses, Fantel responded: "Oh, yeah. There are certainly people who want later specimens. If the specimens came here, I'd have no problems providing it."

Did he ever provide late-term fetuses to researchers? "Never," he said. "Our specimens are very tiny. They're in 100,000 pieces by the time I get them."

What about his 1994 advertisement that still appears on the Internet offering tissue "between 40 days and term?"

"That was probably a mistake. We just don't see late tissue anymore." Doctors use potassium chloride injections to ensure babies are not born alive these days, he suggested.

Did the lab ever get late specimens?

"Thirty years ago there were a lot of hysterotomies [mini C-section abortions] and a lot of intact fetuses [were] delivered. Frankly, I'm not even sure if we provided them. We can't work with viable fetuses. That's the nature of the law."

Thirty years in the business have given Fantel plenty of time to meditate on his line of work.

"To me, there is no moral issue here," he said. "My father died of Alzheimer's and a close personal friend died of breast cancer at the age of 32. If it's a choice between seeing this tissue literally go down the drain and using it, there's no question in my mind that it would be absolutely criminal, sinful, to throw it out."

Not everyone in the fetal-tissue research community shares Fantel's zeal.

Geneticist and pediatrician Stephen Bamforth runs a fetal-tissue bank at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Bamforth and his colleagues must pick through the remains of 10- to 12-week-old fetuses for their hearts and eyes, from which they carefully isolate genetic material and transport it to researchers at other universities.

"The humanity is always before us," confessed Bamforth. "If society said this research is not acceptable, of course, we would immediately desist. It's not something that I do happily."

Originally published in the March 2000 issue of the Canadian Citizen magazine.