Congresswoman Vicky Hartzler gave a recent speech on the flood of the House of Representatives blasting the sales of aborted baby parts. The member of the special panel investigating Planned Parenthood and the sales of aborted baby parts provided shocking evidence and details about what is taking place.
Hartzler lent a voice to the women who may have been harmed or violated by the appalling practices of abortion clinics and fetal tissue procurement businesses. Watch her emotional speech below and read the transcript of her remarks:
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today, I rise to again bring attention to the research that the Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives is conducting.
Recently, my colleague and House Values Action team Chairman Congressman Pitts stood on this floor to highlight some of the outrageous acts being perpetrated by Big Abortion.
On April 20th, of this year, Select Panel Chairman Marsha Blackburn held a hearing on the “Pricing of Fetal Tissue” and found broad consensus among witnesses that federal law may have been violated when abortion clinics profited from the sale of baby body parts and, when possible, HIPAA privacy violations occurred.
Let’s take a look at some of what the panel found.
First, and possibly the most shocking is a website where one “procurement Business,” whose name has been redacted, has set up an online order form.
From this website, a user can select what type of parts they want—baby brains, baby tongue, scalp, reproductive organs…
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Then a quantity can be selected, in case one baby brain isn’t enough.
A start and end range of the gestational period can be chosen. The user even has shipping options!
This is truly appalling! This is online shopping for baby body parts…and this procurement business has made it as easy as possible.
But these procurement businesses are not doing this by themselves—they are only the middlemen in a transaction between the supplier, or abortion clinic, and the end user.
As seen on Exhibit B2, this “Procurement Business”, markets itself in its brochure to abortion clinics as a way for the clinics to make additional income by allowing the Procurement Business technicians to collect tissues and organs from aborted babies immediately after an abortion is completed.
The brochure uses the words, “Financially Profitable,” “Fiscally Rewards,” and “Financial Benefit.”
The Select Panel’s investigation revealed that the Procurement Business technician performs every conceivable task in the harvesting process, immediately after an abortion occurs.
For this, the procurement business is charged a fee by the clinic—even though the clinics are not incurring any additional costs in the process. Thus, they make more money off of these horrific acts.
It is important to note at this point that the underlying statute allowing for the donation of fetal tissue assumes the tissue would be for transplantations and research and would not to be sold.
Further, in 1993, former Congressman Henry Waxman, who wrote the restrictions into law, stated on the House floor, quote:
“This amendment … would enact the most important safeguards… to prevent any sale of fetal tissue for any purpose, not just the purpose of research. It would be abhorrent to allow for a sale of fetal tissue and a market to be created for that sale.”
So, what have these clinics done? Just the opposite it would seem.
Exhibit D1 shows that the Abortion Clinic charged the “Middleman” $11,365 for “harvested baby parts- called “P-O-Cs,” or “Products of Conception” – and blood.”
Exhibit D2 shows that the Abortion Clinic charged the “Middleman,” again, this time $9,060, for “harvested baby parts” and “blood” – even though the clinic did not incur any additional expense in the harvesting process.
Exhibit D3 – we have another $6,010 charged for baby parts and blood.
This is the very market Congressman Waxman called abhorrent. And he was right. This is abhorrent. How callous does one have to be to rob a baby of life and then charge others for the pieces of the corpse? This is beyond disturbing.
Just as disturbing, the Select Panel has also found that women’s privacy rights appear to have been violated in the process. After the online order form comes to the procurement company from a researcher, it goes to the procurement company’s technician who is embedded at the abortion clinic.
The technician then – without their consent – reviews the medical files of the women scheduled to have an abortion in order to assign the orders to the women whose babies match the gestational age and sex ordered.
The technician then goes to befriend the women and coerces them to give consent by lying to them, claiming the “blood from pregnant women and tissue that has been aborted has been used to treat and find a cure for such diseases as diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, and AIDS.”
As we know, this is not true.
From there, the procurement technician dissects the aborted baby in order to harvest the specific organs that were ordered and ships them off.
The Select Panel’s investigation into this issue is already illustrating, as Congressman Pitts and I have highlighted now, that clinics are turning the sale of baby body parts into a business, and they are making a profit doing so.
No woman should be used in this way. No woman should have her private medical records given to a for-profit company so they can use her for a financial gain. These practices are deplorable.
I encourage everyone to examine the exhibits from the Select Panel’s investigation on their website:
https://energycommerce.house.gov/select-investigative-panel
Go to the website and see for yourself these alarming exhibits showing how these organizations may have broken the law and profited from this gruesome, inhumane practice of harvesting and trafficking baby body parts.
The Select Panel will continue its work to ensure Americans know the truth about these despicable practices. They deserve the truth.
