Abortion is not about women’s health or rights. It is about murder, lies, and profit. Besides the money that can be made from the murder of an unborn child by abortion in the US or abroad by organizations like Planned Parenthood and its affiliates, there is also the money that can be made from the tissue and organs of the aborted unborn child.
On the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) website, Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) is listed as the affiliate in the United States. In 2012, IPPF held the 60th anniversary of its re-founding with PPFA president Cecile Richards as one of the keynote speakers, who proclaimed: “We are so proud to partner with IPPF as we build a new generation.” Build… kill… to some people it’s all the same.
The still-unfolding scandal of PPFA’s senior medical officers coldly negotiating to profit from the “donation” of organs from murdered unborn children has been devastating for IPPF’s US affiliate. What many may not know, however, is that the horrible revelations coming via viral internet videos released by the Center for Medical Progress are nothing new. The international abortion industry has been at this grisly trade for decades.
Dr. Kristina Gemzell Danielsson MD, an abortionist who is presently a member of the IPPF’s International Medical Advisory Panel, is a professor at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. In a 1987 New York Times article titled Fetal Tissue Implants in Brain Seen, Dr. Lars Olson of the same Karolinska Institute reported that they had conducted experiments in which human fetal tissue was implanted in the brains of mice.
To read the article today is to marvel at how its antiseptic language about animal experimentation and the provision of brain tissue from aborted children would undoubtedly be received today. The article’s description of the behavior of mice and monkeys who were harmed and monitored in the experiments would give rise to grand protests from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, yielding sympathetic coverage in the same paper. The same coverage would ignore the source of the “donated” fetal brain tissue – an ideologically necessary move that becomes harder with each video showing Planned Parenthood officials munching on salad while talking about the “crunchiness” of the procedure of crushing a tiny, living human being.
In his 1988 collection of essays, HLI founder Father Paul Marx OSB recounted: “In 1974, the great English gynecologist Dr. Ian Donald, who ‘invented’ ultrasound, told me of witnessing modern experiments at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute on large, living aborted babies, cringing with pain.”
Indeed, it is difficult to find any corner of the international abortion and population control movement that has not been complicit in this well-known trade. The Guttmacher Institute, a now-“independent” “reproductive health research” organization that began as the research arm of PPFA, still provides research that seeks exclusively to support IPPF and PPFA proposals and programs. In 2001, the Guttmacher Institute released a study titled Human Embryo and Fetal Research: Medical Support and Political Controversy, arguing that “Scientists have long recognized the promise of research involving human embryos and fetuses for the advancement of basic science.…”
Following the release of the troubling videos, IPPF Ireland is being asked “to distance itself from its parent group, The International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF)”, as reported by The Irish Times. It is a legitimate question to ask whether the IPPF affiliates around the world are not also involved, or eventually would be, given their relentless push for abortion in the practice of selling aborted fetal tissue and organs in the countries where they work. Even if the fetal tissue were “donated” it would remain a lucrative business to rely on abortion in the medical research field, whose “successes” could later be put on the global market.
The CMP videos make an eloquent case for ethical for-profit companies and medical research institutions to disengage from the use of unborn children as the source of commodities for trade. Not only for the grisly procedure that yields the desired human product – it is impossible to argue that the source of the “donated” brain is merely “a clump of cells,” as Planned Parenthood and its apologists routinely refer to the unborn baby. These companies must abandon the trade in fetal tissue due also to the ethical problem of seeing the unborn child as a further source of income.
Such divestment from this unethical trade could help to put a halt to the present push to strike down the legal protections for unborn children in foreign countries. There is further support for such divestment in the business community: The 2004 International Trade Administration of the United States Department of Commerce held that
Business enterprises today are expected to meet standards of responsible business conduct that go beyond what had been expected traditionally. Although people more often than not still speak of business in terms of products, jobs, and profits, it is understood and accepted across the globe that a business enterprise remains a member of its community. The pursuit of profits and economic progress is not a license to ignore community norms, values, and standards of respect, integrity, and quality.
HLI is just one of many organizations who have long raised concerns publicly about both the unspeakable crime of abortion and the obvious further ethical problems with trading in “donated” human organs. We should not be surprised that laws against such trade have done little to stop the practice, but we must use the opportunity of the conversation raised by the CMP videos to shed new light on this unacceptable and ongoing affront to human dignity.
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