Baby Body Parts for Sale

Floor Speech

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Mr. PITTS. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to bring attention to the research that the Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives is conducting. I encourage everyone to examine the exhibits from the Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives' investigation on their Web site: energycommerce.house.gov/select-investigative-panel.

On April 20, 2016, 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.

This grave circumstance has caused considerable concern because one of the underpinnings and so-called safeguards of the statute that allowed for the donation of fetal tissue for transplantation and research was that this tissue would not be sold.

The author of the statute, former Congressman Henry Waxman, stated during floor debate in 1993:

This amendment would enact the most important safeguards to prevent any sale of fetal issue 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.

Yet this is what is happening today.

As seen on Exhibit B2, the ``Procurement Business''--the name is redacted--markets itself in its brochure as a way for clinics to make additional income by allowing procurement business technicians to collect fetal tissue 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 Investigative Panel on Infant Lives' investigation revealed that the procurement business technician performs every conceivable task in the harvesting process immediately after an abortion occurs. However, procurement businesses--essentially the middlemen between the abortion clinics on the one hand and the end users, the experimenters or researchers, on the other--still pay abortion clinics a fee, even though the clinics are not incurring any additional costs in the process.

Exhibit D1 shows the abortion clinic charged the middleman $11,365 for harvested baby parts--called POCs--and blood.

Exhibit D2 shows the abortion clinic charged the middleman, again, this time $9,060 for harvested baby parts, or POCs, and blood, even though the clinic did not incur any additional expense in the harvesting process. After obtaining the organs from the clinic, the middleman then made it easy for end users to purchase baby body parts.

Exhibit C3, the procurement business order form, or drop-down menu, for baby organs, illustrates just how easy this is. On the left side of the menu, one can choose: What type of tissue would you like to order? And under a multitude of options--a few of which are listed on the right--one could choose up here at the top, brains. These are little baby brains. Next you must select the number of specimens. And I suppose one could say six baby brains. Continuing down the list of questions, gestational range from start to end? One can select 16 to 18 weeks.

Then it asks: Add another tissue type? One could answer yes and scroll through the numerous options and have the opportunity to pick, for instance, female reproductive system and ovaries. You could then ask for five of those at 15 to 16 weeks. Then you could add, down at the bottom here, tongue.

So these are the options.

For crying out loud, this is the Amazon.com of baby body parts, a market for baby body parts. It is repulsive, outrageous, and I urge you to go to the Web site to see the exhibits.

This is a market for baby body parts where you get what you pay for.

This is utterly repulsive. Absolutely outrageous. Each one of these baby tongues or baby brains belongs to a little human baby. This business is nothing more than a fetal corpse market. How can anyone defend such an abhorrent practice?

These exhibits illustrate that, in both intent and practice, these clinics make money well above any actual costs they incur. They are making a profit. Go to the Select Panel's website energycommerce.house.gov/select-investigative-panel and see for yourself the revealing exhibits that show how these organizations may have broken the law and profited from this gruesome, inhumane practice of baby body part harvesting and trafficking.

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