[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 21]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page 31285]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                      OFFERING BODY PARTS FOR SALE

                                 ______
                                 

                       HON. CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH

                             of new jersey

                    in the house of representatives

                      Thursday, November 18, 1999

  Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Mr. Speaker, I would like to commend to the 
attention of my colleagues this disturbing article by Mona Charen, 
which appeared in the November 11, 1999 edition of the Washington 
Times. As the article itself states, ``This is not a bad joke. Nor is 
it the hysterical propaganda of an interest group.'' It is comprised of 
the personal recollections of a medical technician who worked for a 
medical firm engaged in selling the body parts of the victims of late-
term abortions. In her most chilling descriptions, she relates the 
means by which children born alive are killed, so that their bodies may 
be sold for profit. On this life and death issue, I urge my colleagues 
to consider this woman's words for themselves:

               [From the Washington Times, Nov. 11, 1999]

                      Offering Body Parts for Sale

                            (By Mona Charen)

       ``Kelly'' (a pseudonym) was a medical technician working 
     for a firm that trafficked in baby body parts. This is not a 
     bad joke. Nor is it the hysterical propaganda of an interest 
     group. It was reported in the American Enterprise magazine--
     the intelligent, thought-provoking and utterly trustworthy 
     publication of the American Enterprise Institute.
       The firm Kelly worked for collected fetuses from clinics 
     that performed late-term abortions. She would dissect the 
     aborted fetuses in order to obtain ``high-quality'' parts for 
     sale. They were interested in blood, eyes, livers, brains and 
     thymuses, among other things.
       ``What we did was to have a contract with an abortion 
     clinic that would allow us to go there on certain days. We 
     would get a generated list each day to tell us what tissue 
     researchers, pharmaceutical companies and universities were 
     looking for. Then we would examine the patient charts. We 
     only wanted the most perfect specimens,'' That didn't turn 
     out to be difficult. Of the hundreds of late-term fetuses 
     Kelly saw on a weekly basis, only about 2 percent had 
     abnormalities. About 30 to 40 babies per week were around 30 
     weeks old--well past the point of viability.
       Is this legal? Federal law makes it illegal to buy and sell 
     human body parts. But there are loopholes in the law. Here's 
     how one body parts company--Opening Lines Inc.--disguised the 
     trade in a brochure for abortionists: ``Turn your patient's 
     decision into something wonderful.''
       For its buyers, Opening Lines offers ``the highest quality, 
     most affordable, freshest tissue prepared to your 
     specifications and delivered in the quantities you need, when 
     you need it.'' Eyes and ears go for $75, and brains for $999. 
     An ``intact trunk'' fetches $500, a whole liver $150. To 
     evade the law's prohibition, body-parts dealers like Opening 
     Lines offer to lease space in the abortion clinic to 
     ``perform the harvesting,'' as well as to ``offset [the] 
     clinic's overhead.'' Opening Lines further boasted, ``Our 
     daily average case volume exceeds 1,500 and we serve clinics 
     across the United States.''
       Kelly kept at her grisly task until something made her 
     reconsider. One day, ``a set of twins at 24 weeks gestation 
     was brought to us in a pan. They were both alive. The doctor 
     came back and said, `Got you some good specimens--twins.' I 
     looked at him and said: `There's something wrong here. They 
     are moving. I can't do this. This is not in my contract.' I 
     told him I would not be part of taking their lives. So he 
     took a bottle of sterile water and poured it in the pan until 
     the fluid came up over the mouths and noses, letting them 
     drown. I left the room because I could not watch this.''
       But she did go back and dissect them later. The twins were 
     only the beginning. ``It happened again and again. At 16 
     weeks, all the way up to sometimes even 30 weeks, we had live 
     births come back to us. Then the doctor would either break 
     the neck take a pair of tongs and beat the fetus until it was 
     dead.''
       American Enterprise asked Kelly if abortion procedures were 
     ever altered to provide specific body parts. ``Yes. Before 
     the procedures they would want to see the list of what we 
     wanted to procure. The [abortionist] would get us the most 
     complete, intact specimens that he could. They would be 
     delivered to us completely intact. Sometimes the fetus 
     appeared to be dead, but when we opened up the chest cavity, 
     the heart was still beating.''
       The magazine pressed Kelly again: Was the type of abortion 
     ever altered to provide an intact specimen, even if it meant 
     producing a live baby? ``Yes, that was so we could sell 
     better tissue. At the end of the year, they would give the 
     clinic back more money because we got good specimens.''
       Some practical souls will probably swallow hard and insist 
     that, well, if these babies are going to be aborted anyway, 
     isn't it better that medical research should benefit? No. 
     This isn't like voluntary organ donation. This reduces human 
     beings to the level of commodities. And it creates of doctors 
     who swore an oath never to kill the kind of people who can 
     beat a breathing child to death with tongs.

     

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