[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 6]
[House]
[Pages 8688-8689]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                TRUTH ABOUT THE BABY BODY PARTS INDUSTRY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from 
Missouri (Mrs. Hartzler) for 5 minutes.
  Mrs. HARTZLER. Mr. Speaker, today I rise to bring attention to the 
research that the Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives is 
conducting. On April 20 of this year, Select Investigative Panel on 
Infant Lives 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 the privacy of women may have been violated in the 
process.
  Let's take a look at what the panel found. First, and possibly the 
most shocking, is a Web site where one procurement business, whose name 
has been redacted, has set up an online order form. From this Web site, 
a user can select what type of parts they want: baby brains, baby 
tongue, scalp, reproductive organs. The quantity is then selected of 
the gestational period chosen. The user even has shipping options.
  This is truly appalling. This is online shopping for baby parts, and 
this procurement business has made it as easy as possible.

                              {time}  1030

  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 to your 
clinic.''
  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. 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 are making money off of this horrific act.
  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 be sold. Further, in 
1993, former Democrat Congressman Henry Waxman, who wrote the 
restrictions into law, stated on the House floor: ``This amendment 
would enact the most important safeguards to prevent any sale of fetal 
tissue for any purpose, not just the purpose of research.'' He went on 
and said: ``It would be abhorrent to allow for the sale of fetal tissue 
and a market to be created for that sale.''
  So what have these clinics done? Well, just the opposite, it would 
seem. This shows an abortion clinic charged the middleman $11,365 for 
harvested baby parts or what they call POCs, products of conception, 
and blood. Exhibit D2 shows 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.
  This is the very market Congressman Waxman called abhorrent, and he 
was right. It 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 Investigative Panel on Infant Lives 
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 in the abortion clinic.
  The technician then, without their consent, reviews the woman's 
medical records to see if their baby's age and gender match that day's 
order. If so, the technician then goes to the woman, befriends her, and 
coerces her to give consent by lying to her--and this is a

[[Page 8689]]

Planned Parenthood consent form--claiming that blood from pregnant 
women and tissue that had been aborted have been used to treat and find 
a cure--find a cure--for such diseases as diabetes, Parkinson's 
disease, Alzheimer's, 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 Investigative Panel on Infant Lives' investigation into 
this issue is already illustrating that the clinics are turning the 
sale of baby body parts into a business, and they are making a profit 
doing so.
  No woman should be treated this way. No woman should have her private 
medical records given to a for-profit company so they can use her for 
financial gain. These practices are deplorable, and they must end.

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