Newly uncovered documents reveal more details about Planned Parenthood’s partnership with researchers at the University of California at San Diego, including the collection of “tissue” from potentially viable unborn babies.
The documents, obtained recently by the Center for Medical Progress, show Planned Parenthood agreed to supply aborted “fetal material” to researchers in exchange for the “valuable consideration” of owning any “patents” and “intellectual property” developed from the experiments, according to a news release.
“These barbaric and prima facie criminal projects are getting approved because of total negligence from government actors in the face of the historic political power of the abortion industry, led by Planned Parenthood,” the investigative group’s founder David Daleiden told The College Fix in a recent email.
Researchers at the public university wanted as many as 2,500 aborted babies up to 23 weeks gestation, according to one document, a 2018 “Research Plan” approved by the university’s Institutional Review Board.
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The plan also specifies that the aborted babies may be “nonanomalous,” or healthy.
“We will collect tissues from fetuses ranging from 4 to 23 weeks gestational age from subjects undergoing elective surgical pregnancy termination at Planned Parenthood in San Diego,” the plan states.
At 23 weeks, these were “VIABLE,” “preemie-age babies,” Daleiden wrote in a recent post on X.
He also said the abortion method described in the documents likely means the babies were aborted by “either intact partial-birth abortions or full delivery of live preemies.”
In the documents, obtained through an open records request, the Center for Medical Progress also found discrepancies between the Spanish and English language consent forms given to pregnant mothers when asked to donate their aborted babies’ bodies to research.
The English form told patients: “I understand that the donated blood, tissue, or their derivatives may have significant therapeutic or commercial value. I consent to such uses.”
However, the “commercial value” disclosure was left out of the Spanish form, according to the documents.
UC San Diego’s Institutional Review Board approved both consent forms for use from 2017-2020, according to the Center for Medical Progress’s investigation.
Daleiden told The Fix he wants to see President-elect Donald Trump take action to end the barbaric experiments.
“The incoming Trump administration must terminate all federal funding of Planned Parenthood and stop all government-sponsored experiments on aborted babies, to start,” he said.
He also called on the Department of Justice “to pursue vigorous enforcement actions against the entities involved in such flagrant violations of the civil rights of pregnant women and their infant children.”
The Fix reached out to media relations at UC San Diego twice in the past two weeks by email, asking for the university’s response to the investigation. The university did not reply.
Concerns have been raised about the use of aborted babies’ body parts in research for years at UC San Diego and other public universities across the country.
At the University of Pittsburgh, for example, pro-life advocates have been demanding answers since researchers published a study in which they attached scalps from aborted babies to rodents to study the human immune system, The Fix reported.
Daleiden and others also believe Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the U.S., is financially benefiting from its partnerships with university researchers. Federal law prohibits the sale of human tissue.
However, the abortion provider repeatedly has denied selling “fetal tissue.”
Media relations representatives at Planned Parenthood did not respond to two requests for comment from The Fix within the past two weeks, asking about the newly uncovered documents.
Robert Byrd, executive coordinator of Pro-Life San Francisco, told The Fix many people just do not want to believe these experiments are happening.
“One big challenge to exposing the legal and criminal enterprises in the field of fetal organ harvesting and aborted fetal tissue research is rejection,” Byrd said in a recent email.
For years, his organization has been drawing attention to similar research with aborted babies at the University of California at San Francisco.
“People will refuse to believe any of this is going on, even if all you are doing is referencing the legally allowed practices and quoting directly from the people engaged in it (from published studies in medical journals and the NIH website),” he said.
“We have seen this stubbornness in action when pamphleting on UC San Francisco campuses,” Byrd told The Fix. “UCSF, by the way, leads the medical field’s abortion advocacy nationwide, which could explain some of the hostility there.”
“The concept of aborted fetal tissue research is so bewildering, that denial is a natural reaction from many. But refusing to take literature with sources is another level,” he said.
Another challenge is “misreporting and miscommunication,” he said. “Outlets that aren’t pro-life can misread statements from our movement due to the fact we use different vocabulary than them.”
In one example, he said his organization’s “work against fetal organ harvesting in our local area was maligned by Politifact a few years ago in a poorly researched article that only served to muddy the waters.”
He encouraged “pro-lifers to always speak clearly on this issue, as there are so many moving parts that you don’t want to get mixed up. For me, that has required studying the sources slowly and journaling along the way.”
He said Pro-Life SF and the Center for Medical Progress both provide “a trove” of documents on their websites, obtained through public records requests, that people can read to learn more.
LifeNews Note: College Fix contributor Samantha Swenson is a graduate of Liberty University where she received a BS in law and policy: pre-law. She is attending Widener University Commonwealth Law School in pursuit of a juris doctorate beginning in the fall of 2024. This column originally appeared at The College Fix.
