HOW FAR DOWN

How Far Down the Slippery Slope Are We?
by William Norman Grigg

‘‘We are simply allowing something which is destined for the incinerator to benefit mankind." Were those words spoken by Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi "doctor," to justify his gruesome experiments on doomed Jews at Auschwitz? No. They were uttered by a Lawrence Lawn, a Canadian physician, in defense of experiments he conducted using live unborn children provided by a private abortion clinic. But Lawn, speaking in 1968, insisted that he "would not dream of experimenting with a viable child," meaning an unborn infant capable of living outside of the mother’s womb. But even this insignificant ethical restraint has been demolished in the age of "partial-birth" abortion.

In the summer of 1999, pro-life activist Mark Crutcher, director of Life Dynamics, Inc., made public the videotaped testimony of a woman cloaked in the pseudonym "Kelly," who had worked for a company called the Anatomic Gift Foundation. She was stationed at a Planned Parenthood clinic, where her job was "to dissect and procure fetal tissue for high-quality sales.... 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 would screen out the ones we didn’t want."

For allowing Kelly’s employer to scavenge parts from slaughtered children, the Planned Parenthood clinic received a service fee. The preferred victims were babies scheduled for late-term, partial-birth abortion, Kelly testified. She estimated that 98 percent of the partial-birth abortions she witnessed involved "very healthy babies.... [Most] of the time, [the mother] was just there to get rid of the baby." She recalls that "probably 30 or 40 babies a week" were killed through partial-birth abortion at this particular clinic.

"We were looking for eyes, livers, brains, thymuses [lymphoid tissue], cardiac blood, cord blood, blood from the liver, even blood from the limbs." The requisitioned parts were then shipped by courier. "All they [the shipping service employees] knew was that it was just human cells," Kelly recounted. "But it could be a completely intact fetus. It might be a batch of eyes, or 30 or 40 livers going out that day, or thymuses." What remained of the murdered children was either thrown down the garbage disposal or crated for delivery to the incinerator.

Kelly was prompted to disclose her role in this macabre trade due to an act of unambiguous infanticide. "A set of twins at 24 weeks gestation was brought to us in a pan," she recalls. "They were both alive. The doctor came back and said, ‘Got you some good specimens here, twins.’ I looked at him and said, ‘There’s something wrong here. They are moving. I don’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 their mouths and noses, letting them drown. I left the room because I could not watch this." Despite her attack of conscience, Kelly carried out the scheduled dissection on the murdered twins, but by this point "I decided it was wrong." Nor was this the only instance in which "we had live births come back to us," she continued. "Then the doctor would either break the [baby’s] neck or take a pair of tongs and beat the fetus until it was dead."

Eric Harrah, who until 1998 managed and partially owned a chain of 18 abortion clinics throughout the U.S., told the Canadian publication Alberta Report that the murder of babies who survive abortion attempts is not at all uncommon. He recalls an incident in which a woman who had scheduled an abortion 26 weeks into her pregnancy delivered the baby at a motel the night before the abortion was to take place. She arrived at the abortuary carrying her child in a white cotton towel.

"I was in the scrub room when I saw the towel move," Harrah relates. As he and a nurse looked at the towel, "a little baby’s arm raised up out of the towel and was moving like a newborn baby. I screamed and ran out. The doctor came in and closed the door and when we went back in to process the baby out of the clinic into the lab, [the baby] had a puncture wound in his chest."

The practice of partial-birth abortion has "nothing to do with the woman’s right to choose," comments former abortionist Harrah. "It has everything to do with protecting the sanctity of the fullness of the abortionist’s wallet." It facilitates the profitable trade in body parts cannibalized from viable, fully developed children, whether they are killed during delivery or dispassionately murdered once they are fully born.

Fetal tissue wholesaler Opening Lines of West Frankfort, Illinois (which unceremoniously went out of business following the publicity given to Kelly’s revelations), published a glossy brochure inviting abortionists to "find out how you can turn your patient’s decision into something wonderful." To researchers and others interested in baby parts, Opening Lines director Miles Jones offered eyes and ears for $75 and brains for $999.

Opening Lines commended Bill Clinton for signing the National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act of 1993, which "created a great demand for fetal tissue and has made possible the development of treatments for individuals afflicted with serious diseases and disorders." By resolutely vetoing every congressional effort to ban partial-birth abortion, Bill Clinton has also ensured a continuing supply of victims.