The March of Dimes may have to change its slogan from “A Fighting Chance for Every Baby” to “A Fighting Chance for Every Baby’s Body Part,” thanks to a former employee’s revelations about MOD and its dark ties to research using the body parts of aborted children. Joy Barr lost her job when she confronted the issue, but she hasn’t lost her voice. WND reports:
Joy Barr, who served three years as community director for the MOD’s Augusta, Georgia, and Aiken-Sumter, South Carolina, offices, personally raised more than $250,000 for the organization.
But when she came across the undercover videos from the Center for Medical Progress, she grew concerned.
“I was horrified by what I saw in the videos but not completely shocked,” Barr told WND. “But when Cecile Richards (CEO of Planned Parenthood) made the comment about the importance of research using aborted fetal tissue for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, my next thought was, do we?”
Officially, MOD, which claims to save babies, says it has a neutral abortion stance. In its Policies and Instructions for Research Grants, MOD says:
MOD policy states that abortion is not the solution to the problem of birth defects. The MOD has long maintained its neutrality on the issue of abortion. All grantees and contractors regardless of their personal opinions are prohibited from using MOD funds for abortion research, to pay for abortions, or to give directive advice concerning abortions. Fetal tissue research does not violate this policy if applicable federal regulations are adhered to.
As she continued to press for answers, Barr was told March of Dimes does indeed support some research using tissue obtained from elective abortions.
On July 21, Barr received an email from Michelle Kling, director of public relations for MOD, which included an admission Barr found startling.
“Joy, yes, the March of Dimes has supported some research using cells and tissues obtained from induced abortion and probably will continue to support some,” Kling told Barr in the email, a copy of which has been obtained by WND.
WND’s questions to Kling resulted in some more doublespeak. Kling said:
March of Dimes does have a small number of research grants in our very large portfolio, one or two every year, but the research grants are not given to Planned Parenthood, they are given to research universities whose investigators are using (aborted) fetal issue, and the material may or may not be obtained from a Planned Parenthood clinic….Fetal tissue can mean the placenta, it can mean the amniotic fluid, it can mean the part of the umbilical cord removed after birth, it can mean the blood inside the placenta used for stem cells, and it can mean organs and tissues from aborted fetuses.
March of Dimes does not want to talk about this publicly. It’s like when your 8-year-old asks you if Santa Claus is real. You may not lie and say, ‘yes,’ but you only include information that leads him to believe that is the case. I’m not an 8-year-old child. I’m a 38-year-old employee. I asked a point-blank question, a yes or no question, and I got back a 42-page document.
And Barr isn’t surprised because as she searched, she found the historic ties of the MOD and abortion. Catholic Culture has a full webpage devoted to this history, which began almost 50 years ago:
As early as 1968, the MOD began to fund experiments in in-vitro fertilization by Dr. Georgiana Jagiello at Guy’s Hospital Medical School in London, England, which involved the creation [and destruction] of human embryos in order to assess early chromosomal damage resulting from particular drugs and chemicals.
The report adds that “since the 1960s, [MOD] has generously funded research that has involved the destruction of human life at its earliest stages including the human embryo and his more developed brothers and sisters.” There’s actually no reason to believe MOD is not involved in abortion, fetal tissue research, and the financial ties to all the bloodshed it claims to want to stop. Barr says:
It has been astounding…. There are so many dark secrets and the abortion industry has done a good job of not talking about it. Women who’ve had abortions aren’t going to talk about the fact that they had an abortion, and signed these wavers [sic] for research. That’s not something you would want to talk about, so Planned Parenthood is taking people in a highly personal, emotional crisis and they’re just telling them it’s a blob of tissue.They should be required to say, “You are donating human organs,” but they are not doing that because that humanizes your fetus. And that’s not what it is. You are donating your fetus'[s] brain and heart and kidneys. But if they did that, they would have young women saying, “You’re telling me my fetus has a brain, a heart and a spine?”
Barr told WND that she decided to go public because she did not get answers from MOD officials to three vital questions she was asked to put in writing:
- Do our researchers use companies like StemExpress or ABR to procure fetal tissue from abortion clinics?
- If so, what “fees” do our internal review boards allow MOD grant recipients to pay and is there a standard amount? I realize it is illegal to purchase fetal tissue, but there are also no federal guidelines as to what a standard amount of reimbursement is.
- Do we know how much money was used last year, or any year’s average, to procure aborted fetal tissue for research?
With the evidence against them, the history of supporting bloodshed, and the doublespeak denials that claim neutrality on abortion while promoting it surreptitiously, Barr makes a statement anyone who looks at the facts must conclude:
MOD can’t be neutral on this…. You can’t say that you are the champions of premature babies on the one hand, and then on the other hand admit you are funding research that uses babies who are older and have been aborted.
When an organization that spews baby-saving rhetoric actually supports baby killing and portioning out of parts behind the scenes, it’s easy to see that it isn’t supporting a culture of life. It is supporting the shedding of innocent blood.
