According to a press release, The Center for Medical Progress (CMP) has confirmed that the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) was investigated by federal law enforcement regarding a tissue harvesting program using the bodies of aborted children.
CMP uncovered documents through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) which support the claim it has long made: Pitt has been working with Planned Parenthood to criminally harvest the body parts of babies aborted late in gestation. Those documents include email exchanges from late 2021 through early 2022 between leaders of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Pitt’s senior vice chancellor for research, and the Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Inspector General (OIS). The OIS conducts criminal, civil, and administrative investigations of fraud and misconduct related to HHS programs. It has the authority to make arrests.
In an email dated November 5, 2021, Pitt’s Dr. Rutenbar replied to NIH, stating, “With regard to your request for documentation/information, please be aware that we received a subpoena from HIS OIG requesting similar documentation on October 28, 2021.”
The emails uncovered through the FOIA reference this subpoena to investigate fetal organ harvesting at Pitt’s NIH-funding “GUDMAP” program. GUDMAP — The GenitoUrinary Development Molecular Anatomy Project — studies how the genitourinary tract develops in utero in order to develop therapies for diseases of the kidneys, bladder, ureter, and urethra.
According to an NIH funding award notice from 2016, the GUDMAP research uses the body parts of children aborted between six and 24 weeks gestation. In one year alone, Pitt “disbursed over 300 fresh samples collected from 77 cases.” Pitt promised, “The collections can be significantly ramped up as material could have been accrued from as many as 725 cases last year.” The government gave $600,000 to Pitt for the program.
In Pitt’s application to become the fetal tissue “distribution hub” for the GUDMAP program, it advertised to NIH that it would use labor induction abortions to harvest fetal kidneys, record the time the kidneys were removed from the baby’s blood supply, and “minimize” this “warm ischemic time.”
“Ischemic time” refers to the time frame in which there is an inadequate blood supply to an organ. To “minimize” and to “record” this time as Pitt advertised that it does, it would be harvesting kidney samples from babies who are still alive, said CMP, rather than from kidneys that had already been cut out from the baby’s body or kidneys that had already been cut off from a blood supply. Babies can and do survive induction abortions in the second and third trimesters.
“Pitt’s own statements indicating its Planned Parenthood partners use criminal partial-birth abortions to harvest fetal organs to sell for NIH grant money are serious enough that a federal law enforcement agency opened a formal investigation following CMP’s reporting,” said CMP founder and president David Daleiden. “If this investigation has been conducted honestly, the facts uncovered may be more horrifying than we ever imagined. Planned Parenthood has cloaked its human atrocities committed against vulnerable mothers and infants under its ‘research’ program for decades — it is time for justice under the law for every level of the taxpayer-funded enterprise of selling aborted baby body parts.”
Pitt has been involved in human tissue procurement for more than two decades and boasts that it has a “long standing history of collecting, maintaining and disbursing quality samples to research scientists, both in house and outside the University of Pittsburgh.”
