In their own words . . .

By Marc Crutcher
Courtesy The Tribune Papers, Inc.

"The skin of a baby goes for $100, baby ears are $75, a spinal column is $150, eyes are $75 (one is 40% less); a company in Florida specializes only in baby heads." This was the testimony of Mark Crutcher during a recent interview on WTZY radio (880AM) in Asheville N.C. Crutcher is head of Life Dynamics, a company in Denton, Texas founded in 1992. He has spent the past several years investigating a wholesale parts warehouse network for fetal body parts that are dissected and then shipped all over the United States.

"Tell us about Kelly," asks Ken Bagwell, the host of the show. "Well, Kelly is the person who came to us originally. She was a technician working for one of the wholesalers in a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic harvesting the baby body parts. She was starting to have some real moral problems; she was starting to have nightmares and to get depressed by what she was seeing. One of the things she was starting to see were babies who were taken out alive and who were beginning to have parts taken out of them while they were still living. One day a doctor walked into the lab and set a metal bucket at the foot of the dissection table. 'I got you some really good specimens - twins. Twin little boys" Kelly looked down and saw a pair of perfectly formed 26-28 week-old babies moving, gurgling, and struggling to breathe. 'Something is not right about this,' she exclaimed. 'They are still alive. I can't do this. That stuff isn't in my contract.' She left the room. A little while later the doctor called her back into the room and said, 'O.K., now get what you need.'

She went back in and saw that the bucket had been filled with water and that the twins had been drowned. That was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back for her. She knew, by the way, that babies at that age if given proper treatment survive in excess of half the time. So she contacted another organization that referred her to us. That's what started us down this horrendous trail."

 

In September, 1993, Brenda Pratt Shafer, a registered nurse with thirteen years or experience, was assigned by her nursing agency to an abortion clinic. Since Nurse Shafer considered herself "very pro-choice," she didn't think this assignment would be a problem. She was wrong.
This is what Nurse Shafer saw:

" I stood at the doctor's side and watched him perform a partial-birth abortion on a woman who was six months pregnant. The baby's heartbeat was clearly visible on the ultrasound screen. The doctor delivered the baby's body and arms, everything but his little head. The baby's body was moving. His little fingers were clasping together. He was kicking his feet. The doctor took a pair of scissors and inserted them into the back of the baby's head, and the baby's arms jerked out in a flinch, a startle reaction, like a baby does when he thinks that he might fall. Then the doctor opened the scissors up. Then he stuck the high-powered suction tube into the hole and sucked the baby's brains out. Now the baby was completely limp. I never went back to the clinic. But I am still haunted by the face of that little boy. It was the most perfect, angelic face I have ever seen."
 
Kelly was working at that time for a Maryland company called the Anatomic Gift Foundation. She is in the May issue of "Life Talk" video magazine - the first of a series of videos released by Life Dynamics, Inc. Life Dynamics admits to having other people working undercover in abortion clinics. It cannot reveal all its sources due to the dangerous nature of the work they are doing.

"We have a lot of proof that these things are factual, and we have made available a lot of hard information. We have a 54 page booklet that outlines how the wholesalers circumvent the laws, includes numerous orders for chopped up baby bodies, and also provides price lists. The way this particular system works is as follows: these wholesalers train people as "technicians" to chop up baby bodies, and then they go to an abortion mill and say 'look, we want to put our technician in here to harvest parts from these babies. We know it is illegal to buy and sell these parts. But what we will do is to pay you a 'site' fee for letting us put our techs in here. Then when he or she harvests these parts - we will send faxes each morning of the parts we want, such as 20 pairs of eyes, or 10 spinal columns, or 16 livers - they will be shipped out each day and you will have 'donated' those parts. Your fee will come to you as a 'site' fee.

'Once we have the parts, we then' donate' them to the university -such as the University of North Carolina - or to a government agency or pharmaceutical company and we then charge them a 'retrieval fee' or a 'shipping fee.' As long as I make my 'shipping' or 'retrieval' fee higher than my 'site' fee, I am in good shape. It doesn't violate the 'letter' of the law.

Now, what you need to remember is that when an order is faxed to the technician, the baby whose body is to be chopped up to fill an order is still alive. The faxes arrive early in the morning. Often the mom is sitting out in the waiting room, and the technician can even look out through the window and see the pregnant moms waiting just before their baby is to be killed to fill the orders. In addition, when a baby is chopped up, that baby might help fill several different orders from different places. As a result, the baby who was alive and kicking in the morning might end up chopped up into several different pieces on several different research tables all over the country by the end of the afternoon.

"Now if you piece out all the parts and fill eight or ten different orders, the dollar income for a 20 to 22 week old baby could run $1,500 to $2,000 for the abortion plus $3,000 to $4,000 for the parts for a total of $5,000 or $6,000.

It's big money.

"In my opinion, this is a completely predictable result of legal abortion. Let me put it to you this way. If there is nothing wrong with abortion and if abortion is OK morally, then what is wrong with any of this? If an unborn child is not a human being nor deserving of protection, then what is wrong with this?

I think it is hypocritical for some of the people who I have spoken to to say 'look, I'm pro-choice; I'm not a radical, but this horrifies me. I'm very uncomfortable with this.' That person is not facing the issue squarely. Fundamentally, if there is nothing wrong with abortion, then there is nothing wrong with this. Once you devalue life to where it has no value, which is what you really say when you say you are pro-choice, then this is the logical result. Probably 99% of all abortions occur simply because the baby is 'not wanted' or is 'not needed,'" Crutcher stated.

"Patricia Ireland, on a recent TV interview, cleverly responded to a question regarding whether or not a culprit who takes the life of a pregnant woman should be charged with taking two lives in the following manner. She stated that that would depend on whether or not that child was 'wanted.' Should life be determined by 'wantedness'? To suggest that someone's life has value or not should be based upon whether or not someone else wants them is outrageous. And yet it happens all the time; four or five thousand abortions occur every day."

In the radio interview, Crutcher says to just "look at the data in the packets of information we have."

"A sample from a scientist studying the 'Biochemical Characterization of human type X Collagen,' requests 'Whole intact leg, include entire hip joint, 22-24 weeks gest.' The technician is told to 'dissect by cutting through symphasis pubis and to include whole Illium (hip joint).' They also tell you that it is to be removed from the baby within 10 minutes of its death. Now, a physician I spoke with told me there is no way to do a conventional abortion, which means you cause a fetal demise inside the uterus of the woman, and then get the baby out and then get it chopped up in 10 minutes. This means the baby had to be brought out still alive in order to do this procedure and have it on dry ice in 10 minutes following death. This confirms again what Kelly had been telling us."
 

From the "Availability of human fetal tissue - NIH guide"
Volume 23, Number 10, March 11, 1994 "Human embryonic and fetal tissues are available from the Central Laboratory for Human Embryology at the University of Washington. The laboratory, which is supported by the National Institutes of Health, can supply tissue from normal of abnormal embryos and fetuses of desired gestational ages between 40 days and term. Specimens are obtained within minutes of passage and tissues are aseptically identified, staged and immediately processed according to the requirements of individual investigators. Presently, processing methods include immediate fixation, snap fixation, snap freezing in liquid nitrogen, and placement in balanced salt solutions or media designated and/or supplied by investigators. Specimens are shipped by overnight express, arriving the day following procurement. The laboratory can also supply serial sections of human embryos that have been preserved in methyl Carnoy's fixative, embedded in paraffin and sectioned at 5 microns.
 
"The clinic that Kelly worked at also performed 'partial birth' abortions," Crutcher continued. " This procedure is basically a 'breached' birth. The doctor reaches in and grabs hold of the baby's leg with tongs, turns him or her around, and pulls the entire baby, except for the head, feet-first and face down out of the mother. Then he punctures the base of the skull with scissors, inserts a cannula to suck out the brain, and slides the head out. It is a three day long procedure which requires that the woman be inserted with laminaria, seaweed cervix dilators, ahead of time."

"Kelly said that routinely the women would go into labor before their final surgery. 'They were coming out alive,' she said. There would be three or four live births in a normal two-week time span. 'The doctor would either break the neck or take a pair of tongs and basically beat the fetus until it was dead.'"

According to McGovern's report the evidence for the demand can be corroborated in other places besides Life Dynamics. "The National Institutes for Health operates a Laboratory for Embryology at the University of Washington in Seattle that runs a 24-hour collection service at abortion clinics. An advertisement in the March, 1994 NIH Guide still appears on the Internet, offering to 'supply tissue from normal or abnormal embryos and fetuses of desired gestational ages between 40 days and term. Specimens are obtained within minutes of passage . . . and immediately processed according to the requirements of individual investigators . . . Specimens are shipped by overnight express.'"

Mark Crutcher affirmed in the WYZY interview that he is now fully convinced that the big money involved in research using intact late-term baby organs is the hidden truth behind the partial-birth abortion controversy. "One of the things that always puzzled me was why there was such a big fight by pro-aborts to keep partial birth abortion? Why fight for this? It's a dangerous procedure. A ban on it wouldn't mean babies wouldn't be killed; it would just mean that they wouldn't be killed with that method. They could still be killed with D&E's, or saline or urea or other late term abortion procedures. It was always a mystery until we got into this "fetal tissue' thing. What you find is that partial birth abortion came on the scene about the same moment that there became a market for baby body parts.

"If you look at all the abortion procedures, there is really only one procedure that leaves you with a significant amount of tissue at the end that you can sell, and that is partial birth abortion. This is plain and simple about maximizing profit. First, you sell the mother an abortion. Then you turn around and sell the dead baby that you pull out of her. But you need to take it out whole in order to really have something good to sell.

"It, partial birth abortion, makes no sense from a medical standpoint. I challenge any OBGYN to come in and tell me otherwise - that you would purposely create a breached delivery, which is what a partial birth abortion is when they turn the baby around and have his or her feet come out first. There is no reason to ever do that except to have intact whole baby parts to sell.
 

On January 22,1993, President Clinton issued a directive to the Secretary of Health and Human Services ending a five-year moratorium on Federal funding of therapeutic transplantation research that uses human fetal tissue derived from induced abortions. Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna E. Shalala notified the National Institutes of Health (NIH) of the President's action, and then formally revoked the moratorium on February 1, 1993.
 
"It has nothing whatsoever to do with the woman's right to choose or with protecting the sanctity of the right to have an abortion. It has everything to do with protecting the sanctity of the abortionist's wallet. 'Fetal tissue marketing' is the father of the partial birth abortion. Now, I know that some organizations claim that partial birth abortions are done on severely deformed babies or those that have abnormalities. That is a bald-faced lie. First, if you look at the order book, the vast majority of the orders specify 'no abnormality.' Secondly, let's look at what is beginning to happen elsewhere.

"If you have been following the situation at Christ Hospital in Chicago, Ill or at the hospital in Calgary in Canada and the ones in Ohio, you now have hospitals doing what they call 'genetic terminations.' This is where they are doing an abortion by simply inducing the woman who then gives birth, and the hospital gives orders so that the baby cannot receive any treatment. It is given what they nicely call 'comfort care.' They wrap it up in a blanket and put it in a hallway closet or someplace else like that until it dies.

"You have a woman called Jill Stanick who is a nurse in the labor unit and delivery section of Christ Hospital in Chicago who is stating that this is going on. Christ Hospital is not denying it. As a matter of fact they and other Chicago hospitals are saying they are doing it. In Columbus, Ohio a nurse admitted she held a baby girl for 6 hours until it died.

"This is the next logical progression. Partial birth abortion gives you exponentially more tissue to sell than a D&E or a saline does. These 'live abortions,' so called 'genetic terminations,' give you a complete intact baby who just suffocated or died from 'natural' causes or whatever, and now you have a whole, complete baby that can be chopped up and sold.

"A 'genetic termination' was originally made only if three doctors stated that a baby could not survive outside the mother's womb; but once you start down that trail, the next step is that this baby 'probably' won't survive. After that we see another step that happened recently in Canada whereby a woman had an abortion that evidently failed, and the woman found out she was 20 weeks pregnant, so they went back in and did a 'genetic termination' on a perfectly healthy baby.

"In addition to this we have a woman who came forward and told us that pharmaceutical companies are working with OBGYNs and paying them - when they have a girl who is eight weeks pregnant and wants to abort - to tell her to come back at 20 or more weeks along and that they will pay for her abortion so that she gets it for free. In addition, they will give her x dollars for her expenses because they want this later term tissue.

"Now it's not far from there to 'baby farms.' Let's say you have a woman who says 'I need some extra cash,' and there are people willing to pay her $2,000 for a 'fetus,' why not get pregnant and make a little money? However, once again, I would like to make the point that if there is nothing wrong with abortion, what really is wrong with all of this?

"But can we really look at killing and chopping up innocent babies one minute and then turn around in the next breath and say 'What time do the Cowboys play,' without having it turn us into a warped bunch of human beings? What is going on needs to be looked at for what it is. We can't run around with our heads in the sand. Call me whatever you want, but I honestly believe that God has to be running out of patience with us."
 
A free package of information as well as a video can be obtained from Life Dynamics by calling 1-800-401-6494. Their web site address is http://www.ldi.org Marc Crutcher can be reached at 1-940-380-8800. The entire Roe vs Wade decision can be found at http://www.tourolaw.edu/patch/Roe/index.html
 
(Courtesy: The Tribune Papers Inc.)