March 6 2000

ARTICLE TOOLS

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Prolife members of Congress are pushing for hearings as early as this spring on the issue of trafficking in fetal body parts. The hearings, stemming from a voice vote last November, will study a little-known loophole that circumvents federal laws banning the commercial sale of human body parts.

The hearings may also shed light on a controversial part of the American abortion industry: the fate of second- and third-trimester premature infants who are aborted with their vital organs and limbs intact, allowing for use by biomedical researchers.

At the center of the allegations is the controversial Kelly, the pseudonym for a former employee of the Anatomic Gift Foundation (AGF), which is headquartered in Maryland with regional offices in Colorado and Arizona. The firm specializes in obtaining human organs and limbs for researchers across the United States. Kelly says her job, as on-site representative for AGF at an unidentified Planned Parenthood affiliate, was to dissect bodies, sometimes living, and ship the parts to researchers, usually under an innocuous name such as "biomedical specimens."

Kelly says she would get a daily list of the parts researchers wanted (eyes, livers, brains), and she understood that she was to procure the best, defect-free specimens. She says that each week she would see about 30 or 40 fetuses at around seven months' gestation and that several at various ages of gestation would be born alive. She alleges that a staff physician would kill any such newborn. Kelly claims that after an incident in early 1997 she developed profound misgivings about her work. A physician wanted her to dissect twins of five and one-half months who had just been aborted but were not yet dead. She immediately protested. In response, ...