Ethical Research Now!

by Robert Byrd‬

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Fetal Organ Harvesting. It’s a bewildering term, regardless of one's familiarity with the subject. However upsetting or confusing it may be to dive into this topic, there are ethical implications of this practice that require people of conscience to keep their attention on it. 

Since 2016, I have been working and volunteering for a local pro-life organization in California that spends a lot of energy monitoring this practice, which takes place inside abortion facilities both in our backyard and across the country. My aim with this article is to provide a summary of the issue, speak about the progress we've made in countering it over the years, and share the steps that still need to be taken moving forward.

Most recently, the topic of Fetal Organ Harvesting was brought front and center on the national stage in the summer of 2015 with the publication of hidden camera videos filmed by a group called the Center for Medical Progress. Their allegations that America’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood, was illegally selling fetal remains from abortions to agencies involved in medical research experiments shook the country. 

The question of Planned Parenthood’s legal culpability attracted discussion and investigation. However, it was acknowledged by Planned Parenthood themselves  that they are in fact a source of specimens for Fetal Tissue Research (FTR) projects.

In the ’70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, when the government hammered out policies regulating this practice, they arrived at an odd standard: they will look the other way unless human fetal tissue is being transferred for “valuable consideration.” To be more colloquial, the government won’t intervene unless price tags (metaphorically speaking) are being placed on the body parts themselves, profiting any parties involved. The salaried work structured around identifying a pregnant woman, persuading her to donate her child’s dead body by lauding the societal benefits, placing her in a frame of mind where she’s less likely to cancel her appointment — influencing whether she follows through with her decision, and then waiting for the abortion death to occur to abuse the corpse afterward does not concern the U.S. Government. 

The nationwide call against aborted Fetal Organ Harvesting was responsible for the founding of Pro-Life San Francisco, as it put a fire under our founder and many future participants. 

Inspired to step up and take action for unborn children, our advocacy for ethical research started out more indirect, as we continually spotlighted and amplified the voice of the Center for Medical Progress. In the Fall of 2019, we launched our “UCSF Campaign” to directly address this practice in our own backyard at the University of California, San Francisco. 

We had just learned that UCSF had long been a site for FTR experiments, with one laboratory alone receiving 10 million dollars in federal funds for the duration of a 6-year contract. To directly quote the Statement of Work attached to a Solicitation for Federal Funding, UCSF was required to create and use two groups of “humanized” lab mice for HIV drug testing: "one cohort of up to 50 SCID-hu Thy/Liv mice per month, engrafted with [fetal] tissue from a single donor" and "one cohort of up to 40 mice per month, engrafted with [fetal] tissue from a single donor." 

Finding direct primary source links to the National Institutes of Health contract was integral to Pro-Life SF’s method of reporting, as we first learned about this contract from a conservative outlet that our readers might dismiss out of hand. Also, as part of our research effort over the years, we combed the internet for explicit references to elective abortion in UCSF’s published studies. We found the following references:

• “Fetal gut tissues (18–24 g. w.) were obtained from women with normal pregnancies before elective termination for nonmedical reasons with informed consent according to local, state, and federal regulations. Single intact segments of the human fetal intestine (2−3 cm in length) were transplanted subcutaneously on the back of 6–8-week-old male C.B17 scid mice.”

• “Human fetal salivary glands were harvested from post-mortem fetuses obtained from elective legal abortions with the written informed consent of the patients undergoing the procedure and the approval of the Institutional Review Board at the University of California San Francisco…between 22 and 24 weeks of gestation.”

For the following five years, we shared numerous sources such as these across social media, during in-person talks, and also in the presence of University of California leaders – specifically at the Public Comment mic across several Board of Regents meetings starting in September 2019. Of course, our message was that we can care for the sick and afflicted in our midst without building and perpetuating systems dependent on violence. 

Aside from the publicly available information we found tucked away in corners of the internet, we wished to obtain other data: internal documents accessible through California's Public Records law. As with the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), public institutions in California have a duty to release requested records. 

When our first request hit a brick wall, we proceeded with a video project to help spread the word. June 2020 saw the debut of our mini-documentary on UC San Francisco titled “UCSF: An American Horror Story.” This video racked up 2,300 views on YouTube in under two weeks and continued to make the rounds. 

We were eventually given access to hundreds of pages of documents by UCSF’s public records officers detailing the inner workings of the institution’s abortion and fetal organ harvesting practices, thanks to the help of a lawyer. The value of having these documents cannot be overstated. 

These documents include the consent form given to pregnant women before their abortions that lauds the moral benefits of allowing the university to collect fetal remains. Suspiciously, this document fails to describe the organs with anywhere near the same level of detail as the internal collection logs or studies published by UCSF – merely calling the specimens “pregnancy tissue” rather than leg, intestine, lung, brain, bladder, or calvarium (head) samples. 

Not wanting anyone to take our word for it, and also keeping in mind the potential for skeptical pro-choice readers, we described on multiple occasions that anyone can receive the same documents directly from UCSF, themselves, by referencing the number assigned to our requests. They could, for example, ask for “all responsive documents sent to representatives of Pro-Life San Francisco under PRA #020-107.” A write up in The Christian Post soon followed the launching of our UCSF Records page, bringing even more eyes to our effort. 

This campaign was not limited to online activism and pamphleting, or even to the Regents Meetings alone. We took our message to the streets and through even more halls of power, starting with public plaza protests that we held alongside Christian pro-life group Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust – the first organization to join us as a partner in this campaign. 

As reported by the pro-life blog Live Action News, members of our coalition were detained by county deputies and placed in handcuffs in November 2020 following open air speeches and chants near a site where abortions up to 24 weeks are committed. These arrests did not deter us, as the facts on the table and our deeply held concerns over the potential for unintended live births, followed by infant deaths, spurred us on. 

Pro-lifers continued to probe. In 2022, some individuals in our circle even attempted a Pink Rose Rescue (as defined by the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising) to intervene on behalf of children and parents being targeted one summer morning at UCSF’s late-term abortion center. Prevented from reaching the waiting room, one person handed a rose to the clinic director and an impromptu demonstration broke out in the lobby near the staffing station, reminiscent of many Occupy Movement protests.

We also made a concerted effort to bring public pressure to another San Francisco Bay Area institution – one with direct ties to the Planned Parenthood controversy: Advanced Bioscience Resources (ABR). Beginning in July 2021, we were given access by UCSF to invoices between them and this agency, revealing ABR as a secondary source of fetal remains for UCSF’s FTR labs (in addition to the university’s in-house abortion facilities at Zuckerberg SF General Hospital and UCSF Mount Zion). This was further substantiated by additional studies we dug up:

• “Human fetal tissues (the thymus, spleen, MLN, small intestine, liver and lung) were collected from second trimester elective abortions from The SFGH Women’s Options Center (San Francisco, CA). Several fetal thymi were from Advanced Bioscience Resources (Alameda, CA). Fetal tissues were collected from gestational weeks 18–23.”

• “We thank the staff and faculty at the San Francisco General Hospital Women’s Options Center and at Advanced Bioscience Resources, who assisted in human fetal tissue collection.”

As with our efforts in San Francisco, countering ABR was not limited to social media and lit drops. We took our message to the streets of Alameda and through the halls of the office building housing ABR’s headquarters. We were grateful to have alongside us representatives from Rehumanize International, Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, and Survivors. 

Together, we highlighted the concerning invoices between ABR and UCSF, most notably Procurement Order B002014423 from December 2020, which listed $20,000 as a price next to a reference to fetal pancreas samples, as well as multiple invoices noting intact calvariums in the 2nd trimester.

ABR’s info sheet titled “Fees for Services Schedule” – provided to us by UCSF as well – strangely separated fees for processing and delivery from procurement fees, which raises legal questions. For example, as of January 2019, UCSF would owe ABR $375 for each second trimester specimen they receive. 

Of course it “makes sense” that UCSF is able to legally reimburse them for sending a car or mail truck across the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge to deliver a fresh human head. But it’s not immediately clear how hundreds of dollars can legally change hands when simply providing an additional fetal specimen. These dollar amounts also increased over the years, as seen in the multiple versions of the Fees for Services Schedule.

Highlighting their troubling history, we told audiences about ABR being referred to the Department of Justice for federal investigation in 2016 by the majority staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee. They, along with four Planned Parenthood affiliates in California, were left unchecked by the state attorney general, but thankfully evidence was uncovered by Congressional investigators. 

However, after the news came down a year later that this referral did in fact warrant the opening of a federal investigation, the Department of Justice took no public action. No prosecutions, no statements, nothing. 

In response, Pro-Life San Francisco held a protest in 2020 outside the office of U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr in Washington, DC, with dozens of demonstrators demanding that he prosecute fetal traffickers. And as part of our educational efforts, we also took note of information published the following year in the Federal Register. 

The Department of Health and Human Services had notably announced the cancellation of its contract between ABR and federal government laboratories in 2018. This surprise move was explained with only a vague statement, with HHS stating that they were “not sufficiently assured that the contract included the appropriate protections applicable to fetal tissue research or met all other procurement requirements.” A few years later, comments written by HHS Secretary Alex Azar in the Federal Register appeared to give details on what I assume were the circumstances surrounding this cancellation:

As noted above, in September 2018, HHS initiated a comprehensive review of all HHS research involving human fetal tissue from elective abortions to ensure consistency with statutory and regulatory requirements and to ensure the adequacy of procedures and oversight of such research in light of the serious regulatory, moral, and ethical considerations involved. As part of this audit and review, HHS personnel reviewed the contracts (or purchase orders, as applicable) executed by personnel at NIH…and sought to obtain, from the organizations that supplied such tissue to the NIH researchers, copies of the required informed consents for the donation of the fetal tissue for research purposes, as well as documentation that valuable consideration was not sought or given... One tissue procurement organization, which procured human fetal tissue for a number of NIH intramural research projects, provided its template informed consent document. It, however, refused to produce any executed informed consents or documentation of its compliance with laws and NIH policies on the informed consent of the mother to donate the fetal tissue for research, and would not make any representations to HHS that such informed consents had been obtained. The organization also declined to provide HHS with financial documentation for HHS to assess compliance with federal prohibitions on valuable consideration… While HHS's inability to obtain information from one tissue procurement organization to confirm compliance with informed consent requirements and the bar on valuable consideration occurred in the context of HHS's audit of intramural research involving human fetal tissue from elective abortions, and there are other sources from which researchers can and do obtain human fetal tissue, the organization at issue also provides human fetal tissue to a number of NIH-funded extramural researchers…

Providing information like this to our audience is invaluable, and our continued probing of ABR’s business kept revealing more eye-opening information. 

The next ally we made in this effort was Tommy Kearns, the father of an ABR victim by the name of Clementine. We first heard of Clementine and her parents through a viral video posted by Students for Life. In this video, Tommy shared with an audience about Clementine’s mother deeply regretting succumbing to the pressure of New Jersey abortionists and now seeking to honor the memory of her daughter together with him. 

Pro-Life SF board member Emma Craig was the first to see ABR mentioned on Tommy’s social media, as he and his partner began using the medical records from the abortion appointment to seek out the possible retrieval of their daughter’s body. Sharing the medical record files in confidence with Pro-Life SF leadership, Clementine’s parents told us all they had been learning about ABR and a newer procurement company named Cercle Allocation Services, which is led by one of the same executives. 

We were honored to organize a memorial for Clementine on her expected due date outside the ABR headquarters last summer. In a video recounting moments from that memorial, we interspersed clips published years ago by the Center for Medical Progress to provide viewers with a deeper insight into the gravity of ABR’s practices. The two clips featured Perrin Larton, ABR’s Director of Procurement. Here is one exchange between Larton and CMP’s attorney Peter Breen during a court deposition interview:

Breen: How does a tissue procurement occur in one of these situations when the entire fetus is intact in the lab?

Larton: We do a dissection.

Breen: And just to be clear, you do dissection to obtain the tissues that are on the list for the day?

Larton: We do dissection to get the tissues that the researchers have requested. Yeah.

The other clip we showed, filmed at an abortion trade conference in 2013, featured CMP leader David Daleiden speaking with Larton while undercover.

Larton: We’re totally not involved in the clinical work at all. The clinic does all of the consenting. The only thing we do is after the procedure, we will draw blood from the donating mother if she needs serology testing. And we will – and that's all we do for the patient. I mean, we don’t do anything else.

Daleiden: Okay, so you just wait for them to bring you the tissue, then?

Larton: Yeah, we're usually standing right outside the door where they're doing the procedure in the O.R., and we're in the lab area. 

In the same video, Larton listed regions across the country where ABR expected to launch partnerships with abortion centers – including New Jersey, where Clementine would be killed in 2024. Watching that video now is extremely eerie. 

One of ABR’s victims finally had a name. With this knowledge, we at Pro-Life SF had a duty to help share that name with the world.  

Last year, we took notice when a chiropractic business moved into the suite occupied by ABR. Looking through the business filings on the California Secretary of State website, we noted ABR’s lack of re-filing in 2024. The other company connected to Clementine’s body, Cercle Allocation Services, had also registered for operations in California in the summer of 2023. Putting two and two together, we chalked this up to ABR closing up shop and passing the torch to a new entity. 

However, as of July 30th, we are now aware of an updated May 2025 filing for ABR on the Secretary of State website. We will continue our research to make sure we know the players in our area and have the ability to revive our calls for them to work toward healing the community.

With the span of time we have spent facing this issue, it is difficult to recall in this article every single action we have taken. Joint demonstrations with Live Action, writing and protesting the SF Director of Public Health, marching on the office of UCSF’s chancellor, launching the Harvesting Justice podcast, combatting misinformed Fact Checkers – so many things have taken place to saturate our audience with knowledge and perk up the ears of local, influential figures in the world of Fetal Organ Harvesting. The work has started, but going forward, our movement needs to tighten the screws of public pressure. 

This summer, we signed a contract with a vendor that will provide us with the online public advocacy software necessary to send waves of messages – in numbers larger than all our previous demonstrations combined – to the inboxes of leaders such as UC Regent Janet Reilly. We have taken our message directly to her in the past, in conference rooms from San Francisco to Los Angeles and San Diego. Recently, she was promoted to the position of Board Chair. 

We call on everyone reading this article to follow us on social media, subscribe to our emails, and be ready to share the launch of EthicalResearchNow.org. Provided adequate resources, we will be able to publish and keep this site live for as long as it takes for the Regents and Chancellor Sam Hawgood to enter into conversations with us. In a world of medical advances, medical ethics must never be thrown out the window.

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Robert Byrd is executive coordinator of Pro-Life San Francisco.