Foetal tissue harvesting -

David Daleiden, of the Centre for Medical Progress, has released an update on his ongoing investigation into the trafficking of foetal body parts in the US. Daleiden’s examination of the case of “Clementine”, a baby who was born alive so that her organs could be harvested while still viable, has uncovered evidence of foetal organ procurement by the University of California.

In this article:

Press release from the Centre for Medical Progress
“What Happened to Clementine?” – original video report
“What Happened to Clementine?”- update

Press release from the Centre for Medical Progress

Abortion business sold foetal body parts for $765 each to taxpayer-funded labs, new records show. Cercle Allocation Services, Inc. charged University of California $765 per body part harvested from late-term abortion clinics

Contact: David Daleiden, media@centerformedicalprogress.org, 949.734.0859

IRVINE, Sept. 30—New documents released under a California Public Records Act request show a new abortion side business, Cercle Allocation Services, Inc., selling foetal body parts for $765 each to taxpayer-funded laboratories at the University of California.

Cercle Allocation Services is the foetal organ harvesting company that took possession of an infant believed to have been born alive at a late-term abortion clinic in New Jersey two years ago, based on expert analysis of medical records in the recent investigative documentary “What Happened To Clementine?” by The Center for Medical Progress, who made the public records request.

The new documents include purchase orders from a UCLA laboratory to Cercle in August and September of 2023, for a total of $16,065 for 21 foetal body parts—14 livers and 7 thymus glands. The purchase orders show each individual organ being billed at a separate $765 price.

The purchase orders were apparently revised multiple times by UCLA at Cercle’s demand, to remove sales tax from the orders so it would look like only “services”, rather than “items”, were being sold. In a September 2023 email, Cercle’s Account Manager told UCLA, “The overriding issue is the use of terminology that we must not use due to their improper implication that we are selling taxable items,” and, “Due to the nature of our business we must be very careful and clear that we invoice fees for our procurement services (untaxable).” The Account Manager wrote that “notations of ‘Total Tax’ and ‘Total Price Includes Sales Tax’ would imply that we are selling the items received (which are illegal to sell). Therefore, it is quite important that Purchase Orders are created to authorize payment for our Services, which can be tied to the sample dates and numbers”. The purchase orders show that Cercle billed UCLA for as many as five $765-per-body-part charges in a single day.

42 U.S. Code 289g-2 makes it a federal felony to “transfer” “any human foetal tissue” for “valuable consideration”.

Recently published studies note that Cercle was previously doing business as Advanced Bioscience Resources, a foetal organ harvesting company that maintained extensive government contracts. ABR, along with its longtime business partners at Planned Parenthood, was the subject of Congressional criminal referrals in 2016 after investigations prompted by CMP’s undercover video reporting. Planned Parenthood has supplied aborted fetuses to ABR/Cercle since the 1990s.

CMP previously released undercover video interviews with ABR admitting that sometimes aborted fetuses “just fell out” of patients in the operating room. ABR’s procurement manager Perrin Larton—now with Cercle—testified under oath in 2019 that intact fetuses were harvested “every couple months”, and that sometimes she saw foetal hearts beating after being cut out. ABR has sold FDA-regulated “current Good Tissue Practice” (cGTP) foetal organs for up to $7,000 each to taxpayer-funded laboratories.

The new public records documents from UCLA also show that in March 2025, Cercle had to cancel an order for foetal brain because it was unable to procure it. The medical records reviewed in CMP’s documentary “What Happened To Clementine?” show Cercle’s research procurement site in New Jersey, the Cherry Hill Women’s Center, using large doses of the labor-inducing drug Misoprostol on abortion patients. According to expert analysis, the time intervals and procedure steps recorded after that point leave barely one minute for the 5-month-gestation infant, named Clementine by her parents, to be taken out of her mother in the operating room.

“These new records from Cercle’s abortion side business harvesting baby body parts show the extreme financial incentives that exist for ‘research’ abortions to deliver whole, preemie-size babies alive—as appears to have been done to baby Clementine and her mother, and potentially thousands of others,” notes David Daleiden, founder and president of CMP.

Elise Ketch, associate reporter with CMP, states, “Mass organ harvesting for foetal research is the beating heart of the abortion industry. Behind all the fiercest defenders of abortion you can find a tie to profits from this black market. You just have to look.”

Thomas Kearns, the father of baby Clementine from the documentary and founder of the Clementine’s Voice advocacy group, says, “Looking at the prices on this page reminds me of what they claim my daughter Clementine’s life was worth. I’m reminded that these body parts came from children just like my daughter Clementine—children who were more than just a liver or a thymus. The value that Clementine and these children had to offer the world was not a price tag from a business exchange. They are not just their body parts or organs. They had souls, they had families, they had their own lives if they were not interrupted by the abortion and organ harvesting industry. This is the same agency that took my daughter two years ago. Were the babies in these purchase orders harvested with the same partial-birth abortion methods as my daughter?”

“What Happened to Clementine?” – investigation into sale of foetal body parts

“What Happened To Clementine?” is a new, feature-length documentary by The Center for Medical Progress that covers victim family interviews and expert analysis of medical records to investigate the case of a young couple’s unexpected pregnancy and subsequently coerced 5-month abortion at the Cherry Hill Women’s Center in New Jersey—and the clinic’s supply of their preemie-age daughter Clementine to biotech wholesaler Cercle Allocation Services, Inc. in March 2024.

The evidence reveals that the Cherry Hill-Cercle organ harvesting program uses large doses of labor inducing drugs on pregnant women, and baby Clementine appears to have been born alive before being provided to the organ harvesting company.

“What happened to Clementine?” UPDATE

This article was written by an American doctor who is pro-choice. Despite that flaw, he thoughtfully examines many of the immoral aspects of the use of aborted foetal tissue harvesting for use in medicine and science.

By David Bell at the Brownstone Institute

Ignorance is often desirable. It allows us to benefit from things our conscience might deny us. ‘Informed consent’ can be something we need to force upon ourselves.

Sacrificing others for the greater good

Science, we prefer to think, has removed us from the dark inhumanity of human sacrifice and the historic callousness that would kill and dismember a child as insurance against starvation. The Aztecs and Mayans dismembered living prisoners to appease gods and ensure crop fertility, which they believed essential to survival. The Egyptians and Norse killed servants of their deceased wealthy to improve the quality of their afterlife. Our futures now are secured on the laboratory bench rather than the stone altar. We have Science, and consider ourselves far better off because of it.

A few days ago, someone shared this short video, ‘It’s OK,’ about 4 minutes long and worth watching. It is made by a group opposing abortion called Choice42.

The abortion issue is complicated and evokes emotions and is discussed later. What matters here is that the video is well researched, objective, and explains how scientists are paid to cut and disembowel live humans on laboratory benches in the hope of improving the futures of those who pay them, and the rest of us.

As a society, we have developed well-organised, methodical ways to do this, and pride ourselves in their cleverness. The video is very moving – it is meant to be because pulling little humans apart without anaesthetic for the benefit of others is something that, when removed from its veil of scientific progress, can be hard to think about.

The use of aborted human fetuses and embryos brought us many of the vaccines we use today, including some promoted by the Roman Catholic Church and those used by many who oppose abortion itself. The cell cultures derived from the unborn babies represented in the video, and from similar cases, are used widely by people working in the biological sciences. They can be purchased online. Undoubtedly, many lives of people who lived after have been saved by the use of some of these cell lines, and people are therefore born today who would not be if the cells had not been harvested.

The researchers who regularly work with these cells come from a whole swath of different cultures, religious beliefs, and political perspectives. Mostly, they probably never seriously consider whom the cells in the petri dish descended from. If they do, they may dismiss the harvesting as too long ago to be relevant (though the practice continues) or somehow necessary (as the Aztecs did, needing to keep the world itself habitable). The video simply reminds us of certain truths, and of how willing we are, or how far we will go, to ignore them.

What is a human foetus?

Abortion is an emotive subject, but unfortunately also politicised, and this makes any discussion like this difficult. So, to be clear, this article is not about abortion, on which my views are nuanced. As a doctor, I have taken part in abortions, as prior family members took part in bombing people and machine-gunning them. I have used some of the products mentioned in the video here and have no high ground to stand on.

I have also worked in a country where several thousand women die of septic abortions every year, because they cannot access practices safe for them. We probably all know people who vehemently oppose abortion but support the death penalty, and people who hold opposite views on both.

Taking a life is a terrible thing, and sometimes circumstances can lead to choices between terrible things. Nearly all of us find ways around “Thou shall not kill.” But we need to understand what is happening.

The other thing to be clear on here is whether a developing fetus is a human (i.e. a person). The World Health Organization (WHO) considers them “pregnancy tissue” until delivery from the womb in its hopelessly incoherent Abortion Care Guidelines, and ”lives lost” if they happened to be born prematurely before being deliberately aborted. Such a position, that personhood is purely geographical (in or out the womb), is convenient but obviously bankrupt, telling us more about the WHO than the status of a foetus. The unborn foetus can hear, respond, feel pain, move, and is fully genetically human.

Having spent months nursing a baby born at 28 weeks, I had no doubt of that child’s humanity. I have cradled premature babies born far earlier before they died. They move, struggle to breathe sometimes for hours, and I am unable to see how they were not human children, helpless though they were.

Outside of a eugenicist or fascist mindset, I also struggle to see how there can be a hierarchy of human worth. We are equal or we are not, and that is not dependent on an arbitrary time of existence or the arbitrariness of position within or without the womb. This does not mean humans cannot be killed (sadly, we have wars still and may sometimes also face other difficult choices), but those we kill are our equals.

Most of us also consider humans different in worth and essence from other animals. However, irrespective of one’s view on this, we do have strict rules on the use of animals in research. Institutional (Ethics) Review Boards (IRBs) are usually reluctant to allow the infliction of pain on animals. There was a loud outcry when the National Institutes of Health were shown to have been torturing beagles in the name of science. Hollywood movies using animals have a standard line in the credits reassuring us that “no animal was harmed.” We don’t, for whatever reason, afford the same care to developing members of our own species, and we don’t at present, label our medicines to indicate their derivation from such practices. That is a strange thing, and seems somewhat cowardly.

Inflicting pain on living beings

So, the point of the video, and this article, is not the rightness or wrongness of abortion. It is that we sacrifice others in horrific ways for our own good, or accept others (the high priests of our Science) doing it for us. We accept that it is worth cutting open a developing human without anaesthetic, disemboweling them, and using bits we cut out for experiments that may or may not prove useful to someone. The only really relevant factor is that someone was willing to pay for it to be done. So, we accept it.

This practice (for which you would be jailed in the United States for doing so to a cat) is considered so acceptable when done to our own that many jurisdictions actually mandate that people have vaccines developed from such practices injected into them. There is strong political pressure at present to block religious exemptions in the United States, preventing people from opting out of partaking in the results of such practices.

With some religious leaders insisting that the use of products derived from fetal mutilation is an act of love, refusal based on revulsion at the slicing and tearing of live humans becomes very much a personal matter that can elicit considerable retribution from society.

The choices we make

It is not necessary to do these experiments. This is true on two levels. Firstly, the human race was not dying out before we started doing this. Most health gains come from what we eat, how we live, and our environment (e.g. good sanitation). What we derive from foetal stem cells and organs is a small fractional gain on top of this. For some people it may be life or death, but for nearly all it is not. There is no such thing as “essential medical research,” just desirable research, and research that someone is paying to have done (which may or may not coincide).

Secondly, it is possible to get stem cells from adults, from bone marrow and other organs. It is harder, and they are less adaptable, so such cells may be less effective in developing the products we desire. But this is certainly a risk we can reasonably choose to take.

We can do well, as a society, without tearing aborted babies apart. We choose to do this for small incremental gain. We are horrified at what the Aztecs did, and think we are better, but objectively we are essentially the same. We sacrifice growing humans, with pain and lack of concern, in the hope of a common good for the rest of us. We make a choice, based on how we value others and value ourselves.

Facing what we do, or have become party to, should not always be a comfortable thing. The past is in the past, but fetal harvesting is still happening. For those who believe a person exists beyond their organic form, the past also continues to have relevance today. We can block from our minds what we do to others for our benefit, but if humanity is worth anything, then we should recognize the act of betrayal that involves.

At the very least, based on logic, rationality, and decency, we should be transparent. This should ensure truly informed consent, labelling medicines, for instance, as having been derived or not through procedures or experiments on unconsented humans. Then, clearly, we should respect those who say “no” and wish no part in the outcomes of what they may consider repugnant or immoral practices. Forcing others to follow our own choice in this matter through mandates would be unjustifiable under any enlightened system of human values.

By David Bell at the Brownstone Institute. By David Bell. This article first appeared at Brownstone Institute and is reproduced here under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. David is a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organisation (WHO), Programme Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland, and Director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in Bellevue, WA, USA.

Tag: Foetal tissue harvesting

New report on trafficking foetal body parts from CMP