I was reading this book tonight and this section left me speechless. I thought you should read it because the abortion industry and that's what it is, an industry, isn't just about "women's health" or the "right to choose". The macabre truth is that it is also in large part about supplying "tissue" i.e. human body parts to researchers for science and its extremely lucrative. “Human Chop Shops: The Booming Business of Tissue Harvesting" "The sun had barely risen over a small Midwestern city when a technician outside the women’s health clinic slung two plastic bags filled with yesterday’s discarded fetal body parts above her head and into an open dumpster. That’s because the sink disposal, where leftover fetuses are usually ground up and flushed into the city’s sewer system, was not working properly. The green bags thumped against the metal wall, falling into a heap with the rest of the week’s garbage." "Inside the clinic, another technician was busy thumbing through a computer-generated list of order forms from researchers around the world. Today’s requests included kidneys, brains, a spinal cord, lungs, one leg with hip attached, eyes, a thymus gland, and two livers. The orders are carefully matched with patients scheduled to come in that day and have abortions. Throughout the rest of the morning and afternoon, fetuses, some as old as thirty weeks, will be extracted (sometimes killed outside the womb if necessary), dissected in assembly line fashion, packaged in dry ice, and shipped by UPS, FedEx, and Airborne to labs, pharmaceutical companies, universities, and clinics for use in medical experiments. Although federal law prohibits the outright sale of human tissue or body parts, President Clinton’s 1993 executive order overturning the ban on taxpayer funding of research on aborted fetuses opened the floodgates for a booming new growth industry: the harvesting and sale of baby body parts. Less than a year after the executive order was signed, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), which operates its own twenty-four-hour collection service at sponsored abortion clinics, issued matter-of-fact guidelines and information about its harvesting services." The following is taken from the March 11, 1994 NIH guide, Availability of Human Fetal Tissue: "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 or 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 “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.” “To avoid the appearance of impropriety or to hide evidence that a sale is being made, abortion clinics skirt the law by renting on-site lab space to harvesting companies that basically serve as middlemen between doctors performing abortions and researchers needing body parts. The abortion clinic is paid a site fee to allow harvesters to set up a “chop shop” where they collect and dissect “donated” aborted babies. Harvesters, in turn, donate the body parts to researchers. So, rather than selling tissue directly, the harvesting companies are paid for “retrieval services” and “shipping fees” and not for body parts." "Picked apart and sold in pieces, a single baby could fetch as much as fourteen thousand dollars. One such company, Opening Lines, Inc. of West Franklin, Illinois processes more than fifteen hundred fetuses a day and openly advertises “the highest quality, most affordable, freshest tissue prepared to your specifications and delivered in the quantities you need, when you need it.” Their prices, according to corporate president Dr. Miles Jones, are determined by market forces and by how much buyers are willing to pay for human tissue. The company brochure, which encourages abortionists to “turn your patient’s decision into something wonderful” "Unprocessed Specimen $70 (> 8 weeks) Unprocessed Specimen $50/ (< 8 weeks) Livers (< 8 weeks) 30% discount if significantly fragmented $150 Livers (> 8 weeks) 30% discount if significantly fragmented $125 Spleens (< 8 weeks) $75 Spleens (> 8 weeks) $50 Pancreas (< 8 weeks) $100 Pancreas (> 8 weeks) $75 Thymus (< 8 weeks) $100 Thymus (> 8 weeks) $75 Intestines and Mesentery $50 Mesentery (< 8 weeks) $125 Mesentery (> 8 weeks) $100 Kidney—with / without $125 adrenal (< 8 weeks) Kidney—with / without $100 adrenal (< 8 weeks) Limbs (at least 2) $125 Brain (< 8 weeks) 30% discount if significantly fragmented $999 Brain (> 8 weeks) 30% discount if significantly fragmented $150 Pituitary Gland (> 8 weeks) $300 Bone Marrow (< 8 weeks) $350 Bone Marrow (> 8 weeks) $250 Ears (< 8 weeks) $75 Ears (> 8 weeks) $50 Eyes (< 8 weeks) 40% discount for single eye $75 Eyes (> 8 weeks) 40% discount for single eye $50 Skin (> 12 weeks) $100 Lungs and Heart Block $150 Intact Embryonic Cadaver $400 (< 8 weeks) Intact Embryonic Cadaver $600 (> 8 weeks) Intact Calvarium $125 Intact Trunk (with / without limbs) $500 Gonads $550 Cord Blood (Snap Frozen LN2 ) $125 Spinal Column $150 Spinal Cord $325 Prices in effect through December 31, 1999" "One reality kept hidden from the public is that babies often need to be manipulated into the proper position and slowly butchered alive during the harvesting process to ensure that the valuable goods are not damaged. A 1990 article in Archives of Neurology describes abortion techniques that take three to four times longer than normal in order to preserve tissue and obtain the best samples possible. The longer the procedure, the longer the baby is subjected to the torture. Here’s a partial transcript of testimony from a July 1997 civil court case brought by University of Nebraska contract harvester Dr. Leroy Carhart, challenging Nebraska’s prohibition on certain abortion techniques." Carhart: My normal course would be to dismember the extremity and then go back and try to take the fetus out either foot or skull first, whatever end I can get to first. Attorney: How do you go about dismembering that extremity? Carhart: Just traction and rotation, grasping the portion that you can get a hold of, which would be usually somewhere up the shaft of the exposed portion of the fetus, pulling down on it through the os, using the internal os as your counter traction and rotating to dismember the shoulder or the hip or whatever it would be. Sometimes you will get one leg and you can’t get the other leg out. Attorney: In that situation, when you pull on the arm and remove it, is the fetus still alive? Carhart: Yes. Attorney: Do you consider an arm, for example, to be a substantial portion of the fetus? Carhart: In the way I read it, I think if I lost an arm that would be a substantial loss to me. I think I would have to interpret it that way. Attorney: And then what happens next after you remove the arm? You then try to remove. “You then try to remove the rest of the fetus? Carhart: Then I would go back and attempt to either bring the feet down or bring the skull down, or even sometimes you bring the other arm down and remove that also and then get the feet down. Attorney: At what point is the fetus … does the fetus die during that process? Carhart: I don’t really know. I know that the fetus is alive during the process most of the time because I can see fetal heartbeat on the ultrasound. Attorney: At what point in the process does fetal demise occur between initial removal of the feet or legs and the crushing of the skull, or I’m sorry, the decompressing of the skull? Carhart: Well, you know, again, this is where I’m not sure what fetal demise is. I mean, I honestly have to share a concern, your Honor. You can remove the cranial contents and the fetus will still have a heartbeat for several seconds or several minutes, so is the fetus alive? I would have to say probably, although I don’t think it has any brain function, so it’s brain dead at that point. Attorney: So the brain death might occur when you begin suctioning out of the cranium? Carhart: I think brain death would occur because the suctioning to remove contents is only two or three seconds, so somewhere in that period of time, obviously not when you penetrate the skull, because people get shot in the head and they don’t die immediately from that, if they are going to die at all, so that probably is not sufficient to kill the fetus, but I think removing the brain contents eventually will. "The gruesome secret of fetal dismemberment and harvesting was revealed publicly in 1999 when 20/20 televised an investigative report and nationally syndicated columnist Mona Charen described a typical day at one firm trafficking in body parts. Interviewing a technician—sometimes referred to as a fetal tissue procurement technician—Charen describes how the young woman collected fetuses from late-term abortions and then dissected them in order to obtain needed parts. According to the technician, almost all of the specimens were “perfect” and many were at least seven months old." "However, nothing could have prepared the medical technician for what she was about to experience one day when a set of seven-month-old twin fetuses were brought to her in a metal bucket. Looking down at the pink babies, she must have recoiled in horror when she saw both of them moving, gasping for breath. She had to have been even more horrified when the doctor suddenly appeared and, according to Charen, said, “I got you some good specimens—twins” before pouring a bottle of water into the bucket to drown what until then were two living human beings." "Disgusted by the process, the technician said there were many such live births. The doctors would simply break their tiny necks or kill the fetuses by beating them with metal tongs. In some cases, the technician revealed, they would begin a dissection by cutting open the chest, assuming the baby was already dead, only to find that the heart was still beating. She added that the manner in which abortions were performed had also been altered, that is, done more deliberately and slowly to ensure that the baby remained intact, even if that meant a live birth or prolonged pain for the baby before it died. When the pace of abortions quickened, babies taken alive would sometimes have their parts removed before they were dead." Speechless.

We need to underpin a theory of "policy-data interactions" - to consider systems of policy and data and how they interact: bit.ly/30qmaPX. Read the introduction to Data & Policy, a unique open access publishing collaboration from @CUPAcademic @dataforpolicy #APSA2019

Criminality is associated with brain networks involved in morality, value-based decision-making and ‘theory of mind’, says neural mapping study bit.ly/2CJhqsv

The #climate has changed before. But this is different – A look at the archeological record explains why action is crucial: theguardian.com/science/2017…