Fetal tissue documents reveal history’s lessons weren’t learned

After World War II, when America was confronted with the shocking Nazi medical experiments on the Jews, they were horrified. The media was especially engaged, attending the Nuremberg trials and publishing stories on a regular basis.

Today, e-mail evidence on the ghoulish Planned Parenthood baby parts investigations, published by the New York Times, reminds us that there are profound lessons not learned from history.

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:

Between 1939 and 1945, at least seventy medical research projects involving cruel and often lethal experimentation on human subjects were conducted in Nazi concentration camps. These projects were carried out by established institutions within the Third Reich and fell into three areas: research aimed at improving the survival and rescue of German troops; testing of medical procedures and pharmaceuticals; and experiments that sought to confirm Nazi racial ideology. More than seven thousand victims of such medical experiments have been documented. Victims include Jews, Poles, Roma (Gypsies), political prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals, and Catholic priests.

It wasn’t that long ago when the revelations of medical experiments on humans by the Nazis garnered outrage from society. Following the discovery of Nazi experimental laboratories by allied forces, Nazi war crimes tribunals were held leading to the hanging of several Nazi offenders.

A review of those events documented by PBS, which has yet to condemn Planned Parenthood, reads:

Researchers at Buchenwald concentration camp developed a method of individual execution by injecting Russian prisoners with phenol and cyanide. Experimenters also tested various poisons on the human body by secreting noxious chemicals in prisoners’ food or shooting inmates with poison bullets. Victims who did not die during these experiments were killed to allow the experimenters to perform autopsies.

To learn if a limb or joint from one person could be successfully attached to another who had lost that limb or joint, experimenters at Ravensbruck amputated legs and shoulders from inmates in useless attempts to transplant them onto other victims. They also removed sections of bones, muscles, and nerves from prisoners to study regeneration of these body parts. Victims suffered excruciating pain, mutilation, and permanent disability as a result.

A series of Nazi letters transcribed by the Jewish Virtual Library are as follows:

In his 1999 Chicago Tribune review of the documentary “Healing by Killing,” John Petrakis warns readers how easy it is for doctors to use experimentation to bend the Hippocratic Oath, writing:

This sobering documentary, which is based on the book “The Nazi Doctors” by American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton (who also provides some vital onscreen narration), should serve as a terrible reminder to doctors around the world just how easy it is to bend the Hippocratic oath.

James Bowman, Resident Scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, summarized the film this way:

It is perhaps not too much to say that “It was the doctors who paved the way for the holocaust. . . It was medical ideology which led to Hitler and the Nazis,” since there is no reason to suppose that medical ideology is any more benign than the other ideologies which have killed so many in our century. But there is a particularly worrying aspect to any ideology that finds it so easy to stake a claim to “scientific” respectability. It is well to remember that, as Lifton recalls, “We [doctors] are descended from Shamans” and other primitive practitioners of sorcery and magic, so that people are in awe of our “magical powers to kill or heal.” That is why, he says, the Hippocratic oath is full of warnings against doing harm— “as if they knew doctors could be dangerous.”

Today, medical experiments using human babies are being carried out by established institutions like Planned Parenthood, StemExpress, and many universities, among others. And, just as in the days of the Holocaust, much of society is silent.

The media is by and large ignoring the ongoing investigation into the marketing of aborted baby body parts by Planned Parenthood. So, kudos to the New York Times editors who, in what appeared to be simple journalistic obligation and not outrage, chose to publish documents from the investigation. They included letters from members of Congress, letters from medical practitioners and email exchanges on tissue requests. The documents hidden inside the PDF upload would appear to be simple pieces of paper until you realize that what is being described on those pages is the dismembering and parceling of human babies.

One heavily redacted email from University of California, San Diego regarding human fetal tissue requests read in part:

Next time you go to PP [short for Planned Parenthood], can you try to get pancreas as well as liver?

The response:

On Friday I’m going to PP and I will collect liver tissue…

Another reply:

Great to hear that, I need a few more fetal pancreas samples…

Another document marked Exhibit 1, also heavily redacted so you cannot read who it is from, reads in part:

We are now ready to include the skull if you could please include that in our order for tomorrow…

Ironically, that correspondence was dated January 21, 2015 – one day before January 22, the date that memorializes Roe v. Wade.

The investigation by a select Congressional panel follows an undercover investigation by the Center for Medical Progress. The pro-life organization secretly recorded high ranking Planned Parenthood medical officials describing how they would obtain the aborted body parts of human babies and then sell them for research. In one exchange, Planned Parenthood Federation Senior Director of Medical Services, Dr. Deborah Nucatola, is heard describing how she will crush the parts above and below whatever the researchers request:

The kind of rate-limiting step of the procedure is calvarium. Calvarium—the head—is basically the biggest part. …

We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact. And with the calvarium, in general, some people will actually try to change the presentation so that it’s not vertex. …

The fetal tissue document marked Exhibit B3, released by the NYT, is an almost haunting reenactment of that description, reading:

The Calvarium [ fetal head] is mostly in tact with a tear up the back suture line, but all pieces look to be there.

The limbs, one upper and one lower are totally in tact, with upper broken at the humerus, and one lower broken right above the knee…

These lessons not learned from history are a blight on our society. This time, atrocities against humans are being deliberately swept under the rug and labeled “medical research” instead of being condemned like they were in the past.

The horrifying nature of these fetal tissue documents represent a setback for humanity.