'What Happened to Clementine?': New documentary exposes gruesome fetal harvesting

A new documentary from the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) exposes further details about a late-term abortion carried out on a baby named Clementine, and the abortion business's inhumane treatment of the baby and her mother.

Clementine appears to have been born alive during an abortion, so that her body parts and organs could be harvested and sold.

Key Takeaways:

• A new documentary details the account of how one couple's baby was aborted late in pregnancy, was likely born alive, and was harvested for body parts and organs.

• The mother of a 20-week preborn baby girl named Clementine sought an abortion at Cherry Hill Women's Center in New Jersey in 2024. She was not certain of her decision, but felt pressured by the staff.

• Documentation, examined by medical experts, appears to show that the baby's mother was pushed rapidly through an extremely painful late-term abortion process so that the baby girl would be delivered intact and alive; when harvesting organs, this is the ideal.

• Baby Clementine's parents are seeking answers about what happened to their daughter; they are grieving her death by abortion and want to give her a proper burial.

The Backstory:

Thomas Kearns was in a long distance relationship with a woman* when she discovered she was pregnant. He was happy to hear the news, and although she brought up the idea of abortion, they went to a pregnancy center where they heard their baby's heartbeat.

“Once I saw her on the screen... ‘Nope, that’s a living thing. I want to keep my baby. I don’t want them to die,'” recalled Kearns. Their daughter, Clementine, was about 10 weeks old at the time.

The couple decided against abortion, but Clementine's mother was still battling with fear and uncertainty, which is not uncommon for any woman who learns she is pregnant.

Several weeks later, Clementine's mother called Cherry Hill Women's Center, which, according to CMP founder David Daleiden, is "one of the top ten third trimester abortion centers in the country and has been a fetal organ harvesting site for decades."

Clementine's mother explained, "I wasn't calling to schedule an appointment. I didn't have money to schedule an appointment. I was literally just calling to ask questions and then they just were pushing, like, 'This is, you know, normal. You gotta go and do it.' It was pushy. They were very persistent."

Cherry Hill routes all of its calls to a call center, which Daleiden said is staffed with salespersons.

"I was probably in one of the worst mindsets I've ever been in," Clementine's mother told CMP. "Hence, the reason why I made the call [to Cherry Hill]. I don't know what I was looking for. Not that. I literally had no idea what an abortion was. Nobody ever explained anything to me either. But I didn't know what procedures entailed. I didn't even know if it was legal. Like, I was literally just calling to ask questions."

However, on March 12, 2024, Clementine's mother ultimately went to the New Jersey abortion facility where she underwent an abortion at 20 weeks.

CMP's associate reporter Elise Ketch called Cherry Hill undercover and was routed to the call center, where an employee told her that the National Abortion Federation offers funding which significantly decreases the costs of late-term abortion for women — and that Cherry Hill "has got a good amount of funding" to pay for abortions.

When Kearns learned about the abortion, he was devastated.

The Details:

Though Kearns initially believed Clementine had been put through a dismemberment (D&E) abortion, the new documentary purports to show that Clementine was born alive and intact through an induction abortion (or possibly an illegal partial-birth D&X abortion), and then her body parts were harvested.

Paperwork from the abortion was obtained by Kearns and Clementine's mother, and it details each step of the abortion process.

"What Happened To Clementine?" - A Baby Trafficked for Organ Harvesting

A decision made in fear

As the documentary notes, Clementine's mother arrived at Cherry Hill Women's Center on March 12, 2024, "in state of crisis," said Ketch, and "stayed in her car to regulate herself by smoking legal marijuana."

She told the staff that she had just smoked marijuana, but they didn't reschedule her; they continued on with the abortion appointment.

Former abortionist Dr. Catherine Wheeler explained that if Clementine's mother had been smoking marijuana, she would not be considered able to make clear decisions of informed consent — and if her heartbeat was at 116 as her medical records show, it is clear that she was highly anxious.

The abortion staff inserted dilators into Clementine's mother's cervix; she reportedly turned white and was sweating. Former abortionist Dr. Kathi Aultman stated that this is the most painful part of the process and that Clementine's mother should have been administered a paracervical block — a series of injections to numb the pain fibers in the cervix.

But it appears she didn't; notation about the use of these injections was not present in her medical records.

"It's just too painful otherwise," she said in the film. "I just think it's barbaric that you would dilate... to nine and a half centimeters without any kind of anesthesia...."

Intent to obtain organs for harvesting

Aultman pointed out that there was a fetal heartbeat present at the time of the abortion, as no feticide was given to stop the heart before delivery. The consent paperwork for the feticide was not signed by Clementine's mother, which shows there was no intent to stop Clementine's heart before her mother was induced.

This is key, because feticide, explained Daleiden, "severely compromies the use of the fetal organs, cells, and tissues for experiments." Research shows that the tissue of babies who are given the feticide is more greatly damaged and that "prolonged incubation at body temperature without fetal circulation... is the primary driver of the poorer tissue quality observed in terminated fetuses."

Daleiden explained (emphasis added):

"[F]or the organs to be usable, the baby has to be kept alive for as long as possible before harvesting. No feticide beforehand."

On March 13, Clementine's mother returned to Cherry Hill as instructed. She believed there was no turning back, but she was still extremely fearful.

A Massive Dose of a Powerful Drug

The facility administered 600 micrograms of misoprostol, which they had her consent to the day before — meaning they knew they planned to keep Clementine alive for the abortion and force her mother into a rapid delivery.

Dr. Wheeler explained that to induce labor, just 25 or 50 micrograms of misoprostol are typically given; Clementine's mother was given 12 to 24 times more than usual. This would have cause powerful (and unspeakably painful) contractions.

Licensed professional midwife Lisa Marie Oxenham noted in the film:

"That's really high. That's going to cause the uterus to contract really, really hard and be very painful. And doing this without pain medication... that's really sad, actually. That's trying to evacuate the uterus, because that's what that would do.

They should not be doing that. That should be illegal, actually, using it that way. It would be throwing the walls against the baby really hard... It's unconscionable to me to do that to a viable baby.

But I imagine [in this situation] people aren't thinking about what the baby is experiencing."

Clementine's mother explained, "I've never felt cramps like this my entire life. They were a 20 out of 10."

Procuring the Organs

On the way into the procedure room, she was asked to sign one more consent form, while in excruciating pain. It was a form from Circle Allocation Services, a rebranded organ procurement company once known as Advanced Bioscience Resources, which CMP previously investigated.

This company has been harvesting and selling body parts from aborted babies since 1989.

Clementine's mother never met the abortionists — Dr. Alena Hoover, a trainee, and Dr. Richard Lieblich, who had been accused of killing a patient in a lawsuit that Cherry Hill paid nearly a million dollars to settle.

She said she kept telling them she was scared but they ignored her and told her to relax because she was having an anxiety attack. They put a mask over her face and she went unconscious.

Drs. Wheeler and Aultman assessed that the abortion was extremely quick. It began at 11:21 and it was over by 11:31, meaning that between giving the anesthesia and ensuring the sterility of equipment, the abortion would have taken three minutes.

This means it was likely not a D&E dismemberment abortion, but a live birth abortion or an illegal partial birth abortion.

The average D&E abortion, said Dr. Aultman, takes about 10 to 30 minutes. They only used a 12 suction cannula, she said, which cannot be used on a 20-week baby.

"Something is very strange here. Something is very wrong," she said.

"If i had to give you my suspicions," said Dr. Aultman, "I would suspect that when they removed the dilators, perhaps there was a big uterine contraction and the baby was completely delivered."

Dr. Wheeler agreed that this was not a D&E abortion based on those records.:

"To me, the only way you're gonna get that done is either the baby's already mostly expulsed if not expulsed, or the feet are accesible or you can get that baby flipped around quickly. The only way to get [the baby] out and have it done so quickly is to grab the baby's feet, pull, and hopefully come out intact."

A Born-Alive Cover-up?

Another red flag is that the records of the abortion don't mention the baby at all.

Dr. Aultman believes the staff was "purposefully being evasive" on the records because "they don't want [to show violation of] the Partial Birth Abortion Act or the Born Alive Act. In any other circumstance they would document the baby came out in pieces — the baby was delivered intact whether the baby was born alive or not."

She added:

"You would think they would want to document those things to protect themselves, but they wouldn't be able to if the baby was born alive and I think that's why you're not seeing them document any of those things."

She explained that from everything she is reading in the medical records, it appears Cherry Hill lined up the procedure on Clementine so that there was a minimal amount of time between Clementine's death and the harvesting of her body parts:

"They need fresh tissue and, knowing that, everything makes sense as you're reading this op report and you're looking at the way that she was handled and treated. The fact that they don't describe how the baby was delivered, the fact that they didn't state if the baby was alive at the beginning of the procedure or if the baby was alive at the end of the procedure — was this baby delivered intact or in pieces?

They've left out everything that could tell us what really happened and they didn't want to fall afoul of either the Born Alive Act or the Partial Birth Abortion Act, which they would if that baby was born alive. ... There's no way it could have been a standard D&E in that amount of time."

After the abortion, Clementine's mother was sent home, and says no one seemed to care how she was doing emotionally.

She then spoke with Kearns, and they called the facility on March 15 to ask for Clementine's remains to give her a funeral. First, they were told they didn't know where Clementine was, then that they couldn't tell them where her remains were. Then the facility blocked their calls entirely.

Kearns wants answers:

"How many pieces is she in? Is she whole? Is her body on standby in a freezer? Did they dissect her on site?

This was a human trafficking. They trafficked my daughter's remains. When they were done torturing her, they sold her body, purchased by the procurement agency, resold a second time to a research center or lab that will continue to profit off of her on so many different levels.

Cherry Hill Women's Center is a hub. It is not only just a murder mill, it's an auction block. They are selling dead children. I don't think people realize how serious that is."

Kearns and Clementine's mother are working with Catherine Glenn Foster, an attorney from First Rights Global, to file complaints with state and federal agencies.

Why It Matters:

Clementine is one of countless aborted babies whose body parts have been sold for to researchers for experimentation. CMP exposed this horrific and profitable network of human body part trafficking over a decade ago, yet there have been no consequences. Clementine became a victim of that scheme.

Many women don't even know that their babies' organs and body parts were harvested. Clementine's parents are the first to come forward, and they hope that their story brings an end to the inhumane practices of abortion and the harvesting of those children's body parts.

"This is not an isolated incident and thousands of women men, mostly without knowing, have had their preemie age babies harvested from them at taxpayer funded abortion clinics across the country," said Ketch. "... Clementine's case is not an outlier; it's a window into how the system operates. And that's why Clementine's parents have resolved to help all who have been impacted by the predatory behavior of the abortion harvesting industry."

*Name has been left out to protect privacy.