Planned Parenthood and the university’s fetal tissue experiments

Abortion giant Planned Parenthood maintained a relationship with the University of California San Diego (UCSD) to exchange the body parts of aborted babies for “ownership of the university’s ‘patents’ and ‘intellectual property’” created through experiments on them, according to documents obtained by the pro-life investigative group Center for Medical Progress (CMP).

On March 5, CMP announced that it obtained a 2009 “Biological Materials Transfer Agreement” (MTA) contract between Planned Parenthood’s San Diego affiliate and UCSD, which gives the latter “access” to “fetal and placental tissue, which are proprietary materials of PPSD.”

“PPSD shall retain all right, title, and interest in and to the Material, including but not limited to all right, title, and interest in patents and patent applications and other intellectual property rights relating to the Material,” the contract says. It is unclear whether the agreement remains in effect to this day, but emails show that as late as 2020 UCSD officials were concerned about respecting “any rights” fetal tissue providers might legally “retain.”

Such patents can be extremely lucrative; the University of California system’s overall patent invention revenue for 2021-2022 amounted to a total of more than $127 million. “The transfer of any aborted human fetal tissue for ‘valuable consideration’ is a federal felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison or a fine of up to $500,000,” CMP noted.

“This new evidence shows Planned Parenthood sells late-term aborted baby body parts in violation of federal law, for far more money than has ever been discussed before,” CMP founder and president David Daleiden said. “Planned Parenthood’s national headquarters knew about and approved these sales of aborted babies for valuable consideration as part of government-funded research grants. The federal OIG investigation of fetal trafficking in Pittsburgh must be expanded to include Planned Parenthood’s activities in San Diego and every other location where this $1.8 billion abortion business supplies aborted babies for taxpayer-funded experiments. The highest levels of Planned Parenthood leadership must answer under oath for what we now know is the organization’s participation in government-sponsored trafficking of late-term aborted babies.”

The latest developments are a continuation of a scandal that has followed Planned Parenthood for almost a decade, yet so far not led to any consequences for the abortion giant.

Starting in 2015, CMP began releasing a series of secretly recorded conversations with officials from Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation that set off a firestorm of controversy and a string of revelations about the abortion industry breaking multiple federal laws against profiting off human tissue, altering abortion procedures for the sake of procuring better tissue samples, and potentially even committing partial-birth abortions or infanticide, as well as video examples of abortion workers displaying callousness toward the humanity of the children their work killed.

Neither the Obama nor Trump administrations took action against the abortion organizations over the revelations, but the pro-lifers who exposed their activities were hit with various lawsuits and felony charges on claims of trespassing, misidentifying themselves with fake driver’s licenses, and recording people without their consent. In December, CMP lost its final appeal of a nearly $16 million judgment against them, which argued that the federal Racketeer Influenced & Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act had been misapplied. The U.S. Supreme Court had declined to intervene in October.

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