As an American, you should always wonder where your taxpayer dollars are going. However, there are times where the answer to that question might be downright sickening.
The Department of Health and Human Services gave away $2.7 million in taxpayer funding to the University of Pittsburgh, who turned around and utilized it for a tissue bank that stores fetal body parts, as reported by Fox News.
Judicial Watch is a conservative watchdog group, and they have allegedly received documents that fully explain the horrific mission of the “GenitoUrinary Development Molecular Anatomy Project.”
This so-called “Tissue Hub ” has been intended to further research on urinary track and kidney issues.
Judicial Watch recently announced that they had received over 250 pages of new documents from HHS that reveal that as much as $3 million in federal funds had been spent on the University of Pittsburgh’s quest to become a “Tissue Hub” for the human fetal tissue that ranged from 6 to 42 weeks in gestation.
These documents noted that they had two goals:
The first goal was to “develop a pipeline for the acquisition, quality control and distribution of human genitourinary samples obtained throughout development (6-42 weeks gestation).” The document added that “we currently have access to 6-24 week samples through the HSTB.” Should your taxpayer dollar be funding macabre practices such as this?
Secondly, the project is going to continue to “generate an ongoing resource to distribute fresh developmental human genitourinary samples from various stages (6-42 weeks).” This means that the samples are going to be “procured by a pathologist and inspected for mechanical damage. Samples will be collected from all qualified cases,” as noted by the document. They continued, “The samples will then be subdivided based on the demand for fresh/frozen aliquots; the validation laboratory for quality control will keep a portion of each sample. The tissue samples will be immediately sent out for live cell use or immediately separated into distinct cellular populations before shipping based on researcher demands.”
Fox News noted that the university had told the HHS in 2015 that they had been “collecting fetal tissue for over 10 years … includ[ing] liver, heart, gonads, legs, brain, genitourinary tissues including kidneys, ureters and bladders.” Of course, there are some obvious moral concerns with harvesting fetal organs, but this hasn’t stopped the institution from continuing to insist that they haven’t done anything wrong.
“The University of Pittsburgh complies with rigorous regulatory and ethical oversight of fetal tissue research,” university vice chancellor Paul Supowitz once told Congress, the outlet noted.
“The researchers in this matter followed all applicable federal and state guidelines and regulations (with Pennsylvania having one of the most restrictive set of requirements in the nation), as well as strict protocols approved by the University. The University’s Institutional Review Board approved the acquisition of stem cells.”
Yes, it is true that the world has made some amazing medical developments, but what is the cost of all of this?
Creating an inventory of fetal parts seems like the plot from a draconian doomsday novel or Nazi Germany, and at best it is extremely questionable.
If there is one thing that this pandemic has accomplished, it would be in demonstrating that we don’t know where our taxpayer dollars are really going.