Products That Use Aborted Fetuses, by Andrea Byrnes

By Andrea Byrnes, Human Life International

Do some products contain fetal parts? The short gruesome answer: Yes.

Today’s consumer products are not the soap and lampshades of recycled Nazi concentration camp victims. The new utilitarian use of people is a sophisticated enterprise, not visible to the human eye.

Fetal Parts in Daily Life

Perhaps you are a diligent supporter and promoter of pro-life legislation, only vote for pro-life candidates, avoid entertainment from musicians and actors who openly support Planned Parenthood. Regardless, you may unwittingly be cooperating in aborted fetal cell research by purchasing products that use aborted fetuses, either in the product itself or in its development.

One might take Enbrel (Amgen) to relieve Rheumatoid Arthritis. Your husband was given Zoastavax (Merck), a Shingles vaccine, at his annual physical. Your mother with diabetes and renal failure is prescribed Arensep (Amgen). Your grandfather is given the blood product Repro (Eli Lilly) during an angioplasty. The local school district requires that your grandchildren receive the MMRII (the Merck Measles-Mumps-Rubella vaccine). Your daughter and son use coffee creamers and eat soup with artificial flavor enhancers (Senomyx/Firmenich) tested on artificial taste buds engineered from aborted fetal cells.

Because of the vagary of FDA labeling, unless you are proficient at reading patents and pharmaceutical inserts you wouldn’t know aborted fetal parts were there without someone to tell you.

Luckily, that someone is the watchdog group Children of God for Life (COG), a pro-life public citizen group which tracks the use of aborted fetal parts. Under the leadership of Executive Director Debi Vinnedge, COG publishes a downloadable list of products that use aborted fetuses currently available in the U.S.

Products That Use Aborted Fetuses

Products related to fetal material can be broken down into roughly 3 categories: artificial flavors, cosmetics, and medicines/vaccines.

1. Food and Drink

To be clear, food and beverages do not contain any aborted fetal material; however, they may be tastier because of it. How is that?

The American biotech company Senomyx has developed chemical additives that can enhance flavor and smell. To do this, they had to produce an army of never-tiring taste testers–that is, flavor receptors engineered from human embryonic kidney cells (HEK 293, fetal cell line popular in pharmaceutical research).^[1] These artificial taste buds can tell product developers which products the public will crave. The goal is to do a taste bud “sleight of hand,” creating low-sugar and low-sodium products that taste sweet or salty while actually using less sugar or sodium in the product.

Does your Nestle Coffee-mate Pumpkin Spice refrigerated creamer taste more like autumn? Does your Maggi bouillon taste just like chicken? Thank Senomyx.

The laboratory-created artificial enhancers do not have to be tested at length by the FDA because the Senomyx chemical “flavor compounds are used in proportions less than one part per million” and can be classified as artificial flavors.^[2]

In 2005, Senomyx had contracts to develop products for Kraft Foods, Nestle, Campbell Soup and Coca-Cola.^[3] However, when it was discovered in 2011 that PepsiCo was using Senomyx to develop a reduced sugar beverage, a boycott ensued that caused Kraft-Cadbury Adams LLC and Campbell Soup cancelled their contracts with Senomyx. In a 2012 letter to Children of God for Life, PepsiCo stated, “Senomyx does not use HEK cells or any other tissues or cell lines derived from human embryos or fetuses for research performed on behalf of PepsiCo.”^[4] To that effect, PepsiCo is working with Senomyx on two products developed with Sweetmyx 617, a new Senomyx sweet taste modifier.^[5]

In November 2018, the Swiss company Firmenich acquired Senomyx, Inc. Firmenich describes itself as “a global leader in taste innovation and expert in sweet, cooling and bitter solutions.”

2. Cosmetics

The fountain of youth…is babies.

Commercially, it’s known as Processed Skin Proteins (PSP), developed at the University of Lausanne to heal burns and wounds by regenerating traumatized skin. The fetal skin cell line was taken from an electively aborted baby whose body was donated to the University.^[6]

Neocutis, a San Francisco-based firm, uses PSP in some of their anti-aging skin products. Their website claims the trademarked PSP “harnesses the power of Human Growth Factors, Interleukins and other Cytokines, to help deliver state-of-the-art skin revitalization.”

3. Vaccines and Medicine

The Vaccine Card at the Sound Choice Pharmaceutical Institute (SCPI) website lists over 21 vaccines and medical products that contain aborted fetal cell lines. The Card is updated yearly, and also lists ethical vaccine alternatives when there are any.

SCPI is a biomedical research organization headed by Theresa Deisher, who has a PhD in Molecular and Cellular Physiology from Stanford and 23 patents in the field to her name.  Dr. Deisher, the first person to identify and patent stem cells from the adult heart, has an insiders understanding of genetic engineering having worked in the industry leaders such as Amgen, Genetech, and Repligen.^[7]

Among other things SCPI “promotes awareness about the widespread use of fetal human material in drug discovery, development and commercialization.”

No vaccine product is completely pure: “You will find contaminating DNA and cellular debris from the production cell in your final product. When we switch from using animal cells to using human cells we now have human DNA in our vaccines and our drugs.”^[8]

The problem is three-fold. Aborted fetal parts are used for experiments, aborted fetal cell lines are used, and fetal cellular DNA debris are in vaccines and medicines.

But it is not just human DNA that is left over, so are some of the chemical stabilizers that keep the product from degrading, as well as, stimulants to rev up the immune system.

“Vaccines are a virus that have been put into a vial, in a liquid, which is the buffer, which we call excipients, and companies have put in stabilizers so that the virus won’t degrade and other things that kind of rev up your immune system so that they can use lower amounts of the virus and have a greater profit margin. And immune stimulants are things like aluminum and thimerosal, they are stabilizers but they rev up the immunes system, so all of these things are in the final product, including contaminates from the cell lines that are used to manufacture the vaccines.”^[9]

Why aren’t the contaminates removed? Because nobody wants a pediatric vaccine that costs a few thousand dollars.^[10]

In finance, the yield is inversely related to the price. In chemistry, the yield is inversely related to purity. The price of inexpensive mass-produced vaccines is that the medical establishment accepts that the vaccines contain a high amount of fetal contaminates.

“[I]f they have purified out the containments from the cell lines, the yield would be so low that they wouldn’t make any money, or no one would pay a thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars for a vaccine. And so because of that case remnants from the cell lines, in that case, fetal cell lines are in the final product. And they are at actually very high levels. And in the chicken pox, the fetal DNA contaminates are present at twice the levels of the active ingredient which is Varicella DNA.”^[11]

The Fetal Tissue Marketplace

Much research is currently being done with fetal cells.

We know this because, for one, there’s a market for fetal parts. In a series of undercover videos, David Daleiden of The Center for Medical Progress exposed Planned Parenthood abortion clinics selling fetal parts to investigators posing as and medical researchers. And for his efforts his office was raided in 2016 by then California Attorney General Kamala Harris, now a Senator and 2020 Presidential Candidate Harris.^[12] Daleiden is currently being pursued in court by current California Attorney General, and former Democrat California Congressman, Xavier Becerra.

We already knew this was happening from the testimony of scientists themselves. On January 11, 2018, professor emeritus Dr. Stanley Plotkin, the lead developer of the Rubella vaccine for the Wistar Institute (Philadelphia) in the 1960s, was deposed as an expert witness on Vaccinology in a Michigan child custody case.^[13] Dr. Plotkin was asked how many aborted fetuses he has used in his experiments:

QUESTION: So in your, in all of your work related to vaccines throughout your whole career, you’ve only ever worked with two fetuses?

PLOTKIN: In terms of making vaccines, yes.

But after being presented with Exhibit 41 (Proceedings of the Society of Experimental Biology and Medicine), the two fetuses involved in his experiment grows exponentially to 76 aborted fetuses.

QUESTION: So this study involved 74 fetuses, correct?

PLOTKIN: Seventy-six.

QUESTION: And these fetuses were all three months or older when aborted, correct? PLOTKIN: Yes.

A true enough response. Fetal cells, for that matter all normal cells, have a finite capacity to replicate following the principle of cellular aging. The vaccine trail needed many cell lines in order to achieve its end. 

An interesting aside, during questioning Dr. Plotkin answered affirmatively that some of his subjects for experimental vaccine trials had been children of “mothers in prison,” the mentally ill, and “individuals under colonial rule” [Belgian Congo].

Dr. Theresa Deisher first became aware of the introduction of fresh aborted fetal material in drug discovery in 1996.^[14] Fresh fetal parts are a time-saver compared to the days spent washing and prepping animal tissue, like monkey hearts, for laboratory experiments. While it is not legal to sell aborted fetal tissue, it is still available in catalogues and comes with high prices for shipping and handling.

A Better Option

According to Dr. David A. Prentice Vice, President of the Charlotte Lozier Institute and Adjunct Professor of Molecular Genetics at the John Paul II Institute, adult stem cells are the benchmark for research that has led to actual cures for patients.

“The superiority of adult stem cells in the clinic and the mounting evidence supporting their effectiveness in regeneration and repair make adult stem cells the gold standard of stem cells for patients.”^[15]

Then why are we still using embryonic cell lines when adult stem cells have become the Gold Standard? There seems to be little excuse for products that use aborted fetuses.

U.S. Policy on Products That Use Aborted Fetuses

President Bill Clinton

On the 20th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade in 1993, President Clinton signed five abortion-related memorandums which included the reversal of the George H. W. Bush era moratorium on creating new fetal tissue for research, claiming at the time that, “This moratorium has significantly hampered the development of possible treatments for individuals afflicted with serious diseases and disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes and leukemia.”^[16]

While a bio-ethics debate transfixed the country in 2006 as to whether the United States would allow the use of new aborted fetal stem cells in research, [see White House Fact Sheet on Stem Cell Research Policy], the medical research community had already decided that the future lay with human-animal hybrids and new aborted fetal cell lines. According to a statement submitted to the President’s Bioethics Council:

“Aborted human DNA in our vaccines is not the end, it is only the beginning, as the creation of human-animal hybrids demonstrates. A new aborted fetal cell line has been developed, called PerC6, and licenses have been taken by over 50 partners, including the NIH and the Walter Reed Army Institute, to use this cell line for new vaccine and biologics production. The goal of the company that created the PerC6 is to become the production cell line for ALL vaccines, therapeutics antibodies, biologic drugs and gene therapy.”^[17]

And this has largely come to pass.

In 2019, the Department of Health and Human Services granted a second 90-day extension to a contract it has with the University of California at San Francisco that requires UCSF to make “humanized mice” for on-going AIDS research. The human fetal tissue comes from late-term abortions.

CNSNews reported that “according to an estimate it has published on its website, the National Institutes of Health (which is a division of HHS) will spend $95 million this fiscal year alone on research that–like UCSF’s “humanized mouse” contract–uses human fetal tissue.”^[18]

See here for news on how the Trump administration limited the sale of fetal parts.

Stop Ebola? Prevent Zika Virus? Cure AIDS? Look for more, not fewer, aborted fetal products in the future.

Writer Andrea Byrnes was the first producer of U.S. March for Life coverage at EWTN Global Catholic Network, which she continued to supervise for seven years. She attended her first HLI conference in 1989, where she first met Servant of God Dr. Jerome Lejeune. She and her husband would later pray for Lejeune’s intercession for her son’s health difficulties discovered before birth, and thanks be to God, he is thriving.

Notes

^[1] Melanie Warner, “Pepsi’s Bizarro World: Boycotted Over Embryonic Cells Linked to Lo-Cal Soda.” CBS News Moneywatch. June 3, 2011.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pepsis-bizarro-world-boycotted-over-embryonic-cells-linked-to-lo-cal-soda/

^[2] Melanie Warner, “Food Companies Test Flavorings That Can Mimic Sugar, Salt or MSG” New York Times. April 6, 2005.

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/06/business/food-companies-test-flavorings-that-can-mimic-sugar-salt-or-msg.html

^[3] Melanie Warner, “Food Companies Test Flavorings That Can Mimic Sugar, Salt or MSG” New York Times. April 6, 2005.

^[4] PepsiCo to Debi Vinnedge Executive Director, Children of God for Life. April 26, 2012.

https://cogforlife.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/pepsiresponse042012.pdf

^[5] Christ Young, “San Diego Company’s New ‘Sweetness Enhancer’ Draws Scrunity.” Inewsource. KPBS.Org. October 8, 2015

https://www.kpbs.org/news/2015/oct/08/san-diego-companys-new-sweetness-enhancer-draws-sc/

^[6] Valerie Robinson, “Aborted fetus cells used in beauty creams.” The Washington Times. November 3, 2009.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/nov/3/aborted-fetus-cells-used-in-anti-aging-products/

^[7] Theresa A. Deisher, Phd. “Testimony on Conscience Rights related to biologic drug disclosure and alternative drugs.” President’s Council on Bioethics Archive. Georgetown University. September 8, 2008.

https://bioethicsarchive.georgetown.edu/pcbe/transcripts/sept08/deisher_statement.pdf

^[8] Theresa A. Deisher, Phd. “Testimony on Conscience Rights related to biologic drug disclosure and alternative drugs.” President’s Council on Bioethics Archive. Georgetown University. September 8, 2008.

^[9] “Dr. Theresa Deisher Guelph, Ontario Canada June 23, 2018.” Vaccine Choice Canada published on YouTube. August 2, 2018.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1k6xLQnJD8

^[10] The National Vaccine Injury Act was signed in 1986 so that manufactures wouldn’t raise the price of vaccines due to injury lawsuits. Robert Pear, “Reagan Signs Bill on Drug Exports and Payment for Vaccine Injuries.” New York Times. November 15, 1986. https://www.nytimes.com/1986/11/15/us/reagan-signs-bill-on-drug-exports-and-payment-for-vaccine-injuries.html

^[11] “Dr. Theresa Deisher Guelph, Ontario Canada June 23, 2018.” Vaccine Choice Canada published on YouTube. August 2, 2018.

^[12] Paige St. John. “Kamala Harris’ support for Planned Parenthood draws fire after raid on anti-abortion activist. Los Angeles Times. April 7, 2016.

https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-kamala-harris-planned-parenthood-20160407-story.html

^[13] DEPOSITION OF STANLEY A. PLOTKIN, M.D.CASE # 2015-831539-DM, JANUARY 11, 2018, COUNTY OF OAKLAND CIRCUIT COURT, FAMILY DIVISION, MICHIGAN. Ricardo Beas — RBWorks© — Natural Law Church of Health and Healing© © Common Law Copyright – All Rights Reserved, Without Prejudice.

http://www.cafepeyote.com/files/Plotkin_Deposition_-_Summary.pdf

“King of Vaccines Comes Clean!” The HighWire with Del Bigtree. Youtube. Published. January 17, 2009.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NACBHtFMllA

^[14] Dr. Theresa Deisher: Moral Vaccine Development. Saint Michael Broadcasting. YouTube. Published March 5, 2011.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTEh_BsGwZQ

^[15] Wesley J. Smith. “Adult Stem Cells Now the “Gold Standard.” National Review. March 15, 2019. 2:40 PM.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/adult-stem-cells-now-the-gold-standard/

^[16] Robin Toner. “Settling In: Easing Abortion Policy; Clinton Orders Reversal of Abortion Restrictions Left By Reagan and Bush.” New York Times. January 23, 1993.

https://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/23/us/settling-easing-abortion-policy-clinton-orders-reversal-abortion-restrictions.html

^[17] Theresa A. Deisher, Phd. “Testimony on Conscience Rights related to biologic drug disclosure and alternative drugs.” President’s Council on Bioethics Archive. Georgetown University. September 8, 2008.

^[18] Terence P. Jeffrey. “HHS Extends Contract to Make ‘Humanized Mice’ With Aborted Baby Parts for Another 90 Days.” CNSNews. March 1, 2019. 5:16 PM.

https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/hhs-extends-contract-make-humanized-mice-aborted-baby-parts-another?fbclid=IwAR0NpDMb6W3BVweC0-H4TUza6Ix2aMyjoTn6cOvSmJ9e0YfLk7C6WLueqMw