Independent Journalist Tells Supreme Court Some Research Labs Have Racial Quotas for Aborted Baby Body Parts

The Supreme Court is seen in Washington on June 30, 2021. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo)

Supreme Court justices were told on Aug. 4 in an amicus curiae brief that some medical research laboratories use racial quotas in buying body parts from unborn babies killed via live dismemberment in abortions.

“Even though 4-month-old infants in the womb move, kick, suck their thumbs, hiccup, and demonstrate a readily discernable heartbeat and brainwaves, and even though the Constitution guarantees that ‘neither slavery nor involuntary servitude’ shall exist in America nor that any person be deprived of life without due process of law … these same children can be routinely killed through live dismemberment abortions or trafficked and sold for experimental use,” claimed the brief, which was submitted on behalf of undercover journalist David Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress (CMP).

“These abortions already disproportionately affect poor and minority communities and some laboratories specifically set quotas for aborted fetuses based on race.”

The brief was prepared by the Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund in partnership with the Thomas More Society, the Chicago-based public interest law firm that specializes in religious liberty cases.

The brief was submitted to the court in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in which the state of Mississippi is defending its recently enacted law banning all abortions after the 15th week of a pregnancy.

The state has also encouraged the high court to reverse its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide. An estimated 60 million unborn babies have since died as a result of elective abortions made legal by the decision.

The brief further noted that “the vast majority of states in the union, including Mississippi, plus the United States federal government, recognize pre-viability unborn children as human beings under the law equal to any other, for purposes of protection from physical violence and injury.

“Yet, due to this Court’s antiquated, 1900s-era abortion precedents, absent laws like Mississippi’s, unborn-victims-of-violence laws do not protect the very same unborn victims from the violence of predatory businesses that operate with the explicit purposes of killing them by abortion and selling them for experimentation.”

Daleiden and CMP first came to national attention in 2015 with the release of a series of videotapes the journalist secretly made of his interviews with a series of officials from Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the nation’s largest abortion provider, and others in the industry.

Daleiden and various associates have been variously charged with multiple crimes by former California Attorney General Xavier Becerra and his predecessor in that office, Vice President Kamala Harris. The cases are under appeal. They were also sued in civil court by Planned Parenthood. The latter won a $2.3 million judgment that is also being appealed.

The arguments presented in the brief are prefaced with a quote from Planned Parenthood Senior Director of Medical Services Dr. Deborah Nucatola, who was seen in the videos saying, “We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know, 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.”

Nucatola was referring to preserving the main organs in the unborn baby’s torso, so they could be sold to medical research firms and their labs.

The high court agreed to hear the Dobbs case in May, after the Mississippi law was adopted and then challenged by the state’s lone abortion clinic.

In a brief submitted in opposition to the state’s petition to the high court to hear its appeal of lower court rulings, attorneys for the Jackson Women’s Health Organization argued that the Mississippi law banning abortions after 15 weeks violates the core principle underlying Roe v. Wade and subsequent cases based on it.

The nation’s highest court held in Roe v. Wade that prior to the unborn baby achieving “viability”—the point before which it could not survive outside the womb—only the mother can decide whether to continue the pregnancy.

“Roe and Casey, and the Court’s subsequent cases, are clear, before viability, it is for the pregnant person, and not the State, to make the ultimate decision whether to continue a pregnancy. A pre-viability abortion ban unquestionably contravenes this fundamental tenet of the Court’s abortion jurisprudence,” the clinic’s brief argued.

“Before viability, the state’s interests, whatever they may be, cannot override a pregnant person’s interests in their liberty and autonomy over their own body.”

“Planned Parenthood of SE. Pa. v. Casey” was a 1992 Supreme Court decision that upheld Roe.

The Thomas More Society separately filed an amicus brief in the Dobbs case on behalf of Dr. Steve Jacobs and Illinois Right to Life. In its brief, the society argued, “This case presents the Court with a unique opportunity to correct a judicial error of historic proportions, an error that has resulted in the deaths of more than 60 million unborn children. Roe v. Wade, should and must be overruled.”

The brief argued Roe should be overruled because the Court in the decision incorrectly claimed that most states retained until after the Civil War the English Common Law standard of “quickening”—the first moment an expectant mother feels her unborn baby moving—as the time after which abortion was illegal.

The More brief noted that “by the end of 1849, 18 of the 30 states had enacted statutes prohibiting abortion, and by the end of the Civil War, 27 of the 36 states had done so.

“By the end of 1868, the year in which the 14th Amendment was ratified, 30 of the 37 states had enacted such statutes, including 25 of the 30 ratifying states, together with six of the 10 federal territories.

“The widespread adoption of these laws prior to the ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868 undermines the Court’s conclusion in Roe that “the right of privacy ... founded in the 14th Amendment’s concept of personal liberty encompasses a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.”

Since, among other arguments, the court’s finding in Roe of a right to obtain an abortion in the 14th Amendment’s privacy protection was based on a misreading of the legal precedents, the 1973 decision must be overruled, according to the brief.

Congressional correspondent Mark Tapscott may be contacted at: [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at @mtapscott and on Parler at @Mtapscott.