Virtual Eternity (the Serialized Novel) Episode 32 - The Medical Research Library Part One: Harvesting cells

This is Episode 32 of the serialized version of the novel, Virtual Eternity: An Epic 90s Retro Florida Techo-Pro-Life Love Story and Conversion Journey. These 52 episodes are presented here free for you every Friday. You can buy the paperback version []  from Mike Church’s Crusade Channel Store or at Amazon.

Or you can start reading at the Table of Contents: here

The COVID vaccine mandates and the right to religious exemption required millions of us to question whether or not science could have pushed COVID vaccines to market at warp speed if not for abortions. Some of us found religious objections not only because babies died, but also because of how they died.

We research and discern this for fear of being fired or for fear of permanent harm by experimental vaccines. What would have driven us to research and discern this decades ago, before it all became new-normal? Could we have known years ago the likelihood that vaccines depended on cruel experimentation on babies? If so, why did we miss it?

The Medical Research Library Episode One: Harvesting cells

On Monday evening, January 22, Maureen and I sat on the sand, hands meshed, watching the cigarette boats and winter tourist parasails float by on the edge of the infinite green-blue southeast Florida ocean in front of us.

“Jonathan, you’ve told me about all the answers you think you found, about life,” Maureen said. “About reality and truth, and about purpose and the good. It reminds me about so much I’d forgotten, about God and the Church. But tell me more about what drove you to ask.”

“You want to know about my sister?”

“Yes.”

I detailed the last night with my father, every word of his announcement: the decision to be free of children for a few more months, the first state-of-Washington abortion after the vote in December 1970, the donation of tissue, the meeting with the doctor/researcher at the “damnfool” tennis match, the notion that the aborted baby was a girl.

“You were born in September of the next year, right?”

“Yeah.”

“If my math is correct,” Maureen said, “they got pregnant with you almost right after the… donation happened.”

“True. He said they were surprised.”

“Jonathan, do you mind if I ask you something else about this? And please tell me if this is uncomfortable.”

“It’s fine. I suppose I’m in the ‘acceptance’ stage.”

“It might be a dumb question.”

“I like to call them ‘curious questions.’”

“Okay. I’ve always been told abortions are gruesome things, where the fetus is torn apart so they can remove her. But if they got tissue from your sister, they’d need her intact. Do you know if they can get premature babies intact, without doing a C-section? I don’t think your mother could’ve had a C-section, because they got pregnant so quickly afterward.”

“I don’t know anything about that. Do you think they never actually got any tissue from my sister?”

“I was hoping they didn’t. I once read a couple articles about how they get tissue from fetuses. They were in some old Catholic newspapers that my mom had. I’ll always remember them.”

“What’d they say?”

“Are you sure you want to hear about it?”

“Maybe.”

“First off, I’m not sure we should even call them fetuses. I remember from my Latin class that ‘fetus’ literally means ‘little one’ – baby. Anyway, the articles said they got organs from live-born babies, who I had assumed were from C-sections. One article quoted testimony before the Supreme Court. Some hospital in Connecticut got the tissue, and they couldn’t use anesthesia, probably because that’d ruin the vital organs they needed. I think it was from his kidney, like your sister, or maybe his liver. The baby was a boy, fully alive, peeing and everything. You don’t forget images like that. Then the doctor called it ‘just garbage’ or something.”¹

“When did that happen?”

“That article was recent, like late eighties,” Maureen said. “But the experiment happened in the early seventies. The other article was about babies in the seventies too, but written back then, just after Roe v. Wade. For some reason, the doctor would put radiation or chemicals or something inside the umbilical cords of Down Syndrome babies. Then, while they were still alive with the heart beating, they’d cut out their kidneys and other organs. Even their brains.”²

“But I thought they used miscarriages for all that.”

“Lots of people think that. But supposedly it’s not possible.”

“So you think they might not have done that to my sister?”

“Maybe not. But I don’t want to get your hopes up, or upset you.”

“No, Maureen, it helps. I’ve never thought about these things like this. Maybe I should’ve.”

“Maybe we all should’ve.”

That weekend, the last of January, we drove straight down the Interstate highway to explore the latest craze restaurant in the trendy Coconut Grove neighborhood of Miami.

But Maureen’s questions from earlier that week needled me.

“I need to understand more about those experiments on fetuses. And could they even do experiments on a 20-week fetus like my sister, who was not a C-section?”

“Which is related to my dumb question: if not a C-section, can they get preemie babies out intact? This has been bothering me too. Hey, in a few more exits, we can try the University of Miami. They have a pretty good med school. We can look this up in their library. It’s at a different place than the rest of the college. I got lost near there once.”

After Maureen asked two students for directions, we found a short, white, square building hidden between other white buildings, palm trees, and planters with benches.

We joked about looking like med students to gain entrance.

“Good thing you wore a white jacket Maureen, but it’s a little too dressy, and too short.”

“And no stethoscope.”

But since the semester had just started, the library was almost empty, so we could dive into any bookshelf, journal, microfiche, or computer terminal we wanted.

In the main room of the library, we went our separate ways, then met up about an hour later to check in.

We returned to two pushed-together tables near an empty carrel in a library corner, carrying books and copies smelling of musty paper and ink. We decided we needed another hour.

After that hour, Maureen returned and slumped into a chair.

“You look tired.”

“Well, I found a lot of interesting stuff,” she said.

“I didn’t find much of anything. Went into a lot of ditches. I did meet a biology doctoral student who said he’d help answer some of our questions.”

“We might need that. It’s definitely true, given you arrived so soon after the abortion, that your sister almost certainly was removed by induction, not a C-section. This part was easy to find out, in this intro Ob/Gyn textbook I found. If someone gets a C-section, even for a 20-weeker like your sister, they must wait at least six months to even try to get pregnant.”

“And you don’t think she was aborted inside either? That is, they birthed her.”

“It was common practice. I stumbled on a federal report about protecting human subjects in experiments, from 1976. It said that research on live human fetuses was key to vaccines, like the one for Rubella. So yes, she was birthed.”³

“That makes sense. Not that it matters. Why should where the baby dies matter, whether inside or out? Another thing I never thought about.”

“I agree. When things aren’t exactly pleasant to consider, we choose not to know them. Like once, amazingly only once, I heard a priest talk about abortion in his Homily, and he said that since Roe v. Wade, they’d aborted over 21 million babies. There were about 1.4 million a year. That was in 1990. So by now, six years later, it’s probably, what, almost 30 million.”

“I didn’t realize it was that many.”

“Speaking of unpleasant, here’s how they probably get the preemie babies out intact to get tissue. I found this article from 1973, from an old magazine. It said they inject some chemicals to make the babies deliver alive. The doctor at this New York hospital acknowledged that the fetus can never live very long outside. He said they thought of them as, quote, ‘nothing more than a piece of tissue.’⁴ Unquote.” 

“Amazing.”

“To get them out intact, they use this chemical induction method called prostaglandins. He confirmed they need them alive, and that the babies survive long enough for the tissue extraction, even as long as a day. I think for a preemie, they also could’ve used the Dilation and Extraction method for this. Either way, we now know it was feasible to get your sister out intact so that they could get usable tissue.”

“I get the idea.”

“Jonathan, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay, Maureen. These are questions I should’ve been asking. But now I have even more.”

“Me too,” she said. “I also looked for anything about the University of Washington. This book called Beyond Abortion from 1988 calls out the program your parents probably got into. It said the lab there got a $100K grant from the NIH, the Federal government, to study fetuses, like why some might’ve died prematurely. The head of the lab, a Dr. Shepard, admitted that they’d collected over six thousand specimens in the 60s and 70s.”⁵

“I bet that’s it.”

“Jonathan, do you mind if we stay and look up a few more things? My next question is: Why does it matter to them whether a sibling turned out healthy?”

“And I’d like to understand: Why did they want my sister’s kidney cells? And that might tell us more about how they got them.”

“Okay,” she said. “Meet you back here in an hour.”

References

1. “Cardinal Relates Horror Story About Human Fetuses,” Our Sunday Visitor, March 29, 1987

2.  Joan Wester Anderson, “Beyond Abortion Fetal Experimentation,” Our Sunday Visitor, April 13, 1975

3.  National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, “An Assessment of the Role of Research Involving Living Human Fetuses, In Advances in Medical Science and Technology,” Appendix, Research on the Fetus, p. 467, 1976, [Online] Available from: https://archive.org/details/researchonfetusa00unit/page/n15/mode/2up

4.  National Observer, April 21, 1973

5.  Suzanne Rini, Beyond Abortion: A Chronicle of Fetal Experimentation, 1993, TAN Books

Next week: Episode 32 - The Medical Library Research Part Two: Extracting cells

Copyright © 2022 Christopher Rogers.

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