Traffic in baby parts (Canada).

Edmonton--Tissue and body parts of aborted babies are being sold in increasing numbers to medical researchers in Canada and the United States, relates a detailed story by Celeste McGovern in the August 23 issue of the Alberta Report magazine. The article contains information gathered by a Texas-based prolife group, Life Dynamics Inc., which uses, among other methods, spies working in abortion clinics to collect its documentation. The data, released in a video-magazine entitled "Life Talk", are gruesome and chilling. They include witness accounts of late-term babies who survive abortion but are then killed by alternate methods such as drowning or beating.

The burgeoning market in fetal organs and tissue has come into existence to meet the demands of "the exploding multibillion-dollar biotechnology industry," Ms. McGovern reports. Fetal tissue is used in "respected tax-funded laboratories, including Canadian ones." For example, fetal tissue has been used in experimental treatment for Parkinson's Disease, and human-to-human brain cell transplants are government-funded. Leading the way in this particular research is Dr. Ivar Mendez of Dalhousie University in Halifax, who received a $90,042 grant from the Medical Research Council of Canada for 1999-2000, Ms. McGovern writes.

The president of Life Dynamics, Mark Crutcher, is now convinced that the resistance of the "pro-choice" people to the partial-birth abortion ban is directly related to the profitability of supplying fetal parts. In a partial-birth abortion, the body of the baby remains intact--and therefore a source of organs and tissue--while the skull is crushed and brains sucked out. "Life Talk" is the first in a monthly series of videos to be released by Life Dynamics.

The story in the Alberta Report, today the Report Newsmagazine, led to a November 9, 1999, decision by the U.S. House of Representatives to investigate the trade in aborted babies.