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Prolife members of Congress are pushing for hearings as early as this spring on the issue of trafficking in fetal body parts. The hearings, stemming from a voice vote last November, will study a little-known loophole that circumvents federal laws banning the commercial sale of human body parts.

The hearings may also shed light on a controversial part of the American abortion industry: the fate of second- and third-trimester premature infants who are aborted with their vital organs and limbs intact, allowing for use by biomedical researchers.

At the center of the allegations is the controversial Kelly, the pseudonym for a former employee of the Anatomic Gift Foundation (AGF), which is headquartered in Maryland with regional offices in Colorado and Arizona. The firm specializes in obtaining human organs and limbs for researchers across the United States. Kelly says her job, as on-site representative for AGF at an unidentified Planned Parenthood affiliate, was to dissect bodies, sometimes living, and ship the parts to researchers, usually under an innocuous name such as "biomedical specimens."

Kelly says she would get a daily list of the parts researchers wanted (eyes, livers, brains), and she understood that she was to procure the best, defect-free specimens. She says that each week she would see about 30 or 40 fetuses at around seven months' gestation and that several at various ages of gestation would be born alive. She alleges that a staff physician would kill any such newborn. Kelly claims that after an incident in early 1997 she developed profound misgivings about her work. A physician wanted her to dissect twins of five and one-half months who had just been aborted but were not yet dead. She immediately protested. In response, the physician poured sterile water over the infants to drown them.

Could Kelly's horrifying account be a hoax? Even staunch prolife leaders are taking a cautious approach, especially because Mark Crutcher—president of Life Dynamics, the Denton, Texas-based prolife group promoting Kelly's story—refuses to make her available. Crutcher claims that Kelly would be in danger if her identity was disclosed publicly. Life Dynamics has produced a videotape of Kelly's story in which her voice is disguised and her back is to the camera.

Brenda Bardsley, one of AGF's founders, denies that AGF has done anything illegal and questions Kelly's credibility, according to WorldNetDaily, a Web-based conservative news service.

All of Kelly's allegations might be easily dismissible, except for one thing: After what she describes as a change of heart following the incident with the twins, Kelly provided Crutcher with protocols, or purchase orders, from medical researchers, dated 1988 through 1998.

Life Dynamics paid Kelly an undisclosed amount for her information, which included names and addresses of the researchers receiving the parts, and the age, condition, and state of freshness the researchers specified. Life Dynamics released these documents to the public last May. Doug Johnson, National Right to Life's legislative director, has not always agreed with Crutcher on prolife strategies. But, Johnson says, "As far as what's there, it's authentic. Journalists have gone to interview some of the same individuals. None of them have denied, so far as I know, that these are authentic documents."

Concerning Kelly's allegations apart from the documentary evidence she has supplied, Johnson says, "Everybody has to make up their own judgment about what she claims to have seen."

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March 6 2000, Vol. 44, No. 3