“Alive when researchers start extracting the tissue... The thing needs to be said in so many words: you can’t transplant a dead organ into a living body, you cannot make a cell line out of dead tissue” - Biologist Pamela Acker
In a January, 2021 interview with Lifesite News, Acker discussed COVID-19 vaccines currently available in the U.S., all of which have some involvement with human fetal cell lines. In 2012 Acker gave up her doctoral research rather than work with HEK 293, an "immortalized" cell line derived from the kidneys of a baby girl aborted in 1972...
A 1952 paper from the Canadian Journal of Medical Science, described babies aborted and sent to the lab with hearts still beating.
American embryologist C. Ward Kischer said in “The Media and Human Embryology” (Linacre Quarterly, Vol. 64, Issue 2, May 1, 1998), referring to organ transplants from aborted babies: “The truth is that dead tissue would do nothing. The transplant must contain living cells, and the only way to ensure that is to obtain them from living fetuses... In order to sustain 95% of the cells, the live tissue would need to be preserved within 5 minutes of the abortion. Within an hour the cells would continue to deteriorate, rendering the specimens useless.” The incredibly short time window makes the distinction virtually moot, considering the additional time needed to operate, administer tissue preservation fluids, and remove organs.
Quoted in Vivisection or Science, Italian scientist Pietro Croce, Herranz said: “… to obtain embryo cells for culture, a programmed abortion must be adopted, choosing the age of the embryo and dissecting it while still alive in order to remove tissues to be placed in culture media.”
Alvin Wong, whose 2006 paper “The Ethics of HEK 293” guided Acker’s decision to leave her doctoral research, concurs: "If in fact the embryo or fetus is still alive while tissue is being extracted from it then the one doing so commits an even more serious act of violence directly to another living human being. This might happen, since it seems to be a scientific criterion that tissue be obtained in a viable state to be suitable for research."
The statement by Herranz highlighted what Acker calls the “calculated” nature of abortion for tissue donation. Prostaglandin abortion, introduced in the early 1970s, has generally replaced hysterotomy –the “mini-C section”—as the “ideal” method for fetal tissue harvesting. In fact, the use of prostaglandin to induce labor revolutionized the field of fetal tissue donation. First viewed as “the dreaded complication,” researchers soon realized the birth of a live baby following prostaglandin abortion was actually expedient: “With prostaglandins,” stated geneticist and pediatrician Dr. Kurt Hirschhorn in 1973, “you can arrange the whole abortion, so [the fetus] comes out viable in the sense that it can survive hours, or a day” (National Observer, April 21, 1973).
According to legislative findings in a law drafted by the Bioethics Defense Fund (BDF): The harvesting of organs, tissues and cells from unborn children whose deaths are directly caused by induced abortion violate the dead donor rule … because (a) the unborn children are alive when the fetal repositioning and crushing point decisions are being made by the abortion provider with the goal of procuring intact fetal heart, lungs, livers, brains and other tissues and organs; and (b) the repositioning of the fetus and crushing above and below the thorax to procure intact fetal organs, tissues and cells is itself the cause of death of the human being from whom the organs are then harvested. viii