01/20/2017 / By JD Heyes
The scourge of legalized abortion, which has seen tens of millions of babies killed since the U.S. Supreme Court somehow created the “right” to the procedure out of thin air in 1973, continues to scar our national psyche through its promotion of both irresponsible sexual behavior and pure barbarism.
In the summer of 2015, the Center for Medical Progress published a series of undercover videos featuring various officials with Planned Parenthood discussing the harvesting and sale of fetal tissue and body parts, a gruesome practice that is actually against federal law and would likely have been prosecuted had the Justice Department not been led by pro-abortion fanatics appointed by a fanatically pro-abortion president.
As the center began its steady release of those videos, another group, “2nd Vote,” published a list of dozens of major corporations that were essentially funding the harvesting of fetal tissues as well. Natural News reported that the organization’s function is to track contributions from consumers and corporations back to various political causes. The group identified an astounding 38 firms that regularly contribute to Planned Parenthood, making them accessories to the grisly and insane harvesting of baby body parts for sale and profit.
Though taxpayers fund most of Planned Parenthood’s operating costs, the 38 companies contribute nearly one-quarter of PP’s $1.3 billion in annual revenues. Sick, indeed.
The companies identified by 2nd Vote were:
The list is full of corporate hypocrites and bad actors (not all corporations are bad actors, by the way – this isn’t an anti-capitalism rant), many of which push GMOs, pre-processed foods, fast foods and other unhealthy lifestyle choices. Others merely push an unhealthy political and social agenda, namely abortion and the cottage industry of death that it has spawned.
You’ll notice that Pepsi is also on that list. In 2012, a pro-life organization may just have scored a victory of sorts against PepsiCo. The group called off a year-long boycott of Pepsi products after the company promised in convincing fashion that it would no longer use an aborted fetal-cell line to develop (deep breath here) flavor enhancers, the Washington Times reported.
In 2011, the group, Children of God for Life, discovered and then disclosed that PepsiCo had signed a contract with Senomyx Inc., a biotech firm based in San Diego that listed HEK-293, a “human embryo kidney” cell line that was concocted from an aborted fetus in the 1970s, in more than 70 patents that were all related to flavor enhancement.
Gross. And disgustingly inhumane.
“We are absolutely thrilled with PepsiCo’s decision,” Debi Vinnedge, the organization’s executive director, stated at the time on the group’s website, as quoted by the Times. “They have listened to their customers and have made both a wise and profound statement of corporate integrity that deserves the utmost respect, admiration and support of the public.”
Paul Boykas, PepsiCo’s then VP for global public policy (basically a division of the company that engages in propaganda and serves as a shill for its international interests), said the drink maker did not engage in any research that utilized fetal cells and that Senomyx would not be using the HEK line in any Pepsi products.
But was that reassurance credible? Children of God for Life officials thought so. The Times reported that the boycott had previously grown to 30 pro-life groups in all – groups that attempted to engage PepsiCo on the matter but were put off with nothing more than legal jargon from the drink maker’s legal team.
In a subsequent interview with the Times, however, Vinnedge said that a letter she had received from PepsiCo would make it difficult for the drink maker to evade its responsibility.
“When they said they would not use HEK cell lines in their most recent letter – well, that is the hallmark for Senomyx research. So that was majorly different than what they had said in the past,” she said.
But then the company had lied to Vinnedge and everyone else concerned about this blatant abuse of human life. The Times noted that a “Responsible Research Statement” on PepsiCo’s website states clearly that the company “does not conduct or fund research – including research funded by PepsiCo but performed by third parties – that utilizes any human tissue or cell lines derived from embryos or fetuses.”
The group 2nd Vote, three years later, exposed that as largely untrue (the company website still carries that statement, by the way). Though the drink maker may not be using human embryo stem cell lines in product flavoring directly, by providing funding to Planned Parenthood, PepsiCo has become an enabler of companies like Senomyx that do, through PP’s illicit (alleged) sale of fetal tissue and body parts.
That’s pretty much the same as supporting such grotesque flavor enhancing research (and the “secret” behind the 1973 science-fiction classic, Soylent Green).
The fact is, this kind of casual, for-profit trafficking in human body parts on any level is only possible because abortion is legal. You don’t have to like that statement, but you can’t deny that it is true.
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Tagged Under: abortion, corporations, fetal body parts, human trafficking, Planned Parenthood, profit