Pitt’s Self-Serving Attempt to Exonerate Itself from Abortion-Related Medical Wrongdoing

L ast year brought national attention to the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) and its affiliated medical center, UPMC — where I used to work as a therapist — for unethical and legally questionable fetal tissue research practices following decades of troubling activity at the region’s two largest employers.

After mounting pressure from lawmakers and pro-life groups, last fall Pitt took the self-described “proactive” step of hiring a law firm to conduct a regulatory assessment of the university’s fetal tissue research practices. The investigation was conducted between September and December by D.C.-based Hyman, Phelps & McNamara (HPM), and the full report has been made publicly available.

When I met with HPM’s investigators on September 15 in the context of my employment at UPMC, I was unaware that one of them was intimately familiar with Pitt as an alumnus of the university’s pharmacy school. After I alerted the Board of Trustees about this potential conflict of interest, a university spokesperson released a statement proclaiming that my concern had no merit because the attorney graduated “almost two decades ago.”

Suspiciously, HPM was not the first law firm that Pitt had selected for the so-called independent review. The firm chosen first had previously been involved in litigation on behalf of UPMC. Upon finding out about this connection, a concerned trustee pleaded with Chancellor Patrick Gallagher and the university’s legal team to select a new law firm, as well as to perform a conflict check prior to contracting for its services.

It is unclear if that conflict check was conducted prior to hiring HPM. It is also uncertain whether HPM’s investigators visited Pitt facilities or if they expedited the review by relying on statements and documents sent to them by the university. The way that the report reads when compared to statements released by the university gives the impression that members of Pitt’s Office of Communications & Marketing had a hand in crafting its language. The office is led by a former executive director of Emily’s List and a former communications director for NARAL Pro-Choice America.

At the end of last April, I left UPMC after reading about a Pitt study that grafted the scalps of human fetuses to mice and rats. The HPM report claims that the study’s researchers obtained the fetal tissue from a wholesaler out of California called Advanced Bioscience Resources (ABR). This claim contradicts the study itself, which indicates that the tissue came from fetuses aborted during the second trimester at UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital (Magee) and processed through Pitt’s Health Sciences Tissue Bank, also known as the Pitt Biospecimen Core.

While the HPM report acknowledges that UPMC keeps the university stocked with fetal tissue, the investigators declined to delve into the “clinical decision-making” and “delivery of medical care” at the medical center because it’s a “private healthcare institution.” The assessment doesn’t mention the noteworthy sharing of resources between the university and UPMC, including that one of the Pitt Biospecimen Core’s laboratories is located directly within Magee.

This interconnection appears to be growing stronger, according to former Magee president Leslie Davis. Last summer, she highlighted her plan to “maximize” the medical center’s relationship with Pitt following her promotion to president and CEO of UPMC.

In the same way that Pitt’s administration saw no conflict of interest with paying one of their own alumni to investigate them, the HPM lawyers found no issue with Dr. Beatrice Chen overseeing Magee’s abortion program and serving on the university’s Institutional Review Board that reviews study protocols involving fetal tissue. There is no mention in the report of Chen’s additional responsibilities and oversight beyond a committee membership as one of the review board’s vice chairs. Nor did the investigators appear to look into potential conflicts involving Chen’s predecessor, Dr. Mitchell Creinin, who served as a committee member on the IRB during his tenure at Magee.

A glaring omission in the report is the absence of an answer to allegations of partial-birth abortions and the harvesting of fetal organs to enhance the university’s research outcomes. These claims were intensified last August, when Judicial Watch released a 2015 grant application from Pitt to the National Institutes of Health, in which the university boasted about its ability to minimize the lack of blood supply to parts of the fetal body for the purpose of ensuring “the highest quality biological specimens.” It’s puzzling as to why the grant applicant found it important to discuss this process when the university purports not to be involved in the collection of fetal tissue.

Experimentation on living fetuses at Magee can be traced back to the 1930s, when a medical researcher at Pitt conducted reflexive movement studies at the hospital on babies that lived through surgical abortions. The first whistleblower to publicly claim that aborted babies were surviving the procedures for research purposes was a nurse who came forward in 1972 and testified that she witnessed moving fetuses being “packed in ice” and rushed to a laboratory. Prior to Roe v. Wade, doctors at Magee were using a controversial loophole to perform abortions.

Three months ago, a separate nurse shared disturbing details with me about her first job interview out of college in 1987. She had answered an ad to work on the high-risk pregnancy unit at Magee and was offered an interview. As she accompanied the nurse manager on a tour of the hospital, she was taken to a labor and delivery room used exclusively for abortions. She was told that an adjacent utility room was where babies who were born alive would be stored until they were no longer breathing.

Despite a lack of thorough investigation into UPMC, the HPM lawyers did note that some of Magee’s consent forms for tissue donations were left unsigned. One form included in the appendices of the report included inducements such as the claim that that fetal tissue samples “may contribute to a new discovery or treatment” and benefit society through “a gain in knowledge.”

According to Pennsylvania’s Abortion Control Act, the employee who is responsible for obtaining the patient’s informed consent may not entice a pregnant woman to undergo an abortion by pointing to “the possibility of the use of aborted fetal tissue or organs.” The Magee consent form predictably ignores the disturbing details of what takes place in the laboratories once the fetal tissue has been signed over.

If 2021 was any indication, inquiries into the fetal tissue research practices at Pitt and UPMC aren’t going away any time soon. These organizations can either start providing truthful answers or continue their long tradition of railing against transparency.