This is a MUST read!

A top fundraiser for the March of Dimes in two Southern states has been ousted after questioning her employer on whether it has ties to Planned Parenthood’s business of supplying aborted babies for scientific research.

The March of Dimes has always said publicly that it has no involvement in the abortion industry and “no relationship” with Planned Parenthood. It remains “neutral” politically on the issue of abortion, it says on its website.

The MOD slogan is “A Fighting Chance for Every Baby.” It raises nearly $200 million annually for research into cures for birth defects and premature births.

Joy Barr, who served three years as community director for the MOD’s Augusta, Georgia, and Aiken-Sumter, South Carolina, offices, personally raised more than $250,000 for the organization.

But she discovered the group, founded in 1938 to support healthy newborns, is hiding dark secrets from the public and its donors.

Barr’s job was to recruit donors of all sizes, including a large Catholic hospital, Trinity Hospital of Augusta, which has a strict rule against donating to any groups with ties to abortion.

After the Center for Medical Research started releasing its undercover videos showing Planned Parenthood executives casually bartering for “reimbursement” for baby body parts harvested during abortions, including intact livers, hearts, brains and even whole babies, Barr began asking questions of her employer.

“I was horrified by what I saw in the videos but not completely shocked,” Barr told WND. “But when Cecile Richards (CEO of Planned Parenthood) made the comment about the importance of research using aborted fetal tissue for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, my next thought was, do we?”

Were there any ties between the wholesome March of Dimes and the ghastly Planned Parenthood?

Watch video of Joy Barr describing her quest for information on the true involvement of March of Dimes in the abortion business.

“At first, they were friendly and tried to get me as much information as they could,” Barr said of her former employer.

Barr was sent an old letter dated June 17, 2014, from Dr. Edward McCabe, head of medical research for March of Dimes, explaining MOD policy with regard to abortion:

“The March of Dimes does not encourage, fund, or support abortions,” the letter says. “Our longstanding position of neutrality on the issue of abortion is reflected throughout the organization’s many programs. March of Dimes grantees are prohibited from using March of Dimes funds to conduct abortion research, to pay for abortions, or to give directive advice concerning abortions. Violation of this policy would be grounds for cancellation of a grant.”

Barr was then referred to the foundation’s “sensitive issues kit” for more information.

In that kit, March of Dimes directs staffers on how to answer sensitive questions from donors about abortion, Planned Parenthood and other issues.

When the Daily Signal came out with a list of 41 organizations that support Planned Parenthood, and it included March of Dimes, the organization posted the following notice on its Facebook page.

Q: Planned Parenthood – you support them and abortions?

A: “March of Dimes does not have a relationship with Planned Parenthood. Additionally, the March of Dimes does not promote or fund abortion services, nor may Foundation funds be used for directive counseling regarding abortion. Violation of this policy would be grounds for immediate cancellation of a grant or cooperative agreement. Since 2007, five local March of Dimes chapters have given local grants to Planned Parenthood exclusively for prenatal education. In these communities, these are the only such services available to improve the health of low-income women and reduce the risks of birth defects, low birthweight, and prematurity in their babies.”

But it turns out that’s not entirely true.

As she continued to press for answers, Barr was told March of Dimes does indeed support some research using tissue obtained from elective abortions.

On July 21, Barr received an email from Michelle Kling, director of public relations for MOD, which included an admission Barr found startling.

“Joy, yes, the March of Dimes has supported some research using cells and tissues obtained from induced abortion and probably will continue to support some,” Kling told Barr in the email, a copy of which has been obtained by WND.

When WND contacted Kling to ask the same question, Kling conceded that MOD does make grants to researchers who used aborted baby parts as the specimens on which to be experimented.

“March of Dimes does have a small number of research grants in our very large portfolio, one or two every year, but the research grants are not given to Planned Parenthood, they are given to research universities whose investigators are using (aborted) fetal issue, and the material may or may not be obtained from a Planned Parenthood clinic,” Kling said. “It could be obtained from a hospital that performs abortions, or the tissue might come from a different organization than Planned Parenthood that performs abortions. We generally have one or two grants per year that involve fetal tissue. There are some people who would prefer that we don’t have any.”

What confuses many people is the difference between fetal tissue that doesn’t come from aborted babies and that which does.

“Fetal tissue can mean the placenta, it can mean the amniotic fluid, it can mean the part of the umbilical cord removed after birth, it can mean the blood inside the placenta used for stem cells, and it can mean organs and tissues from aborted fetuses,” Kling told WND.

“But some people think that when you say ‘fetal tissue’ it’s only the first category while others believe it’s only aborted material.”

The truth is, it includes both.

“So I think Joy was one who believed it was only the other (first) types of (non-abortive) fetal tissue and so she was very surprised that it encompassed the other,” Kling said.

After a spate of back-and-forth emailing with Kling, Barr found herself frustrated.

“For the most part over those two days, I got a lot of copying and pasting out of the sensitive issues kit, until I finally just said, ‘Look, as an employee I want an answer here. Do we allow our researchers who receive grant money from us, do we allow them to use that money to reimburse, because purchasing is illegal, for aborted fetal tissue and the answer was, ‘Yes, and we will probably continue to do so.'”

In a verbal conversation with her supervisor, she was told that her final three questions were “outside of our scope” and, therefore, could not be answered.

She was eventually called to the state capitol in Columbia for a meeting with her supervisor and the state director. They gave her two choices: Drop her pursuit of the answers she was seeking and go back to work, or resign.

She refused those options, saying she wanted to get the answers and then decide whether her conscience would let her go back to the job she loved.

Barr was abruptly fired on Aug. 4 when she refused to back off from her pursuit of the truth.

March of Dimes raises millions of dollars for research into the causes of premature birth and birth defects, and Barr said she was extremely proud of the work she had done raising money for a cause in which she passionately believed.

“I asked those three questions in several different ways, nobody was coaching me, I never approached an attorney,” Barr said. “I was just an employee trying to get answers to my questions, and at first they tried. And then it basically came to a dead stop, and they said you need to stop asking questions and go back to doing your job. You’re not getting any more information.”

After she was fired, Barr enlisted the help of Thomas More Society, a Chicago-based nonprofit civil rights organization that represents primarily Christians who are discriminated against in the workplace and in business, including those fighting for the sanctity of life.

Thomas More’s special counsel, Peter Breen, issued the following statement to WND:

“The stated mission of March of Dimes is, ‘a fighting chance for every baby.’ That mission is totally inconsistent with experimenting on organs harvested from aborted babies. In the wake of revelations that Planned Parenthood is trafficking in the body parts of aborted babies, the public deserves to know whether the March of Dimes is funding this barbaric practice. Thomas More Society is providing legal counsel for Joy Barr as she works to get to the bottom of March of Dimes’ involvement in the baby parts trafficking scandal.”

Before she was fired, Barr was making Facebook posts urging her friends to call their congressmen and demand that Congress cut off funding to Planned Parenthood. Her bosses told her to “be careful” with her posts about the Planned Parenthood videos.

In a Facebook message obtained by WND, South Carolina State Development Director for MOD Meredith Goodwin Repik warned Barr, “Be careful with the Planned Parenthood posts.” (See screenshot below)

screen shot MOD

Barr responded, above, that she was waiting to hear back from her supervisor about where the aborted babies come from.

She never heard back on that question.

And from that point on, Barr said it became evident that what she thought was her dream job, fundraising for research that would save the lives of premature babies, was coming to a screeching halt.

Going public

“The number one reason I’ve decided to go public was to get answers to those three questions,” she said.

The three questions Barr was asked to put in writing and to which she never received answers are as follows:

Do our researchers use companies like StemExpress or ABR to procure fetal tissue from abortion clinics?
If so, what “fees” do our internal review boards allow MOD grant recipients to pay and is there a standard amount? I realize it is illegal to purchase fetal tissue, but there are also no federal guidelines as to what a standard amount of reimbursement is.
Do we know how much money was used last year, or any year’s average, to procure aborted fetal tissue for research?
March of Dimes’ dark history

While she’s still waiting for answers, Barr discovered a plethora of hidden history involving March of Dimes. It has funded eugenics projects and projects using aborted babies for decades. The most grotesque example dates back to the 1970s.

Performing research on live aborted babies remains a felony crime in America, but that is not the case in other countries. An American doctor traveled to Finland in the early ’70s to perform just such an experiment. The horrific details are described in a fully documented article by Randy Engle, head of the U.S. Coalition for Life, in CatholicCulture.org:

“In the early 1970s, the March of Dimes awarded Dr. Peter Adams of Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio, a grant of $9,240 to study, ‘Fetal Brain Fuel Metabolism at Different Gestational Ages.’ Dr. Adams had to travel to Helsinki, Finland, to carry out his experiments which involved severing the heads of live aborted babies [ages 3-5 months gestation] delivered by hysterotomy [a mini-Caesarean-section] and then mounting those heads on perfusion equipment in order to establish whether glucose and D-beta hydroxybutyrate can serve equally as energy sources in human development. Initially, the MOD public relations department denied that their agency had jointly funded the Adams grant with the U.S. National Institute of Health. Unfortunately for the March of Dimes, the U.S. Coalition for Life was sitting on the entire Adams grant package so the MOD decided to cut its losses, shut up and wait for the storm to pass over.”

In another case, between 1973 and 1975, the March of Dimes awarded $46,000 in donor funds to Dr. John F.S. Crocker at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, for research into renal maldevelopment. Crocker used tiny but intact human embryos from aborted babies between five and 12 weeks of gestation.

Barr believes Planned Parenthood’s negotiating for “reimbursement” is a scam to mask what is actually the selling of human remains.

Via: WND

 

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