There are always bits of information that I come across while researching for an article. Many are helpful, but some are terrifying.

That’s what happened while researching an article posted earlier this week, “Another Scientific Study Attempts to Debunk the Reality that Women Regret Their Abortion.” While looking into the Bixby Center for Global and Reproductive and their “investigators,” one name caught my attention. 

Dr. Jennifer Kerns. I’ve read a lot of studies about abortion, so I knew that her name was on something I’ve ready before and I was sure she was an abortionist. In order to confirm, I decided to Google her to see if my hunch was correct or not. It was, but that wasn’t what surprised or disturbed me. It was the study she had recently completed. 

According to clinicalstudies.gov, Dr. Kern’s most recent study, which concluded in October, was designed “to measure the effect of digoxin injection on Dilation and Evacuation (D&E) procedure duration.” It means that she was testing how poisoning a preborn baby with digoxin would impact the time it took her to remove and dismember the now dead preborn baby from the womb.  

In her results, Dr. Kerns states that 178 women (and babies) were included in her study. These women (and babies) were divided into two groups, those that received the digoxin (88) and those that received a saline or placebo injection (90). The average age of the preborn babies was 21.1 weeks, which means that nearly all these babies would’ve been viable if given perhaps just one to three weeks’ time to grow.  

But they were never given that chance. 

There is no doubt that the sanctity of life and medical ethics were all sacrificed at the altar of abortion for this experiment. To think of what these babies endured is utterly terrible, and for what? Just to see what helped kill them faster. It was completely unnecessary. 

Honestly, there is something truly evil about this, and that’s not a word I use lightly.

As a researcher, I’ve been tasked with looking at some truly awful events and situations in history and in modern times. Some of those topics include terrorism, genocide and cannibalism. What’s truly frightening is what can sometimes happen in the name of science, and it’s usually completely legal.

For example, U.S. psychiatrists Peter B. Neubauer and Viola W. Bernard conducted a study where they separated identical twins and triplets at birth in order to test the “nature versus nurture” theory. In the case of one set of identical triplet brothers, they were adopted into homes of various economic statuses, including blue-collar, middle-class and affluent families to see how their upbringing and resources impacted their lives. Neither the brothers, nor their families, were told about the actual nature of the study or that they had siblings. The brothers didn’t discover it until two of them met in college.

Learning about the experiments had a devastating impact on their lives. One of the triplets, Eddy Galland, committed suicide about 15 years after the brothers were reunited due to the repercussions of the study. The psychiatrists who ran the study asked Yale University to keep records of the experiments sealed until 2066, a way to ensure that everyone involved had died. 

If you need to seal your records to avoid people finding out more information, your actions and experiments were ethically questionable at best, illegal at worst. 

There’s also the Tuskegee syphilis experiments. Started in 1932 by the U.S. Public Health Service, the researchers studied the effects of untreated syphilis on 600 impoverished African American men, of which 399 had syphilis and 201 served as the control group. None of the men or their families knew the true nature of the study or that they had syphilis, and none received the lifesaving treatment penicillin. The study went on for 40 years, during which time 500 of the original test subjects had died (many due to syphilis), and at least 40 wives were diagnosed with the condition and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis contracted in the womb. The government eventually paid out restitution into the tune of $10 million dollars, which is too little in my opinion.

All human life begins in the womb, and scientific curiosity should never come at the expense of another human life. The lives of men, women, children and preborn babies is not something for scientists to play with at the leisure. Experiments, like the one Dr. Kerns conducted, should never be allowed to happen.