The fundamental question is whether site fees and retrieval reimbursements are being used as proxy payments to circumvent the state and federal laws which make it illegal to buy or sell human body parts. As we examine that issue, it is crucial to remember that for any transfer of aborted baby parts to be legal they must be donated and not sold. By law, the only financial remuneration that is legally allowed is recovery of the actual and reasonable costs associated with the retrieval process.

Our figures show that when AGF's monthly retrieval costs ($6,656.66) are subtracted from the retrieval income shown in the section above, in February of 1996 AGF billed researchers between $12,093.34 and $18,173.34 more for parts than it paid to acquire them.

In short, AGF appears to have made between $12,000 and $18,000 in baby parts profit from this one abortion clinic in this one month. And remember, that profit amount is based on costs to AGF that we purposely overestimated. An audit based on AGF's actual expenses would inevitably reveal higher profits than those reflected here.

NOTE: When analyzing the financial data, one problem we encountered was that our site fee documentation was for 1997, while the daily logs were from 1996. However, we felt comfortable assuming that the monthly site fees didn't change much from one year to the next.

The tissue logs reveal that one baby is often chopped up and sold to many buyers. For example, babies taken from donors 113968 and 114189 were both killed late in their second-trimester and cut into nine pieces. By applying AGF's price list, we see that each baby was sold for between $810 and $1,170 depending on whether their parts were shipped fresh or frozen.

Another interesting financial revelation is seen when the tissue logs are analyzed on a "per-day" basis. During the time these logs cover, the heaviest traffic day was February 22, 1996. On that day, AGF sold 39 baby parts. According to their price list, AGF would have invoiced the buyers between $3,510 and $5,070 for these parts, again depending on whether they were shipped fresh or frozen.

Even compared to the $6,656.66 amount that we grossly overestimated to be AGF's monthly operating expenses, AGF recovered between 53% and 76% of their entire month's overhead from sales generated on this one day. If AGF's actual monthly expenses were used instead of our exaggerated estimation, it is possible that AGF recovered their entire month's overhead on this day.