SAN FRANCISCO, California, October 14, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) — Testimony from a longtime pro-life advocate about the grisly reality of the abortion industry riveted jurors in the Planned Parenthood baby body parts RICO trial now taking place in San Francisco.

Planned Parenthood Federation of America brought the suit after the Center for Medical Progress released undercover videos in 2015 exposing the abortion giant’s trafficking in aborted baby body parts.

PPFA and 10 affiliates are now accusing five individuals connected with CMP of committing wiretapping, conspiracy, trespassing, breach of contract, and violating the Racketeer-Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) for going undercover at Planned Parenthood and National Abortion Federation meetings, and are seeking damages in millions of dollars.

Albin Rhomberg is named in the suit as one of the CMP three founding board members.

Rhomberg testified last week that CMP project lead David Daleiden asked him to join the board in 2013, when CMP was formed as the organizational structure to support Daleiden’s proposed undercover operation. Daleiden’s first project proposal listed Rhomberg as part of “the team”: “Albin is a veteran of the pro-life movement in California and is an expert at acquiring hidden and hard-to-access documentation about the abortion industry.”

In describing his past pro-life involvement, Rhomberg testified about the bodies of 16,000 aborted babies discovered in 1982 in a repossessed shipping container in Woodland Hills, California. Each baby was in a separate container, marked with the name of his or her mother. Rhomberg said he advocated at the time for autopsies of the oldest babies, some of whom were seven or eight months gestation, to see if they had been born alive before they were killed. The autopsy examined the lung tissue to see if the babies had ever breathed air.

At the time of the autopsy, Rhomberg brought his camera to the medical examiner’s office and took pictures of the babies alongside the official photographers.

“They were fully developed. Some were very much dismembered; others were partially and/or completely intact,” he said. Unfortunately, the lung tissue samples were stolen and no verdict was reached about whether the babies had been killed after birth.

After a three-year court battle over how to dispose of the babies, they were buried in a mass, unmarked grave at Odd Fellows Cemetery in Los Angeles. Then-President Ronald Reagan wrote a eulogy for the babies’ funeral. Rhomberg’s photos of the babies have been widely distributed in a publication called “The American Holocaust.”

Rhomberg also testified about when the pro-life movement first discovered that the abortion industry was trafficking in fetal body parts in the early 2000s. “It was always a question on the part of [sidewalk counselors], is: What happens to the bodies?” he said.

He told the court:

They started to notice that there was a new phenomenon. The usual morning ritual of, you know, the staff arriving, and then later on the — the abortionists arriving. Then in midmorning, they would see a new group of people would come. Sometimes one or two or three would come in mid-morning. And they had containers. Sometimes they had bags of ice. They had other tools and equipment...And then in the afternoon, at a regular-appointed time, a FedEx truck would come and would remove various numbers of — the special refrigerated gel-pack containers would be taken out, and it was — they came out of the door of the clinic, and went into the FedEx truck. So it was pretty apparent to anybody that this particular place was harvesting — whatever word you want to use — was trafficking in the baby parts. In some cases, the people noticed that the parts went out before the mother went out. She would come — times, come staggering out later, typically throwing up in the bushes and being helped out of the place, after the baby parts had already gone into the FedEx truck.

Observers in the courtroom noted that, for the first time, the jury was completely alert and focused during Rhomberg’s testimony.

Rhomberg went on to describe his part in investigating the fetal parts trafficking through talking with the FedEx drivers and online research. He discovered that Advanced Bioscience Resources was purchasing the baby parts and they were likely being resold to those conducting a study on baldness.

“They were scalping the babies and taking their scalps and grafting them on to immune-suppressed mice, and then using various pharmaceuticals on these humanized mice to test the effect upon preventing or, I suppose you might say, treating baldness.”

Planned Parenthood lawyers questioned Rhomberg on the extent of his involvement in the CMP undercover operation. Rhomberg testified that he was minimally involved and had little knowledge of the details of the operation until the videos were released in 2015.

In particular, Planned Parenthood’s lawyers tried to show that Rhomberg knew that Daleiden presented an ID with an assumed name when he attended abortion industry conferences and meetings during the project.

“You knew that he was going to have to show identification when he accessed those clinics, didn’t you?” asked Planned Parenthood lawyer Jeremy Kamras.

“Hm, not necessarily,” Rhomberg responded. “If you win people's confidence, it would be, I don’t think, necessary to require identification. It’s not like a courthouse or an airline. I mean, the people that are there, the people who have their confidence, some, they are allowed to come in.”

Indeed, the CMP investigators were told about and invited to the supposedly secret and highly secure annual National Abortion Federation meeting while exhibiting for the first time as Biomax, a fetal tissue procurement company, at another abortion industry conference.

Planned Parenthood lawyers also produced an email Rhomberg sent Daleiden the day after CMP released its first video on July 14, 2015, in which he calls the video “the Nucatola NUKE” and writes it had been viewed over 700,000 times. Rhomberg estimated that the original Youtube video has been viewed 3,000,000 times.

The video shows Dr. Deborah Nucatola infamously discussing how she would “crush above” and “crush below” the baby’s thorax to obtain intact organs, and admitting she changes the position of the baby to breech to obtain an intact head.

However, because Judge William Orrick has excluded videos as “prejudicial,” the jury will not see it.

Planned Parenthood lawyers also questioned Rhomberg on closing another email to Daleiden with: “May the Holy Spirit guide and inspire us all to destroy the evil Planned Parenthood Empire.”

Rhomberg said he wanted to be clear that one doesn’t pray to God for evil but to “do good and to do virtue and to restore our proper place in God’s creation.”

He added: “I consider Planned Parenthood to be a destructive, deceptive, dishonest organization that’s done tremendous damage to our society and our culture.”

In his early life, Rhomberg did post graduate work in nuclear physics and worked on the NASA space program, contributing 17 ideas to Apollo 17.

Gerardo Adrian Lopez, named in the suit as a CMP undercover investigator, testified Tuesday that he was not pro-life but became involved in the project after Daleiden, who frequented the Starbucks where Lopez worked, offered him a job transcribing video footage.

Lopez said he was so disturbed by what he was transcribing and by learning that hearts were harvested while the babies were alive that he offered to go undercover. Although Orrick refused to let him go into details, Lopez was able to testify on cross-examination that there “was mention of a woman, a patient being so dilated that when they get in the stirrups, the fetus falls out” — a reference to the CMP recording of Perrin Larton, the fetal tissue procurement manager of baby organ harvesting company Advanced Bioscience Resources.

Lopez is now a Navy hospital corpsman at the Neonatal ICU at Balboa Naval Hospital in San Diego, where, as a Life League Defense Foundation summary points out, he cares for babies born at 21-22 weeks gestation — the same age as many of the babies whose organs are sold for profit.