Maternity Wards From Hell

PETA Pushes to End Painful, Pointless Pregnancy Experiments on Baboons

By Moira Colley, PETA’s Director of Press Outreach

When I became a mother and looked into my baby’s eyes, I was flooded with a love I’d never known before. I was also moved by the universality of this experience: Whatever their circumstances – whatever their species – all mothers feel this same powerful, immense love for their children.

That’s why my heart breaks for moms like Jemma.

Battered Bodies, Broken Hearts, and Loss

Jemma was a beautiful olive baboon, one of dozens used in invasive, painful, and pointless pregnancy experiments in Gerald Pepe’s laboratory at Eastern Virginia Medical School. PETA uncovered the hideous story, learning that she was put through three cesarean sections in three years. Some baboons were forced to endure six of these surgeries. I’ve had a cesarean section, and I still wince when I remember how much it hurt for weeks afterward just to sit up or cough. Jemma endured that pain over and over, but she never even got to hold her babies – because experimenters immediately took them away and killed them.

The same sort of experiments are being carried out at the University of Maryland–Baltimore under experimenter Eugene Albrecht. They have been going on since the 1980s and are funded by taxpayer dollars, yet they haven’t produced anything useful to human mothers. That’s right: no cures and no treatments – only heartbreak, pain, and ultimately death for hundreds of baboons.

Robbed of Their Families and Freedom

Experimenters didn’t take just Jemma’s babies. They robbed her of everything that was natural and important to her. Instead of traversing vast savannas, foraging, and raising her babies alongside her mother, sisters, and other troop members, she spent her life in near isolation. The loneliness and monotony drove her mad: She tore out her hair and destroyed her teeth by biting the bars of the cell in which she was imprisoned.

Jemma’s only solace came when she gave birth to Boo. She loved and tenderly cared for him – and stopped harming herself – for eight sweet months. Then it all ended: Experimenters tore Boo from her arms. I can only imagine her terror and her crushing grief.

Left to Bleed to Death

Boo ended up at the University of Maryland–Baltimore, where he disappeared into the system. Although his fate is unknown, PETA obtained records that reveal the school’s despicable torment of animals. Just one example: They left an intravenous line improperly secured, and a baboon was able to pull it into a cage and bite through it, causing the animal to bleed to death slowly over the course of four hours.

Albrecht’s laboratory routinely subjects mother baboons to multiple invasive surgeries in apparent violation of federal animal protection laws, so PETA filed a complaint with the US Department of Agriculture. In a rare move, the agency fined the school for allowing the baboon to bleed to death and other federal Animal Welfare Act violations. PETA is now calling on local law enforcement to open a criminal investigation.

Baboon Mothers Used, Abused, and Tossed Onto the Trash Heap

PETA exposed persistent and egregious violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act at Eastern Virginia Medical School, too – and the US Department of Agriculture revoked its permission to inflict multiple major survival surgeries on pregnant baboons. This was a positive step, but we knew it would mean that baboons like Jemma, who had already endured multiple cesarean sections, were no longer “useful.”

So PETA acted quickly to secure places at a beautiful sanctuary for Jemma as well as Cookie, Tara, and Toya – other elderly baboons who had been subjected to these experiments for years. But instead of giving these mothers a chance to enjoy some comfort, the school quietly killed them all, as if they were nothing more than broken beakers.

PETA is determined to end funding for these dens of despair and shut them down.