People are living through something like a slow-motion earthquake. It will be some time before we emerge from the rubble and can adequately calculate the damage to our nation’s health, economy, and social fabric. In the meantime, average citizens are busy trying to figure out how best to protect their families. Some Democratic politicians, however, are exploiting the crisis, trying to reverse a recent ban on tax-funded experiments using the flesh of aborted fetuses. Their claim: Developing a vaccine against COVID-19 depends on this type of morally tainted research. The scientific truth? Ethical experimental alternatives abound, including the use of monkey cells, adult human cells, and chicken eggs. And these alternatives work as well as, if not better than, fetal tissue for the production of vaccines.
Modern vaccine science long ago moved beyond the need for aborted fetal tissue. Some scientific background explains why. To create a vaccine, samples of the actual virus are grown and altered to produce a weakened strain. The weakened strain is then injected into the body to produce an antibody response. This enables the body to fight off the actual disease upon exposure to the virus. To grow and alter the virus in a laboratory, researchers use a cell culture. Yes, those cells can come from aborted human babies, but they can also from monkey, chicken, or rabbit embryos — or even from adult humans.
Of the more than 70 vaccines routinely administered in the United States, none, not one, is made using the cells of recently aborted babies. The manufacturers of a handful of vaccines use the cells of healthy babies aborted in the 1960s as a culture medium but only because those companies have not cared to spend the money and time needed to switch to an ethical alternative.
Long before the existing ban on taxpayer-funded fetal tissue research, most scientists had moved to ethical tissue sources when developing new vaccines. Why? Because those sources (adult cells, neonatal thyroid tissue, and umbilical cord blood) are as effective as fetal cells and sometimes better. In fact, the year before the funding ban, the National Institutes of Health estimates that only 0.3% of research grant money was being given to researchers using human fetal tissue. The scientific need simply isn’t there.
Of course, hysterical calls for taxpayer funding of ethically dubious experiments are nothing new. The abortion industry and its political allies have been making exaggerated claims about the potential for medical cures utilizing fetal tissue from elective abortions for decades now, even as the unethical research goes on and consistently fails to produce the promised cures. Taxpayer-funded research on the hearts, livers, eyes, and brains of aborted babies places us squarely in an ethical morass articulated in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
Consider how the recent ban came about. A series of undercover videos recorded several abortion clinic doctors bluntly discussing their methods for harvesting fetal organs during abortion procedures. A firestorm of shocked horror erupted, though many in the research community continued to justify the harvesting. Scientific American magazine described how researchers “grind the liver … from a human fetus aborted at between 14 and 19 weeks of pregnancy.” Other researchers described the use of “the brains of aborted fetuses” for Alzheimer’s research and the creation of cell cultures “dissected from the eyes of fetuses.”
The Health and Human Services Department under President Trump wisely cut off taxpayer funding for this type of research after investigations found that fetal tissue procurement companies and harvesters like Planned Parenthood failed to follow federal regulations for the protection of human research subjects. Paying for the tissue, failing to secure the adequate consent of the mothers, changing the abortion procedure or its timing to maximize tissue harvesting — the harvesters and procurers crossed all of these ethical bright lines. HHS, understanding that when it comes to using human subjects for research, a single-minded commitment to promote the dignity of human life must inform every decision, even committed $20 million to fund research into experimental models that don’t use aborted fetal tissue.
It is during times of anguish and crisis that we should hold on tighter to principles of right and wrong, not loosen our grip. Along these noble lines, the attorneys general of 18 states, led by Curtis Hill of Indiana, have written an urgent letter to Trump asking him to uphold the ban on aborted fetal research funding. They write: “This nation must reject the false notion that scientists cannot achieve the laudable goal of creating vaccines and treatment for COVID-19 without using unethical means.” Ethics, like all the higher truths, are meant to see us through stormy days as well as sunny ones — and ensure that when the menacing clouds are gone, we will have nothing to be ashamed of.
Dr. Grazie Pozo Christie is a policy adviser at the Catholic Association and co-host of TCA’s podcast Conversations with Consequences. Maureen Ferguson is a Senior Fellow for the Catholic Association.
