When the Center for Medical Progress began in 2015 releasing its undercover videos proving that the bodies of aborted babies were being harvested for medical research, Americans were horrified — at least those who were willing to recognize the truth.
The videos were quickly quashed by the left-wing media or else described, uniformly (in a phrase presumably coined by Planned Parenthood), as “highly and deceptively edited.” But the hidden harvest of these precious innocents was now out in the open.
What was less well-understood was the role of taxpayer dollars in funding this macabre trade. Researchers inside and outside the government were purchasing these body parts with funds provided by the federal government — that is, taxes collected from hardworking Americans.
According to the Charlotte Lozier Institute, in 2018 the National Institutes of Health spent $115 million on grants involving human fetal tissue research at universities and NIH labs. You and I paid for that, whether we knew it or not.
But President Trump on Wednesday took a giant step toward shutting down the fetal harvesting business and taxpayer involvement in it when a new rule was issued by the Department of Health and Human Services. Under the new rule, government scientists and researchers working with government grants will no longer conduct research using tissue from aborted babies.
Outside researchers who receive government grants and who hope to continue using fetal tissue will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis and, on the recommendation of an ethics board, funding can be withheld.
Let’s be clear about what the abstract term “fetal tissue” really means. It’s the valuable organs that Planned Parenthood’s Deborah Nucatola described extracting in the first CMP video:
Fetal tissue also can mean the intact brains of late-term babies, like those sought by the University of New Mexico for a summer camp program.
A baby’s heart that was beating just moments before it began its journey to a medical research lab is also fetal tissue.
Researchers accustomed to having their orders filled for brains and lungs and “intact calvarium” responded with alarm when the new HHS rule was announced. They say fetal tissue is vital to finding cures and treatments for such deadly diseases as HIV and Parkinson’s.
But the truth is that research using a patient’s own skin or adult stem cells from donors or from a dozen other sources has been showing very positive results. We don’t need to further exploit the bodies of abortion victims to find cures — and that is the basis of the HHS rule change. We can do better.
The Trump administration’s new policy, in addition to curtailing the use of fetal stem cells, will also direct funding to develop lifesaving research that is both moral and ethical. In fact, the National Institutes of Health recently announced a $20 million research program to find alternatives to fetal research. This is good news that should be applauded across the abortion divide but is instead being met by abortion advocates with the usual wailing and gnashing of teeth.
President Trump has made the protection of the sanctity of life a hallmark of his administration. This week’s rule change to curtail the use the bodies of aborted babies in research is another promise kept.
Rev. Frank Pavone (@frfrankpavone) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the national director of Priests for Life.
