Responding to critics that claim retired neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson used fetal tissue for research, Carson said Sunday his critics are “desperate” and that “they are looking for things that aren’t even true” from over a quarter century ago.
“It is a desperate attempt by some people to change the argument,” Carson said on “Fox News Sunday.”
The people raising the issue “are looking for things that aren’t even true,” Carson said, adding that he had never performed an abortion or even touched aborted tissue.
“What I did as a surgeon is take tissue samples and then give them to the pathologist” for comparison with other samples, quite different from the undercover videos of Planned Parenthood doctors dissecting fetal organs for sale that he’d criticized, Carson argued.
A former pediatric neurosurgeon, Carson is listed as one of four co-authors on a 1992 academic paper about brain tumors that compares adult and fetal brain tissue. In the paper, samples were collected from fetuses aborted at nine and 17 weeks gestation. Carson said Sunday he was not involved in that part of the research, and that his contribution to the study came from adults.
“I spent my life studying brain tumors and removing them. My only involvement in this study was supplying tumors that I had removed from my patients,” Carson explained on Facebook. “Those tissue samples were compared to other tissue samples under a microscope. Pathologists do this work to gain clues about tumors.”
“I am sickened by the attack that I, after having spent my entire life caring for children, had something to do with aborting a child and harvesting organs,” wrote Carson. “My medical specialty is the human brain and even I am amazed at what it is capable of doing. Please know these attacks are pathetic attempts to blunt our progress.”
“I think that when conception occurs, life occurs,” Carson reiterated on “Fox News Sunday.” “I do believe in contraception.”
While Carson says he tends “to get a lot of questions about race and medicine” he is hoping that his popularity — he is is polling second in a Fox News poll — will prompt more questions “about the economy and foreign policy,” he said.
