President Donald Trump has banned the use of body parts from aborted babies for government research.
Government scientists will no longer be able to use fetal tissue for medical research, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced Wednesday. The HHS also announced it will cancel a contract worth millions with the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) for research that uses tissue from aborted babies to study diseases like HIV.
“Promoting the dignity of human life from conception to natural death is one of the very top priorities of President Trump’s administration,” the HHS said in a statement.
Big changes at HHS
In a victory for life Wednesday, the Trump administration banned intramural research — that is, research conducted internally — at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that uses fetal tissue from aborted babies. The HHS said it would not renew an intramural research contract with UCSF that expired on Wednesday.
UCSF was the NIH’s top recipient of federal funding in 2018. Its research included a $13 million project that involved injecting mice with cells from aborted babies. UCSF said the decision was “abrupt” and would impede scientific discovery.
“The efforts by the administration to impede this work will undermine scientific discovery and the ability to find effective treatments for serious and life-threatening disease,” UCSF said.
Current contracts for extramural research — that is, research conducted outside the NIH and funded with grants — will remain unaffected. However, any new grants or applications for renewal will be subjected to stricter ethical review.
The decision comes after the HHS canceled a contract in September of 2018 with a fetal tissue supplier, Advanced Bioscience Resources, over its failure to comply with regulations. The HHS then launched a review of all federally-funded research using fetal tissue “to ensure consistency with statutes and regulations governing such research, and to ensure the adequacy of procedures and oversight of this research in light of the serious regulatory, moral, and ethical considerations involved.”
The NIH has about $104 million set aside for research contracts involving fetal tissue for fiscal year 2020.
Pro-life groups celebrate decision
Pro-life groups like the Susan B. Anthony List lauded the decision.
“This is a major pro-life victory and we thank President Trump for taking decisive action,” said Susan B. Anthony List president Marjorie Dannenfelser. “It is outrageous and disgusting that we have been complicit, through our taxpayer dollars, in the experimentation using baby body parts.”
Liberals say that the research can be ethically justified because of its potential to cure diseases. Dr. Francis Collins, Obama’s NIH director, defended fetal tissue research in December.
“There is strong evidence that scientific benefits come from fetal tissue research, [which] can be done with [an] ethical framework,” Collins said, according to Science Mag.
However, Dr. David Prentice, vice president and research director at Charlotte Lozier Institute, said that fetal tissue research has no benefit that other methods, like adult stem cells, can’t provide.
“Today’s move demonstrates NIH’s investment in scientifically-proven methods for research: adult stem cells, iPS cells, organoids, humanized mice constructed using postnatally sourced cells and improved non-human cell lines—just to name a few,” he said. “All of these have been used in the production of treatments, vaccines and medicines currently on the market; the key is that our government will now invest in effective research methods that do not rely on the destruction of human life.”
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