FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: April 16, 2021
Contact: Prudence Robertson, [email protected] | 240-672-2828
Pro-Abortion HHS Secretary Becerra Leading Push to Roll Back Trump Policy, Make Taxpayers Complicit in Controversial Experiments
Washington, D.C. – Today the Biden-Harris Department of Health & Human Services is expected to resume taxpayer funding for experiments using the body parts of aborted babies, according to news reports. The move reverses Trump administration policies that stopped NIH intramural grants and required an ethics review for other proposals.
“Biden and Harris, working hand-in-glove with radical appointees like Xavier Becerra, are moving rapidly to pay back their abortion industry allies and wipe out pro-life progress made under the Trump-Pence administration,” said SBA List President Marjorie Dannenfelser. “From day one they have sought to expand abortion on demand, funded by taxpayers, against the will of the strong majority of Americans. Now they would force Americans to be complicit in barbaric experiments using body parts harvested from innocent children killed in abortions, with no limits of any kind. Pro-abortion Democrats push this deeply unpopular agenda at their own political peril.”
Dr. Tara Sander Lee, senior fellow and director of life sciences at Charlotte Lozier Institute, added:
“The HHS decision to resume experiments using the body parts of aborted children defies both the best ethics and most promising science. Exploiting the bodies of these young human beings is unnecessary and grotesque. Fetal tissue was not, and has never been, used for polio or any other vaccine, nor to produce or manufacture any pharmaceutical. There are superior and ethical alternatives available such as adult stem cell models being used by countless scientists worldwide to develop and produce advanced medicines treating patients now, without exploitation of any innocent life. All scientists should reject the administration’s attempts to prey on fears related to the pandemic to advance the practice of harvesting fetal tissue.”
Previously the Trump administration:
- Terminated a contract between Advanced Bioscience Resources (ABR), Inc. and the Food and Drug Administration that provided human fetal tissue from elective abortions to develop testing protocols (September 2018).
- Committed $20 million to accelerate development of the existing array of ethical alternatives to objectionable research (December 2018).
- Banned intramural (National Institutes of Health-based) research using tissue from elective abortions (June 2019).
- Convened an Ethics Advisory Board (EAB) to review all new and renewable requests for research using tissue from elective abortions (July 2020).
- Concluded 2020 with decisions from the EAB that rejected many funding requests due to major deficiencies with their consent process for women being solicited for tissue and organ donations.
SBA List is a network of 900,000 pro-life Americans nationwide, dedicated to ending abortion by electing national leaders and advocating for laws that save lives, with a special calling to promote pro-life women leaders.
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