President Donald Trump’s nominee for Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has pledged to ban the use of aborted baby remains being used by research funds.
Nominee Jay Bhattacharya was speaking at a Senate committee hearing into his nomination when he said he’d reinstate the prohibition that had also been in place during Trump’s first administration.
While the 2019 ban did not prohibit research using already existing aborted baby remains, it banned any new parts from being acquired for NIH-funded research. The policy also required experiments on such remains to be approved by an Ethics Advisory Board. In August 2020, the Board rejected 13 of 14 such applications.
The review process was later scrapped in 2021 during President Joe Biden’s administration.
When Bhattacharya was asked at the 5 March hearing if he would support Trump’s prohibition, he replied that he would “absolutely follow the lead” of Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services who also supports the measure.
“During the pandemic, I would often be on Catholic radio, and people would ask me whether the mRNA vaccines were made or developed with aborted foetal stem cell lines”, said Bhattacharya, who is a Christian professor at Stanford University’s medical school.
“A lot of the folks who were calling in had ethical objections,” he continued. “In public health, we need to make sure the products of the science are ethically acceptable to everybody…
“We need to make sure that everyone is willing to take the kinds of progress that we make, so I am absolutely committed to that.”
Some Covid-19 vaccines were developed from cells taken from aborted babies, including a baby who was aborted in the 1970s. While such vaccines do not contain such cells, the cell lines used can be traced back to aborted children, posing an ethical issue for some people.
A cell line is a collection of cells adapted and grown in a laboratory using primary cell cultures taken from tissue or organs. They are often used for cancer research and developing new drugs and vaccines.
Professor Andrea Gambotto, who worked on developing vaccines during the pandemic, called such ethical concerns “annoying”.
“It’d be a crime to ban the use of these cells… It was a dead embryo, so the cells back then, instead of being discarded, they were used for research”, he said.
However, an academic paper published in The Linacre Quarterly, the official journal of the Catholic Medical Association, warned in 2018 that “each medical benefit or scientific advance from the use of fetal tissue from elective abortions desensitizes beneficiaries, scientists, and doctors to the original evil act that produced these cells”.
The paper continued: “Of greatest concern is that desensitization ultimately leads to scandal by erroneously validating elective abortions for a greater good. Without careful oversight, the fetus could become, like fetal tissue cell lines, merely cells, cultured within the uterus for scientific exploration.
“All people of good conscience have the responsibility to voice opposition to the use of fetal tissue from elective abortions in order to promote development of alternatives, affirm the value of all human life, and limit scandal.”
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