The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary and radical pro-abortion activist Xavier Becerra shut down the National Institutes of Health (NIH) ethics board overseeing human fetal tissue research. Under President Donald Trump, the advisory board had the authority to block fetal research proposals on ethics grounds.
In April, at President Joe Biden’s direction, HHS also reversed the Trump administration’s policy prohibiting funding for intramural research using human fetal tissue. The decision gave the “best and brightest” government researchers and agencies license to use the skin, brains, liver, and eyeballs of aborted children for taxpayer-funded research. In essence, the Biden administration is allowing for taxpayer-funded harvesting of aborted babies, and now it has abolished any sort of ethical oversight.
In response, Republican Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, as well as Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer and Sen. Vicky Hartzler, both of Missouri, are leading a letter signed by more than 100 congressional Republicans on Wednesday demanding Becerra reinstate the ethics board and the policy banning funding from going to fetal tissue research. The lawmakers are asking the Biden administration to instead “embrace more avenues for research that employ ethical, non-fetal alternatives.”
The news that the Biden administration is shutting down the fetal harvesting ethics board comes in the wake of shocking details about how federal agencies traffic aborted babies. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) bought organs such as livers, brains, and eyeballs of dismembered babies for hundreds of dollars apiece from Advanced Bioscience Resources, one of the country’s largest fetal tissue trafficking firms. Firms such as Advanced Bioscience Resources work as the middleman between the federal government and Planned Parenthood, the country’s largest abortion provider.
The FDA pays $2,000 per individual baby, adding up to $12,000 per box of harvested organs. The FDA also requested late-term aborted babies, buying body parts from children up to 24 weeks old (babies can generally survive outside the womb as early as 22 weeks).
Most disturbing, the FDA requested organs from baby boys for “very important and … challenging” surgeries to create humanized mice. Moreover, it was uncovered that FDA employees would be joining Advanced Bioscience Resources associates at a “Humanized Mice Workshop” in Zurich in 2016.
The Center for Medical Progress reported in May that grants from the Anthony Fauci-led National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health were funding fetal tissue experiments that included stitching the scalp of a killed 5-month-old in utero child onto the back of a lab rat.
Pointing to these examples, Republican lawmakers said in their letter that the restrictions on the use of human fetal tissue in 2019 “were instituted because of glaring abuses that came to light.”
“Further investigations and disclosures led HHS to discontinue intramural research projects that exploited the remains of unborn children and to convene the statutorily defined Ethics Advisory Board to provide oversight and accountability for extramural [human fetal tissue] projects,” the legislators wrote.
Lawmakers also said that some of the concerns the NIH ethics board encountered last year “found substantial failings in extramural [human fetal tissue] proposals related to ensuring proper consent, adherence to NIH policy, questions of financial gain from the exchange of fetal tissue, and lack of scientific justification for using [human fetal tissue] over alternative tissue sources.”
“In fact, the Board voted to recommend that the Secretary withhold funds for 13 of 14 proposals on account of serious ethical concerns.” the letter says.
“Given these concerns, it is absolutely vital that NIH maintain adequate oversight of federally funded [human fetal tissue] projects,” the letter asserts. “Eliminating the [NIH’s Human Fetal Tissue Ethics Advisory Board] removes critical oversight and increases the likelihood that federally funded extramural projects may violate governing law and standing NIH policies with impunity.”
The Biden administration has been one of the most radically pro-abortion administrations to date. In addition to reversing policies governing research using tissue from dismembered children, Biden reversed the Mexico City Policy’s ban on U.S. taxpayers funding foreign abortion providers, and Becerra has spent his career shielding Planned Parenthood from investigation, violating the rights of pro-life pregnancy centers, and prosecuting pro-life journalists.
Source: The Federalist
