Your tax dollars are going to ‘humanized mice’ experiments

The National Institutes of Health has until Wednesday, Dec. 5th to renew a contract that requires researchers at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) to obtain the remains of aborted babies for testing on mice with compromised immune systems.

The Department of Health and Human Services recently terminated a $15,000 contract for the same work with Advanced Bioscience Resources — a company under federal investigation for working with Planned Parenthood on fetal tissue research.

{mosads}“So far, this contract, which creates a demand for human organs taken from aborted babies, has paid UCSF $9,554,796 in federal tax dollars,” reports Terry Jeffrey of CNSNews.com.

NIH reserves the right to renew the contract awarded to UCSF in 2013 every year through the end of 2020. If renewed through that time, NIH will have paid UCSF nearly $14 million in taxpayer dollars. NIH estimates that it spent $103 million in fiscal 2018on research that used human fetal tissue.

However, a majority of taxpayers do not want their money funding abortion at all, much less propping up a marketplace for aborted baby parts used in experimental research. In fact, Marist polling shows 60 percent of Americans oppose using tax dollars to support abortion.

Not only are taxpayers being made complicit in funding big abortion business, but contracts like the NIH deal with UCSF are also creating demand for late term abortions-harvesting body parts from babies between 20-24 weeks gestation. This is in stark contrast to the consensus of most Americans who would limit abortion to, at most, the first trimester.

Under one of the most pro-life administrations in recent history, the Health and Human Services Department should know better than to invest in science that reduces a baby to the sum of its parts.

The theme of the upcoming 2019 March for Life is “Unique from Day One: Pro-life is Pro-Science.” Human life has inherent dignity from the moment of fertilization; developments in science and technology continue to reveal the humanity of the unborn at early stages. Yet science is unethical when it is not at the service of life and that is what is happening in the context of these research grants.

“The concern with fetal-tissue research is that it’s not ethical and that any research or therapies or treatments that are attempted are going to be tainted,” says Dr. Tara Sander Lee, associate scholar at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, in a recent interview. “It’s not right to exploit one group of human beings for the benefit of another.”

The apparently widespread acceptance in the scientific community of using aborted baby parts in the name of science should alarm citizens and lawmakers alike. Scientific progress should not be accepted as sacrificing the life of one for the alleged benefit of another. The very idea is counterintuitive to a nation devoted to protecting and preserving life.

The White House and those at the Department of Health and Human Services should demand more transparency from those awarded our hard-earned taxpayer dollars and cancel contracts like the NIH-UCSF humanized-mice study, just as they cancelled a much smaller contract with ABR. Funds should instead be used towards successful alternatives that promote life, not devalue it. Science like this works against its intended mission and puts a price on something invaluable: human life.

Jeanne Mancini is the president of March for Life.