In 2014, approximately 150 scientists were awarded grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in a category called “human fetal tissue.” The Washington Examiner reports that 23 of them have donated money to Democratic political campaigns but none have donated to Republican candidates.
This information was collected from two decades of data on the website Open Secrets. Unfortunately, half of the donors gave to pro-abortion President Barack Obama. Bioethicist Jacob Appel from Mount Sinai Hospital said he’s not shocked by the new information.
He explained, “I am not particularly surprised, but I do think this is unfortunate, a trend that is troubling for both scientific research and for society more generally.”
He added, “I think the problem may be less that attitudes among scientists have changed and more that scientists and health professionals have moved en masse to the Democratic Party.”
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Lynda Powell, a political science professor at the University of Rochester, says that the information won’t hurt Republicans with their base voters. She said, “It doesn’t seem to damage them very much with their core constituency in the primary electorate. Those people are pretty suspicious of science themselves.”
Last month, the Washington Examiner found that in 2014, Planned Parenthood spent nearly $5 million on electing pro-abortion Democrats to office. Their analysis showed that the abortion company gave $676,885 directly to federal Democratic candidates during that same time period.
Additionally, in the past fifteen years, Planned Parenthood has donated at least $25 million to Democratic lawmakers. A FoxNews.com analysis found that the abortion company has given money to Democrats through their employees, political action committees and through soft money donors.
Unfortunately, every Democrat that has voted against defunding Planned Parenthood since 2000 has received a financial contribution from their organization. For example, Senators Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) have received more than $30,000 from Planned Parenthood since 2002; and Senator Jeanne Shaheen, (D-New Hampshire) received $38,449 during the same time period. Jeanne Zaino, a political science professor in New York, told Fox News, “These types of contributions — any contributions — to public officials are important and they do sway votes.”
As LifeNews previously reported, fetal “tissue” research became a hot topic in July after videos were released exposing Planned Parenthood’s abortion business. However, scientists, publicly funded universities and Planned Parenthood have all defended their research by claiming that it results in lifesaving scientific discovers.
The problem with this claim is that scientists indicate that research using fetal organs has been disappointing. For example, Harvard researcher, Ole Isacson, MD, said they have been fairly unsuccessful in using it to finding a cure for Parkinson’s. He said, “It is very difficult to obtain dopamine nerve cells from fetal tissue. It would be far easier to grow the cells in a laboratory from stem cells. There have been no stem cell transplants as of yet for Parkinson’s patients.”
The Federalist reports that even though fetal tissue research receives $76 million in taxpayer funding, scientists are moving on to other methods because they believe it will produce better results. The associate professor of bioethics at Case Western Reserve University, Insoo Hyun, explained, “Despite the long history of using fetal tissue in medicine and research, the practice could be on the way out. Even though it has led to important medical advances in the last several decades, ‘in the future, the need for fetal tissue will go down because of advances in stem cell [technology] that will take over.”
One of the reasons Professor Hyun argues this position is because the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) believes that fetal tissue is no longer needed to create vaccines. They explain, “…Some vaccines such as rubella and varicella [were] made from human cell-line cultures, and some of these cell lines originated from aborted fetal tissue, obtained from legal abortions in the 1960s. No new fetal tissue is needed to produce cell lines to make these vaccines, now or in the future.”
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