Ben Carson: Accusation I Used Aborted Babies in Research is a False Left-Wing Media Attack

National   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Aug 14, 2015   |   10:54AM   |   Washington, DC

Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson has doubled down on his defense against claims that he conducted fetal tissue research in the early 1990s, a revelation that has come to light on the heels of the scandal at Planned Parenthood — where unborn babies are purposefully killed in order to use their body parts for research purposes.

Carson has been critical of not only the Planned Parenthood abortion business for selling aborted babies and their body parts for research, but he said defenders of that have oversold the benefits of fetal tissue research.

As LifeNews reported, according to the Washington Post, Dr. Jen Gunter, of pro-abortion medical company Kaiser Permanente, recently uncovered a paper Carson co-authored in 1992. In the paper, he and other doctors conducting research say they used “human choroid plexus ependyma and nasal mucosa from two fetuses aborted in the ninth and 17th week of gestation.”

Carson calls the reports that he conducted research with aborted babies “desperate” and defended himself in an interview.

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Now, in a post on his Facebook page, Carson says the claims are nothing more than an attack on him by the liberal mainstream media.

I wanted to use our time tonight to directly deal with an attack launched on me today by the left and the media. A couple questions came in on this subject, so I want to address it head on.

Today I was accused by the press as having done research on fetal tissue. It simply is not true. The study they distributed by an anonymous source was done in 1992. The study was about tumors. I won’t bore you with the science. There were four doctors’ names on the study. One was mine. I spent my life studying brain tumors and removing them. My only involvement in this study was supplying tumors that I had removed from my patients. Those tissue samples were compared to other tissue samples under a microscope. Pathologists do this work to gain clues about tumors.

I, nor any of the doctors involved with this study, had anything to do with abortion or what Planned Parenthood has been doing. Research hospitals across the country have microscope slides of all kinds of tissue to compare and contrast. The fetal tissue that was viewed in this study by others was not collected for this study.

I am sickened by the attack that I, after having spent my entire life caring for children, had something to do with aborting a child and harvesting organs. My medical specialty is the human brain and even I am amazed at what it is capable of doing. Please know these attacks are pathetic attempts to blunt our progress.

In his previous defense, Carson appeared to say there’s a difference between specifically selling, as in the case of Planned Parenthood, or buying, as in the case of Colorado State University, University of Wisconsin and Oregon Health and Science University, aborted babies for research and using fetal tissue for comparative research along with other tissue samples because the tissue was already available.

“To willfully ignore evidence that you have for some ideological reason is wrong. If you’re killing babies and taking the tissue, that’s a very different thing than taking a dead specimen and keeping a record of it,” Carson said.  “It’s one of the reasons why at the turn of the last century, the average age of death was 47. Now, the average age of death is 80. Using the information that you have is a smart thing, not a dumb thing.”

“Bear this in mind about pathologists. Regardless of what their ideology is, when they receive tissue, they prepare the tissue. They label it. They mark how it got there,” Carson said.

“Regardless of whether it’s from a fetus or someone who’s 150 years old, they bank them in tissue blocks. Other people doing comparative research need to have a basis. When pathologists receive specimen, their job is to prepare the specimen. They have no job opining on where the tissue came from,” Carson added.

Carson, reportedly, would not say if he thought fetal tissue research should be banned but he agreed Planned Parenthood should be de-funded.

“I may not be completely objective about Planned Parenthood, because I know how they started with Margaret Sanger who believed in eugenics,” he said. “But it would be good for the public to understand this whole aspect of medical research.”

Carson also said he has never done and fetal tissue research since that 1992 publication.

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