137 Members of Congress Slam Biden for Promoting Research With Body Parts From Aborted Babies

National   |   Micaiah Bilger   |   Jun 28, 2021   |   3:11PM   |   Washington, DC

More than 130 Republicans in U.S. Congress urged the Biden administration this week to restore accountability to the National Institutes of Health amid growing concerns about tax dollars funding research using aborted baby body parts to create “humanized mice.”

Fox News reports U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker, of Mississippi, is leading the effort through a letter to Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra. Joining him were 136 other lawmakers from the U.S. House and Senate.

They urged Becerra to reverse his decision to disband the NIH Human Fetal Tissue Ethics Advisory Board, a group of experts established under the Trump administration to review grants to ensure tax dollars would not be used for unethical experiments involving aborted baby body parts, according to the report.

“The EAB provided critical ethical review of extramural research grant applications and its removal will assuredly reduce accountability and transparency in the use of tax dollars for ethically fraught research,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter.

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“In addition, the recent decision to let federal researchers obtain, use, and store for intramural research the body parts of unborn children violently killed through abortion is deeply troubling,” they continued. “Americans deserve better stewardship of their tax dollars than research that exploits the remains of aborted infants.”

They said the Trump administration established the ethics board after “glaring abuses came to light.” They pointed to government documents and other published material showing how taxpayer-funded research projects used aborted baby body parts to create “humanized mice” and graft the scalps of aborted babies onto the bodies of rats and mice for experimentation.

In one research project at the University of Pittsburgh, scientists grafted scalps from aborted babies between 18 and 20 weeks of pregnancy onto the backs of rodents to study the human immune system. The researchers described it as “full-thickness human skin.” Scientists published photos and other details of disturbing experiment, conducted with taxpayer funding from the NIH, in the September 2020 issue of the journal “Scientific Reports.”

Because of these and other experiments that recently came to light, it is clear that ethical oversight is needed at the NIH, the pro-life lawmakers said.

Last year, they wrote, the ethics board “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 [aborted baby body parts] over alternative tissue sources.”

In its first action, the board voted to recommend that HHS reject funding for 13 of 14 experiments because of serious ethical concerns with the scientists’ plans to use aborted baby body parts.

“Given these concerns, it is absolutely vital that NIH maintain adequate oversight of federally funded HFT projects,” the lawmakers told Becerra. “Eliminating the EAB removes critical oversight and increases the likelihood that federally funded extramural projects may violate governing law and standing NIH polices with impunity.”

Others who joined Wicker in signing the letter include Missouri Reps. Blaine Luetkemeyer and Vicky Hartzler, Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy, Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton.

Under the Obama administration, at least $77 million tax dollars were spent on research projects that used aborted baby body parts, according to The Hill. The Trump administration cut off funding to the unethical research and created the new ethical advisory board to prevent further funding. However, the Biden administration quickly reversed these actions earlier this year.

Earlier this month, the Center for Medical Progress published a new video with details about the University of Pittsburgh experiment and other research projects involving aborted baby body parts.

Other details about the disturbing practice of harvesting aborted baby body parts for scientific research and how American taxpayers are being forced to pay for them were published recently at Judicial Watch. The watchdog organization released nearly 600 pages of government records that it obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request pertaining to these unethical practices.

Among other things, the documents show one experiment funded under the Obama-Biden administration paid approximately $2,000 per aborted baby for an experiment creating “humanized mice,” according to The Federalist. The aborted babies were requested to be between 16 and 24 weeks gestation, according to the documents.