A top scientist in the Biden administration defended using taxpayer dollars for experiments with aborted babies’ scalps, livers and other organs in a new leaked audio, claiming the research is “moral and beneficial.”
The Daily Wire first reported about the leaked audio of Francis Collins, a former National Institutes of Health (NIH) director and current science adviser to President Joe Biden.
During a private Institute of Politics event Oct. 26 at the University of Chicago, a student in the audience asked Collins about the NIH using taxpayers’ money to fund experiments like one at the University of Pittsburgh that involved grafting the scalps of aborted babies onto the backs of rodents, the report states.
Collins, who professes to be a devout Christian, said he feels “troubled” by abortion, but he believes it is ethical to use “fetal tissue” for scientific research.
“After all, pregnancy termination is, at the present time, legal in the United States. Whether you’re in support of it or not, it’s happened …” Collins said, according to the report. “The material from those elective abortions is discarded. There are aspects of fetal tissue that can be extremely valuable in understanding how life works, how development happens, and how to treat certain diseases like Parkinson’s disease, for instance.”
Other scientists say research with aborted babies’ organs has not been effective, and ethical alternatives exist.
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But Collins argued in favor of continuing research with aborted baby body parts because they are in easy supply, saying, “Fetal tissue is being discarded in large quantities every day.” Nearly 1 million unborn babies are aborted in the U.S. every year.
He continued: “If there were a circumstance where, with consent of the mother, having been obtained after the abortion, not in any way as an inspiration to carry it forward, the abortion … could ultimately help somebody. Which of those two choices is more ethical — discard all the tissue or use a small part?”
Then, Collins suggested that research with aborted baby body parts actually may redeem the immoral act of abortion.
“Can you in fact, … even with actions that you consider immoral, derive something from it that might actually be moral and beneficial?” he asked, the Wire reports. “That’s the horns of the dilemma upon which I have been resting here for these 12 years as NIH director, trying to oversee human fetal tissue research, which is something that I have to make decisions about.”
Under Collins’ leadership in the Obama administration, the NIH spent tens of millions of tax dollars funding unethical experiments involving aborted babies’ body parts.
In some experiments, organs were harvested from healthy, later-term unborn babies. According to CNS News, one University of California San Francisco experiment created “humanized mice” using organs from healthy aborted babies at 18 to 24 weeks gestation whose mothers had abortions for “elective … non-medical reasons.”
A 2017 journal article indicates aborted babies’ intestines were used in another taxpayer-funded experiment.
Perhaps the most horrific, a taxpayer-funded experiment at the University of Pittsburgh involved scalping second-trimester aborted babies and then implanting their scalps onto rodents to study the human immune system. The researchers published the results of the study in 2020 in the journal “Scientific Reports,” as well as photos that show tufts of babies’ hair growing on the rodents.
Recently, the Center for Medical Progress uncovered evidence suggesting some aborted babies’ hearts still may be beating when their organs are harvested for scientific research.
The Daily Wire reports Collins did not respond to a request for comment. In the audio, however, the Wire pointed out that Collins mentioned feeling good about being able to speak without restraint because it was a private event.
In the leaked audio, Collins also argued in favor of COVID-19 vaccine mandates and even laughed as he talked about threatening his employees’ jobs.
Here’s more from the report:
When Collins made it clear to the 2,000 out of 46,000 workers who had still declined to take the jabs that they were “in serious danger of being fired in the next month if they [didn’t] do something about it,” Collins said he got a “big response.”
“Reality [was] sinking in,” he explained, so that even the “pretty darn resistant” elected to get vaccinated. He then chuckled, “You get the feeling that their resistance was not maybe quite that deeply seated[.]”
Many people objected to the vaccine because several vaccines were developed and/or tested with cell lines created from aborted babies.