If you think destroying perfectly healthy babies in the womb is horrible, imagine letting scientists pick through the bodies for parts. Based on last Friday's announcement, Democrats are perfectly fine with both. "We believe that we have to do the research that it takes to make sure that we're incorporating innovation," new HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra insisted when he reversed the ban on fetal tissue experimentation. But just how effective is this ghoulish "innovation?" Not very, experts say.
It's been four years since David Daleiden's Center for Medical Progress pulled the curtain back on the abortion industry's baby shop of horrors. In one undercover video after another, CMP caught staffers at the highest levels of Planned Parenthood casually haggling over baby organ prices like trinkets at a local bazaar. With amazing nonchalance, the group's leaders tamely describe how they coach clinics to perform abortions that minimize the damage on the baby's profitable parts.
At one point the gory details about the black market were enough to give even Hillary Clinton second thoughts. "Disturbing," she said when the footage first came out. Now, one House select panel, 15 criminal referrals, and an FBI investigation later, Democrats have changed their tune. Experimenting on dead aborted babies is more than okay -- it's encouraged! Under Biden's HHS, anything goes.
"Not to be too graphic," Dr. David Prentice said on "Washington Watch," "but we're talking about body parts from aborted babies... There are literally 'tissue procurement people' -- that's what they are called -- which is a euphemism for somebody that's basically scavenging corpses for body parts, baby brains, baby hearts, baby livers, other body parts. They collect these from Planned Parenthood clinics and other abortionists, and then they will pass them on to researchers who think that they need fetal tissue to do various types of experiments to test drugs and chemicals or to just see what's happening at some point during human development."
But here's the thing, said Dr. Prentice. "The sad fact is that this is really antiquated research. Obviously, it's unethical. We're scavenging body parts just like scavenging parts from old used cars." And, he pointed out, misleading women to do it. Under the Trump administration, America shut down this barbaric research where government scientists and labs were concerned. Taxpayer dollars, the president decided, shouldn't help create a market for fetal tissue -- especially when moral alternatives exist that are already helping patients!
"What the Biden administration and Secretary Becerra did [Friday]," the vice president for the Charlotte Lozier Institute explained, "was a 180-degree reversal. They've done away with any sort of ethical overview of this. They have decided that, yes, government scientists can use our taxpayer dollars to traffic in these aborted baby body parts and use them for research. There will be no ethical oversight. The foxes will be guarding the henhouse... So NIH researchers will review the science and then and send out millions of dollars for research with aborted baby parts."
As outrageous as that is from a moral standpoint, Dr. Prentice argued, it's even more upsetting from a scientific perspective. "Aborted fetal tissue has never been used to make any vaccines," he pointed out. "They've talked about various drugs that have been made using fetal tissue. It doesn't happen. They're not produced with any fetal tissue. This is all trying to paint a nice picture about a need for aborted baby tissues and organs for research when the fact is there is no need for that. It has not produced any good results. And in fact, there are ethical, better scientific ways to do this research -- like adult stem cells... We hear so often about embryonic stem cells and fetal tissue and all of the great treatments and cures, when the fact is nobody's been cured using fetal tissue or embryonic stem cells. But there are over two million people around the globe whose health is better, whose lives have been saved with adult stem cells."
So not only are we wasting money under President Biden -- we're wasting lives. This isn't done out of necessity, like Democrats claim. We're taking grants and successful therapies away from patients to do what Dr. Prentice calls "grotesque research." And because of how HHS handled this, it goes into effect immediately. "Virtually immediately, government scientists can start ordering baby body parts for their research and resume that taxpayer-funded research with fetal tissue."
What can people do? The first thing they should always do: contact their elected officials. We need to remind Congress that we're a nation that respects human life. We need programs that help patients -- not politically-minded scientists.
