With the exposure of Planned Parenthood’s activities in procuring aborted babies for scientists, the media is buying into the lie that this is “life-saving” research. In a recent article picked up by the AP and published in US News, the hysterics were evidenced by the headlines “Amid uproar over anti-abortion videos scientists say fetal tissue essential for research”.
The article starts out sounding like talking points for Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards by quoting from Stanford University spokesperson Lisa Lapin: “If researchers are unable to work with fetal tissue, there is a huge list of diseases for which researchers would move much more slowly, rather than quickly, to find their cause and how they can be cured.”
Not only has there never been a cure for any disease whatsoever using aborted fetal material, the very next sentence demonstrates what’s really behind their motives.
From 2011 through 2014 alone, 97 research institutions – mostly universities and hospitals – received a total of $280 million in federal grants for fetal tissue research from the National Institutes of Health.
Cha-ching! Looks like government defunding of Planned Parenthood is only the tip of the iceberg isn’t it?
Next the article notes that vaccines for hepatitis A, German measles, chickenpox and rabies were developed using cell lines grown from tissue from elective abortions.
“What they fail to admit is that with the exception of chickenpox there are moral alternatives for every one of those vaccines using animal cell lines,” stated Debi Vinnedge, Children of God for Life’s Executive Director.
“There are 47 vaccines licensed in the US, 8 of which use aborted fetal cell lines yet only 3 of them have no moral option. Those 3 are associated with chickenpox vaccine but in reality, even those did not have to be produced with aborted fetal material,” she added.
The article continues to obfuscate by quoting Dr Paul Offit of CHOP, Philadelphia: “Rubella caused 5,000 spontaneous abortions a year prior to the vaccine. We wouldn’t have saved all those lives had it not been for those cells.”
Uhm…time for a fact check Dr Offit.
In reality, the first rubella vaccines licensed in 1969 did not use aborted fetal cells at all. The HPV-77 (high passage virus) was grown in MDCK (canine) cells and duck embryo while the Cendehill rubella vaccine was grown in rabbit cells. The aborted fetal version of rubella vaccine was not even licensed in the US until 1979 and the data preceding that tells a different story than Offit.
According to the CDC, there were a total of 1,064 confirmed cases of Congenital Rubella Syndrome (CRS) from 1970-1979 .[1] Yes – you read that right – that’s 1,064 cases of CRS over a 10 year period or an average of just over 106 per year. And the actual number of spontaneous abortions that resulted from Congenital Rubella Syndrome shows it began declining from 69 cases in 1970 to 22 in 1976 with no confirmed data for 1977-1979. [2] That’s hardly the 5,000 per year that Offit claimed!
As if that was not egregious enough, the writer then goes on to quote Dr Carrie Wolinetz of the NIH as saying that “Fetal tissue was “absolutely critical” to the development of a potential Ebola vaccine”.
Apparently Ms Wolinetz missed the fact that to their credit, Merck’s Ebola vaccine which is doing well in Phase III clinical trials is using a well established animal cell line, not aborted fetal cells.
However the greater safety concern ought to be with the two Ebola vaccines made by Johnson & Johnson and Glaxo SmithKline that are using aborted fetal cell lines which have never been used in any other licensed vaccine in the US.
What is most disturbing and intentionally left out of their reporting is the horrific methods abortionists have used in order to obtain fetal material for vaccine research. Every video that the Center for Medical Progress has put out on how abortion methods changed to ensure intact organs and whole fetuses is absolutely correct and has been historically documented beginning with the 1930’s polio vaccine research. In just one of numerous academic journals citing vaccine research using aborted babies scientists noted that “in many cases, the hearts were still beating at the time of receipt in the virus laboratory.”
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“The fact of the matter is that aborted fetal tissue is absolutely unnecessary for vaccine production or any medical research. There are numerous FDA approved moral cell lines and if human cells are desired, they can be obtained from a plethora of non-objectionable sources including umbilical cord, cord blood and other adult stem cells,” stated Ms Vinnedge.
“It’s time to stop trying to justify the unjustifiable because America has seen the truth and its certainly not pretty!” she added.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00053391.htm
[2] Division of Immunization, Centers for Disease Control, Atlanta, GA. American Journal of Epidemiology (Impact Factor: 4.98). 03/1989; 129(2):349-61.) PubMed
LifeNews Note: Debi Vinnedge is the director of the pro-life group Children of God for Life.
