The University of California is not happy that President Donald Trump ended a contract for $2 million of taxpayer funds for it to purchase body parts from aborted babies.
As LifeNews reported, the Trump administration has heard the concerns of pro-life organizations and pro-life Americans upset by the news that the FDA had purchased the body parts of aborted babies for research.
Details uncovered by CNS News in 2018 shed light on an NIH contract with University of California San Francisco, which provides money for fetal body parts to conduct experiments involving “humanized mice.”
Aborted baby body parts used in the experiments were taken from healthy, potentially viable unborn babies. According to the report, the aborted babies were 18 to 24 weeks gestation from “women with normal pregnancies before elective termination for non-medical reasons.” Another article indicated aborted babies’ livers and thymuses also were used. They were between 20 weeks and 24 weeks gestation.
On June 5th, the Trump administration cancelled the contract.
Now, the University of California System is slamming the president for his decision. The UC Office of the President claimed the research gained from using aborted baby parts was important and that the new restrictions are a step in the wrong direction.
“The Trump administration dealt a blow today to scientific discovery and medical advancement,” the statement reads. “Fetal tissue research has helped find cures for millions of Americans who suffer from debilitating diseases while improving the quality of life for others. It has fundamentally changed the practice of medicine — including advances in polio, measles and chickenpox vaccines — as well as treatments for Parkinson’s and rheumatoid arthritis, and cutting-edge research on HIV and Alzheimer’s disease.”
“The importance of fetal tissue research cannot be overstated, and today’s action is a step backward for science. The University of California will continue to fight for the critical lifesaving research that Americans have come to expect and rely on from our nation’s scientific community,” the statement continues.
Sam Hagwood, the University of California-San Francisco Chancellor, took it a step further, saying he disagrees with the decision made by the Trump administration.
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“UCSF strongly opposes today’s abrupt decision by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to discontinue intramural fetal tissue research by scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH),” Hagwood said. “The efforts by the administration to impede this work will undermine scientific discovery and the ability to find effective treatments for serious and life-threatening disease. Fetal tissue is used in important research aimed at discovering cures for illnesses that affect the lives of millions of Americans, including Alzheimer’s, spinal cord injury, eye disease, and HIV.”
But Dr. David Prentice, vice president and research director at Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI), says using aborted baby parts and so-called fetal tissue, is not advancing research.
He told LifeNews the Trump administration’s “move demonstrates NIH’s investment in scientifically-proven methods for research: adult stem cells, iPS cells, organoids, humanized mice constructed using postnatally sourced cells and improved non-human cell lines—just to name a few. All of these have been used in the production of treatments, vaccines and medicines currently on the market; the key is that our government will now invest in effective research methods that do not rely on the destruction of human life.”
“Many modern vaccines use animal cell lines, even insect cell lines, as well as modern human cells that are not from fetal tissue. As just a couple of examples, the new Ebola vaccine – recently shown to be 97.5% effective – is produced using the Vero monkey cell line, and the recently approved shingles vaccine (Shingrix) which is a modern recombinant subunit vaccine produced in engineered hamster cells, also than 90% effectiveness while providing better protection than the historical vaccine produced in fetal cell,” he explained.
Dr. Grazie Pozo Christie, Policy Advisor for The Catholic Association, added, “Experimentation using the liver, lungs, hearts, skulls or any other body part of an aborted baby is morally corrupt. Taxpayers have been forced to fund inhumane procedures conducted by corporations looking to make a buck. President Trump made the moral and ethical call to end taxpayer funding of this gruesome experimentation.”
This is the second time the Trump administration has cancelled a contract to purchase aborted baby parts.
Last August, shocking revelations indicated the Food and Drug Administration signed a new contract to acquire body parts from aborted babies to be transplanted into so-called humanized mice. The grisly experiments allow mice to have a functioning human immune system for research purposes.
By September, the Trump administration had canceled the contract with Advanced Bioscience Resources, a company that buys and sells aborted baby parts from Planned Parenthood and other abortion businesses.
When Planned Parenthood was exposed selling aborted baby parts for such research, videos recorded a conversation between Melissa Farrell, Director of Research for Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, and two CMP actors posing as representatives of an organ procurement company. That conversation focused on potential compensation to Planned Parenthood in exchange for fetal remains.
Farrell made it clear that Planned Parenthood had been involved in the selling of aborted baby parts for some time and was very familiar with the use of fetal remains in the production of humanized mice.
She discussed how the Houston affiliate for which she worked was “resistant” to recent efforts by Planned Parenthood Federation of America to standardize fetal tissue sales throughout the participating affiliates because “we’ve been doing our own thing for a long time.”
She emphasized repeatedly that she creates a written line-item budget for compensation that effectively conceals the fact that the money received from fetal remains is actually a financial benefit to the company above and beyond hard costs.
In addition, she noted that they are able to alter abortion procedures to make sure they have baby parts to sell.
“And we have had studies in which the company, and or in this case, investigator, has a specific need for certain portions of the parts of conception and we base that into our contract and our protocol that we follow this, so we deviate from our standard in order to do that,” Farrell said, (emphasis added).
Yet Farrell acknowledged that it was illegal for them to alter the timing or manner of the procedure for the purpose of ensuring organs were fit for use by researchers.
In the lengthy video, Farrell is seen looking over her e-mail when she finds a message from an immune-biology laboratory that was requesting fetal tissue to create humanized mice.
