The latest gambit in the abortion wars opened today. On June 5, 2019, The New York Time reported this:
“WASHINGTON — The Trump administration announced Wednesday that the federal government would sharply curtail federal spending on medical research that uses tissue from aborted fetuses. The move fulfills a top goal of anti-abortion groups that have lobbied hard for it, but scientists say the tissue is crucial for studies that benefit millions of patients.
The Department of Health and Human Services said it would immediately end a $2 million-a-year contract with the University of California, San Francisco, for research involving fetal tissue from elective abortions; the contract started in 2013. The department also said that based on a review it began last fall, it would discontinue all research within the National Institutes of Health involving fetal tissue from elective abortions.
“Promoting the dignity of human life from conception to natural death is one of the very top priorities of President Trump’s administration,” the department said in a statement. It added that about 200 research projects involving fetal tissue and conducted at universities with N.I.H. grants would be allowed to continue, but that a new ethics advisory board would review each application for grant renewal and recommend whether to continue the funding.”
This was not the first time information about scientific use of tissue from aborted fetuses made news. In December 2018, The New York times announced this:
“In a letter last week that read like a shot across the bow, the National Institutes of Health warned the University California, San Francisco, that its $2 million contract for research involving the tissue, previously renewed for a year at a time, would be extended for only 90 days and might then be canceled.
“University scientists had been using fetal tissue to create so-called humanized mice, which can then be used to test drugs and vaccines. The university has played a key role in testing antiviral drugs to treat H.I.V. infection. And researchers say that the mice, which essentially have a complete human immune system, are indispensable.
“Scientists who do this work sometimes receive threats, so U.C.S.F. has asked that its researchers not be named for security reasons. The events there were first reported by the Washington Post.”
I understand that some people think that preventing 100% of all fertilized eggs from becoming zygotes, then blastocysts, then fetuses, and then newly born babies should not be allowed. Many of these people claim that life begins at conception.
Why, then, have these same people — especially those who do believe that life begins at conception — not risen up loudly and clearly to block all in-vitro fertilization (IVF)?
For each round of IVF, lab technicians dispose of several fertilized eggs they haven’t chosen for manual implantation in a uterus. Wouldn’t disposing of any fertilized eggs be anathema to those opposed to abortion?
Recently, Alabama passed a total abortion ban in the state after an amendment that would have made an exemption to the law in cases of rape or incest failed. According to reporting by Molly Jong-Fast, “If we are arguing personhood,” said Eric Johnston, the president of the Alabama Pro-Life Coalition, “then it does not matter how a child is conceived.”
Some anti-abortion leaders have convenient excuses as to why they don’t object to IVF. “It’s much more difficult to try to explain what is objectionable about IVF,” says Ann Scheidler, who founded the Pro-Life Action League with her husband in 1980. “You can only do what you can do with the resources you have, and we choose to really focus on the abortion issue.”