It's been years since Republicans fucked this chicken, but they're at it again.
The Trump regime has ordered a comprehensive review of fetal tissue research policy and already canceled at least one FDA contract with a company named by conspiracy theorists who claimed Planned Parenthood was operating a black market for "body parts."
Federal health officials canceled an FDA contract for human fetal tissue research Monday night and announced a review of all such research projects.
The announcement, citing “serious regulatory, moral, and ethical considerations,” revives a political issue that last flared in 2015 and led to congressional hearings. That fight came over anti-abortion political activists who covertly videotaped Planned Parenthood doctors and employees of Advanced Bioscience Resources (ABR), a cell tissue firm based in Alameda, California, that provides such cells to researchers.
The canceled contract reportedly would have paid $15,900 to ABR for human tissue that would make a laboratory mouse’s immune system more similar to a human’s.
To be clear, the Trump regime is not staffed by animal rights activists protesting the use of mice as test subjects. That is not their moral or ethical concern.
This is almost certainly something cooked up by the fundamentalists who remain in close contact with Mike Pence whose influence has resulted in several regressive policies, such as Trump's failed attempts to ban transgender military service.
Launching this review opens the door to potentially banning fetal tissue research in the future or at the very least defunding all government projects that depend on federal grants for it.
Banning or defunding the research wouldn't mean excess fetal tissue will cease to exist, of course, it simply means all of it will be destroyed when it could serve a scientific purpose. Other countries with no such qualms will make future discoveries that American scientists won't have the funding to discover.