WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – The National Institutes of Health (NIH) under the Trump administration confirmed that it will not renew 17 “human fetal tissue” research projects recently uncovered by a watchdog group.
Breitbart News reported that it received confirmation of the change after covering White Coat Waste Project’s (WCW’s) discovery of the products, which received a combined total of $22 million in taxpayer dollars in the 2024 fiscal year, in public records. The Biden-era projects included the use of fetal tissue derived from abortions as well as experiments to graft fetal tissue such as organs into mice.
“NIH takes this issue very seriously and remains committed to the highest ethical standards in research. The referenced grants, initiated under the Biden administration, will not be renewed,” the agency responded to Breitbart. “NIH is guided by a commitment to valuing human life and ensuring that federally funded research is conducted responsibly and transparently. We are actively reviewing these matters and will take all necessary steps to ensure our policies reflect that commitment.”
The commitment makes good on an assurance that NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya made during his confirmation hearings in March that “in public health, we need to make sure the products of science are ethically acceptable to everybody. And so having alternatives that are not ethically conflicted with fetal cell lines is not just an ethical issue, but it’s a public health issue.” Secretary of Health & Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also pledged not to support the use of abortion-derived fetal tissue in research.
President Donald Trump’s first administration previously rejected 13 or 14 requests to use aborted fetal tissue, as LifeSiteNews reported in 2020. Under pro-abortion President Joe Biden, the University of Pittsburgh actually reached out to former NIH Director Francis Collins for help overcoming state efforts to restrict such practices, according to records obtained by Judicial Watch.
The sale of aborted fetal remains for research and experimentation first came to the political forefront in 2015, when the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) began releasing undercover videos of meetings with Planned Parenthood and National Abortion Federation personnel detailing the practice, which set off a firestorm of controversy and a string of revelations about the abortion industry breaking multiple federal laws against profiting off human tissue, altering abortion procedures for the sake of procuring better tissue samples, and potentially even committing partial-birth abortions or infanticide; as well as video examples of abortion workers displaying callousness toward the humanity of the children their work killed.
Neither the Obama administration nor the first Trump administration took action to prosecute Planned Parenthood over the revelations, which are now likely well beyond any federal statute of limitations.
