WASHINGTON — An anti-abortion organization is pressing the Senate to investigate National Institutes of Health funding for research involving fetal organs and tissue.
The NIH announced in January that it would halt funding for studies using fetal tissue obtained from elective abortions. But 40 Days for Life is seeking scrutiny of federally funded research conducted before that policy change took effect.
“We have a unique perspective on the damage that abortion causes, women, society and obviously, the unborn. We also see daily the abuses of the abortion industry, including the exploitation of aborted baby body parts and tissues,” the group’s president, Shawn Carney, wrote in a letter Thursday.
Carney called on Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Chairman Bill Cassidy (R-La.) to launch the inquiry.
“We respectfully urge your committees to investigate whether NIH’s practices complied with the laws, regulations, Congressional funding restrictions, and ethical requirements expected of our nation’s public health institutions,” he added.
The request follows a July 29 exchange in which Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) questioned Dr. Anthony Fauci during a Senate hearing on COVID-19 about taxpayer-supported research involving fetal body parts.
In a questioning sequence that drew widespread attention online, Ernst described research in which human fetal organ parts were placed into mice.
Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and declined to respond to Ernst’s questions about the practice.
“American taxpayers financed experiments in which researchers surgically implanted livers, thymuses, and chunks of lung from nearly five-month-old aborted human babies into mice—experiments the researchers themselves named ‘BLT-L’ mice and described as a ‘sandwich of aborted body parts,’ Carney wrote.
Since 2018, NIH spending on human fetal tissue research has declined from nearly $120 million that fiscal year to approximately half that amount in fiscal year 2024, according to the agency itself.
The Trump administration argued in ending government fetal tissue research that alternatives such as “organoids, tissue chips, computational biology, and other cutting-edge platforms” have rendered the practice unnecessary.
The Trump administration has also taken steps to reduce animal testing in government-funded research.
Reps for Cassidy, Grassley, and the NIH did not immediately return requests for comment on the 40 Days for Life letter.
