Science doesn’t need abortion

As countries and companies around the world race to find a COVID-19 vaccine, many pro-life advocates have expressed concern about the use of tissue from aborted babies in the process. Despite pressure to capitalize on fetal tissue to bring a swifter end to the pandemic, ongoing research into the coronavirus continues to find other methods that are more ethical and just as effective.

The Trump administration’s new advisory board on the ethics of using fetal tissue in research met for the first time on July 31 under the shadow of the pandemic and with an urgent need to sort out ethical research practices. Two-thirds of those on the 15-member panel are pro-life and against funding research that uses tissue obtained from the victims of elective abortions. Paige Comstock Cunningham, an attorney and former executive director of The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity, leads the panel, which also includes David A. Prentice, vice president of the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute and a well-known supporter of using alternatives to human embryonic stem cell research.

More than 90 medical associations, universities, and scientific organizations on July 28 sent a letter to the panel citing the need to speed up research on COVID-19: “Fetal tissue research has the potential to accelerate the end to the pandemic, reduce human suffering, and enable the U.S. to better respond to future public health threats.”

Stanford University scientist Irving Weissman claimed the Trump administrations’ block on funding fetal cell research has shut down studies into coronavirus vaccines and treatments that used mice grafted with human fetal lung cells. “They are withholding therapies for the rest of us, including their own families,” he told BuzzFeed News.

But Tara Sander Lee, a Charlotte Lozier associate scholar, told a U.S. House of Representative subcommittee more than a year ago that there are other options. Researchers can easily generate humanized mice using surplus human thymus tissue, which doctors can obtain during surgical procedures to repair congenital heart defects in newborns. She noted that researchers can obtain “more than 1,000 fragments” of tissue from a single thymus.

Several companies developing potential COVID-19 vaccines have done so without fetal cells, according to an ethics assessment the Charlotte Lozier Institute conducted. Two of those programs—led by Moderna and a cooperative effort among BioNTech, Fosun Pharma, and Pfizer—have already launched Phase 3 clinical trials. Some people raised concerns that Moderna and another company, Inovio, used a fetal cell line that originated from a baby aborted decades ago to study the proteins the vaccines produced and the antibody reactions they created. But Nicole Stacy of Charlotte Lozier said the organization considers them ethical because “no fetal cells, in fact, no cells at all were used in design or production of either vaccine.”

Many ethical alternatives make research on tissue derived from aborted babies unnecessary, Prentice said. Researchers can harvest stem cells from placentas, amniotic fluid, and umbilical cords. They can also modify adult stem cells so they act like embryonic stem cells. And scientists can obtain fetal tissue from spontaneous miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies.