Albuquerque, NM – Wednesday, Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn announced the first hearing of the Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives will be held on Wednesday, March 2nd. Members of the panel will hear testimony from expert witnesses on the issue of bioethics and fetal tissue. This comes as New Mexico Alliance for Life has serious concerns regarding the ethics of harvesting organs, body parts and tissue from aborted infants used at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center (UNMHSC) for research, especially as the university continues to withhold public documents surrounding this issue. “UNMHSC’s research studies involving organs, body parts and tissue from aborted babies up to 24 weeks gestation gives rise to many ethical concerns, especially considering UNM’s lack of documents evidencing their protocols and procedures,” said Elisa Martinez, NMAFL executive director. “The UNM study using heart vessels from 57 babies harvested within 30 minutes of the abortion procedure raises serious ethical concerns and highlights the need for the Congressional panel’s investigation, as UNM professor Curtis Boyd performs the abortions in his private clinic and is then thanked in UNMHSC studies as tissue collector, when does one role end and the other begin?”
The 2010 University of New Mexico study using heart vessels from 57 babies aborted up to 22 weeks, harvested within minutes of the abortion procedure raises a number of ethical concerns and highlights the need for the Congressional panel’s investigation. The study, Patterns of gene expression in the ductus arteriosus are related to environmental and genetic risk factors for persistent ductus patency required heart vessels from the babies aborted at Curtis Boyd’s be”isolated and snap frozen in liquid nitrogen within 30 minutes of termination.” The study explicitly references different aspects of the abortion procedure, “cervical ripening was performed using laminaria” and “prostagladins were not used during the termination” which questions if there was any separation between the harvesting of organs and the abortion procedure. The incentive for abortionists to harvest organs for research, which is often funded by private and taxpayer grants, presents an alarming bioethical concern. Arthur Caplan, director of the New York University Langone Medical Center’s Division of Medical Ethics, who was quoted in Live Science, referred to fetal tissue research as “the ticking time bomb of medical ethics,” and argues that fetal tissue donation at abortion clinics presents a conflict of interest for clinicians because it “shifts the focus away from women and their needs.” The scientific merit of the UNM study is also suspect. Dr. David Prentice, a stem cell research expert states after reviewing, “The results are strictly theoretical and make no headway toward actual knowledge of whether the genes studied may work in humans toward closure of the ductus arteriosus at birth. Not of much practical value.”
Martinez asks, “If these studies have little scientific merit, why go to great lengths to harvest body parts from aborted babies–are the millions of taxpayer dollars in research grants an incentive to harvest body parts for research at UNM, which may also compromise women’s health in the process?”
“At our first hearing we will ask for America’s best and brightest to help us think through the ethical issues that surround procuring and selling baby body parts and related matters,” said Chairman Blackburn. “We will hear from professors who teach ethics, from medical practitioners, from those who do biomedical research, from those within America’s faith traditions – so that we as legislators might become informed about the ethical implications and issues for the women who terminate a pregnancy, for the researcher, for the person who needs a cure, and for the baby. I look forward to a productive, thought-provoking discussion for all the Select Panel Members.”
The Select Panel’s Majority Memorandum, a witness list, and witness testimony will be available here as they are posted. A live webcast will also be available at the same link on the day of the hearing. ###
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