Taxpayers Don't Pay for "Baby Body Parts"
The Claim
Taxpayer dollars buy baby body parts.
News posted on
Emerging story
Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene posted on Facebook that U.S. taxpayer dollars are being used to buy baby body parts. The post was then liked or shared more than 10,000 times.
Misbar’s Analysis
Misbar discovered that an article attached to Representative Greene’s claim was from The Federalist, published on April 15, 2021. Within the article is a claim that Food and Drug Administration (FDA) employees spent tens of thousands of dollars buying aborted babies for unethical scientific experiments between 2012 and 2018. Judicial Watch is the group that originally created and distributed the 600 page report detailing the purchasing of human tissue by the FDA.
The FDA is an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). According to NBCnews.com, HHS terminated the contract that Advanced Bioscience Resources Incorporated had with the Food and Drug Administration in 2018 for supplying fetal tissue for research purposes (that is referred to in Greene’s post). The Trump administration ended funding for all scientific research in 2018 at the National Institutes of Health that relied on fetal tissue from elective abortions.
In a notice issued on April 16, 2021, the administration of President Joe Biden reversed restrictions imposed by former President Donald Trump’s on federal funding for medical research using human fetal tissue from elective abortions according to Science. The notice by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) does away with both a ban on such studies by researchers within NIH and a layer of ethical review that has crippled funding applications from external researchers.
GOP Representatives Greene and Lauren Boebert were the only members of Congress to vote against the recent TRANSPLANT Act, which would allow bone-marrow transplants for patients with blood diseases. Greene’s spokesperson said that “nothing in the bill prevents the funding of aborted fetal tissue.”
However, renewing the Stem Cell Therapeutic and Research Act of 2005 – which Republican president George W. Bush signed into law – does not mean that taxpayer money will be used to buy “baby body parts.” Stem cells used for these treatments come from embryos left over from in vitro fertilization procedures. They do not, as Greene implies, come from aborted fetuses.
