The vicious attacks on Planned Parenthood are not just attacks on women’s health care – they are attacks on medical research. As a former lobbyist for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, I lobbied for stem-cell research at both the state and national levels. Researchers from the National Institutes of Health and many private universities use fetal tissue in their research. This research is imperative to find cures for multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, macular degeneration, cures for paralysis and a host of other debilitating and life-threatening diseases.
According to The New York Times, “The NIH spent $76 million on research using fetal tissue in 2014 with grants to more than 50 universities, including Columbia, Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford. … It expects to spend the same amount in 2015 and 2016.” It is far better to use the tissue for research rather than throw it in the trash.
I am angry that folks with an agenda distort the truth about this research, about the procurement of the tissue and make it sound like something from a Frankenstein movie or worse – a Nazi camp. Babies are not being killed for their tissue.
Carly Fiorina spews the propaganda about a video showing a live fetus. What she saw was a stillborn child edited into a video not taken at a Planned Parenthood clinic. That film has been proved false by a host of nonpartisan fact-checkers. Confronted with the truth by reporters, she refuses to accept the facts. I’m reminded of the story of the emperor’s new clothes.
In his work as a pediatric neurosurgeon, Dr. Ben Carson wrote a paper titled: “Colloid Cysts of the Third Ventricle: Immunohistochemical evidence for nonneuropithelial differentiation,” published in Hum Pathol 23:811-816 in 1992. In it he describes the use of “human choroid plexus ependyma and nasal mucosa from two aborted fetuses …” Carson conveniently calls this research “disturbing” now that he is pandering for the Republican nomination for president. He knows the truth.
This kind of rhetoric is an attack on medical research. And certainly isn’t pro-life.
Candace Richerson
Durango
