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The National Institutes of Health announced Thursday that it will end federal funding for research using tissue from aborted fetuses, a move aligned with the Trump administration’s biomedical and ethical policy goals.
The policy applies to all NIH grants, cooperative agreements, transaction awards, research and development contracts, and the agency’s intramural research program, according to the Daily Wire.
NIH said the change is part of the administration’s effort to modernize biomedical research and speed innovation by relying on newer scientific methods.
“NIH is pushing American biomedical science into the 21st century,” NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya said Thursday. “This decision is about advancing science by investing in breakthrough technologies more capable of modeling human health and disease. Under President Donald Trump’s leadership, taxpayer-funded research must reflect the best science of today and the values of the American people.”
According to NIH, the agency funded 77 projects involving human fetal tissue during fiscal year 2024, a number that has declined steadily since 2019. Officials pointed to scientific advances that provide alternatives, including tissue chips, computational biology and organoids.
Bhattacharya said the use of fetal tissue from aborted pregnancies has long raised ethical concerns for many Americans.
“The use of human fetal tissue from aborted babies has been argued over for years,” he said, adding that it has placed “a large part of the population” in an ethical dilemma.
“Now that there is better technology, there’s no scientific harm to this, we’re still going to be able to use the science we need … while at the same time getting rid of this use of aborted fetal tissue which so many people, including me, find morally abhorrent,” Bhattacharya said.
He emphasized that the policy does not ban all fetal tissue research. Tissue obtained from miscarriages may still be used if donated voluntarily. Bhattacharya said publicly funded research should be broadly acceptable to the public.
“In public health and in science, we should seek to produce knowledge and products that are widely available for everybody,” he said. “If there are large numbers of people with moral systems that say if you go down this line and use research with aborted human fetal tissue, I’m not going to participate in it…well what good was the research?”
The announcement came one day before the annual March for Life in Washington on Friday.