Trump Administration Seeks ‘Pro-Life, Pro-Science’ Alternatives to Fetal Tissue Research

"The federal government should promote good science and respect innocent human life..."

By Fred Lucas

The Daily Signal

The Trump administration is investing up to $20 million for the next two years to determine effective alternatives to using tissue from aborted babies for research.

The announcement Monday from the Department of Health and Human Services comes after the administration in September terminated a government contract with California-based Advanced Bioscience Resources Inc. to provide human fetal tissue research.

“We are a pro-life, pro-science administration. This means that we understand and appreciate that medical research and the testing of new medical treatments using fetal tissue raises inherent moral and ethical issues,” HHS spokeswoman Caitlin Oakley said in a prepared statement.

After news that the Food and Drug Administration had renewed the contract with Advanced Bioscience Resources, 45 pro-life organizations wrote to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, asserting that it was “completely unacceptable to discover that the FDA is using federal tax dollars and fomenting demand for human body parts taken from babies who are aborted.”

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The HHS soon announced that it had terminated the contract. Monday’s announcement marks another step.

“This also means that we place a high value on the work NIH [the National Institutes of Health] does in creating new discoveries that result in cures and improved quality of life,” Oakley said. “Secretary Azar directed the review, which we are approaching with the utmost seriousness and concern.”

NIH on Monday released a notice of intent to publish new funding opportunity announcements inviting applications to develop and refine human tissue models that can be used to accurately model embryonic development or other aspects of human biology but do not rely on the use of fetal tissue obtained from elective abortions.

The NIH will fund research to develop alternative models to the use of human fetal tissue in biomedical research.

“After a recent review of a contract between Advanced Bioscience Resources Inc. and the Food and Drug Administration to provide human fetal tissue to develop testing protocols, HHS was not sufficiently assured that the contract included the appropriate protections applicable to fetal tissue research or met all other procurement requirements,” Oakley said.

“As a result, HHS is now conducting an audit of all acquisitions involving human fetal tissue to ensure conformity with procurement and human fetal tissue research laws and regulations,” she said.

The new announcement is a positive step, said Melanie Israel, research associate with The Heritage Foundation.

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Planned Parenthood Sues Trump Admin for Wanting Sex Ed Programs to Focus on Abstinence

By Micaiah Bilger
Life News

Planned Parenthood wants taxpayers’ money, and it’s doing everything it can to keep it.

On Friday, it filed another lawsuit against the Trump administration, this time challenging a Department of Health and Human Services decision to prioritize sexual risk avoidance programs instead of the abortion giant’s risky sex education programs, Courthouse News reports.

The Trump administration cut millions of dollars in Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program grants to the abortion chain in 2017 after evidence showed the program was not effective. However, the abortion chain is suing to stop those cuts as well in a separate lawsuit.

The new Planned Parenthood lawsuit claims HHS is wrong to prioritize abstinence-based sex education programs over its own.

Here’s more from the AP:

The lawsuits were filed in federal courts in New York City and Spokane, Washington, by four different Planned Parenthood affiliates covering New York City and the states of Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Nebraska and Washington.
Planned Parenthood says the lawsuits are intended to protect the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program from what they termed ineffective abstinence-only-until-marriage curriculums.

“Young people have the right to the information and skills they need to protect their health,” Dawn Laguens said in a press release, vice president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “The Trump-Pence administration is trying to impose their abstinence-only agenda on young people across the country.”
Health and Human Services Department spokesman Mark Vafiades previously told the New York Times there is very little evidence that the TPP programs are working.

Vafiades said the evidence of a positive impact is “very weak,” and the Trump administration wants to support science-based programs that provide “youth with the information and skills they need to avoid the many risks associated with teen sex.”

In 2017, the Office of Adolescent Health issued two reports evaluating the program. Of the 38 programs examined in the report, only one “reported a long-term reduction in overall rates of teen sexual activity. Nearly all of the evaluations found no long-term difference in sexual activity, use of contraception, or pregnancy rates between students enrolling in these programs and students in control groups,” Dr. Michael New, a professor at Ave Maria University, wrote in 2017.

HHS also pointed to research indicating that 73 percent of the TPP programs under the Obama administration either had a negative impact or none at all.

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Trump Administration Says Abortion is Not a Human Right

By Austin Ruse
Life News

(C-Fam) In presenting the annual U.S. report on global human rights, Ambassador Michael Kozak told reporters that abortion is not a human right and therefore “reproductive rights” was no longer included in the report.

“Reproductive rights” was a rather recent addition to the report, included by the Obama administration that, Kozak claims, never intended the term to include abortion. He said it only acquired that meaning in recent years through its use by partisans on both sides of the abortion debate. 

If this were true, the question arises as to why the term abortion is used under the “reproductive rights” section in the 2013 report on Ireland. Pro-lifers would point out that at least in general usage, the term has always included abortion. Kozak did correctly describe abortion as a largely unsettled question of national policy around the world.

Kozak said that forced abortions and involuntary sterilization would be considered violations of human rights. He said, “it is internationally recognized that somebody should force you to have an abortion or coerce you to be sterilized.”

Kozak said, “We’ve really gotten at it by flipping back to the original U.S. statutory language. It’s in places like China where in order to enforce their — now — two-child policy that there are reports of coerced abortion and involuntary sterilization [or] in North Korea, where the government also coerces [or] forces abortion — although sometimes that’s for political punishment rather than family planning.”

The U.S. report and Kozak’s statements on abortion certainly run afoul of the political left. The report has already been blasted by Amnesty International which says this is further proof the United States under President Trump is moving farther away from human rights globally. The pro-abortion Center for Human Rights maintains that abortion is a human right through customary international law.

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Trump Administration Bans CDC from Using the Term ‘Fetus’

By Becky Yeh
Live Action News

The Trump administration is directing policy analysts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to end the use of certain words, including the term “fetus,” in budget documents.

The Washington Post reports that senior officials distributed a list of “forbidden words” during a 90-minute meeting with policy analysts in Atlanta, which include “entitlement” and “vulnerable.” In some cases, replacement words or phrases were provided. For others, however, replacement terms were not immediately suggested.

Analysts are now being instructed to use the phrase “CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes” instead of “science-based” or “evidence-based.”

The move signals a shift in the nation’s largest health agency — one that appears to lean towards recognizing and respecting human life in the womb. The pro-life movement has long worked to inject the gravity and violence of abortion and the dignity of every human life into language, which has been hijacked by the abortion lobby to dehumanize the preborn.

Website: Live Action News

Trump Administration Changes Obama Policy, Now Confirms Human Life Begins at Conception

By Micaiah Bilger
Life News

President Donald Trump’s administration signaled its commitment to protecting life again this week in a proposed Department of Health and Human Services strategic plan.

The plan states that HHS will serve Americans at “every stage of life, beginning at conception” and up through “natural death,” Opposing Views reports. While the new language will not affect abortion laws, it will help direct public policy under the Trump administration during the next four years.

Unsurprisingly, abortion activists are outraged by the draft. The pro-abortion blog Jezebel, the Huffington Post and other liberal news sites already have attacked the life-affirming language, despite its basis in science.

It is well accepted in the scientific community that a unique, new human life begins at the moment of conception. When the sperm and egg join, they form a totally separate, living human being with his or her own unique DNA. Biology textbooks, medical experts and even some abortion advocates accept this as a basic fact.

And now so does the HHS. The draft of the HHS strategic plan refers to the full span of human life several times.

Under the goal to to “Reform, Strengthen and Modernize the Nation’s Health Care,” it states: “HHS seeks to improve health care outcomes for people we serve. While we may refer to the people we serve as beneficiaries, enrollees, patients or consumers, our ultimate goal is to improve healthcare outcomes for all people, including the unborn, across healthcare settings.” [Emphasis added]

And in the section “Strengthen the Economic and Social Well-Being of Americans across the Lifespan,” HHS promises to “serve all Americans from conception to natural death.”

The Church Militant reports the new, life-affirming language is a major shift from the HHS policy under pro-abortion President Barack Obama’s administration.

According to the report:

Under Obama, the HHS described its organizational structure in this way: “HHS accomplishes its mission through programs and initiatives that cover a wide spectrum of activities, serving Americans at every stage of life.” Now, under Trump, the organizational structure has been modified: 

“HHS accomplishes its mission through programs and initiatives that cover a wide spectrum of activities, serving and protecting Americans at every stage of life, beginning at conception.”

The strategic plan sets goals for 2018 through 2022. The public may comment on the draft now through Oct. 27.

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18 Members of Congress Ask Trump Admin to Investigate Planned Parenthood Selling Aborted Baby Parts

By Steven Ertelt
Life News

Today, 18 members of Congress released a letter urging the U.S. Department of Justice to follow up with an investigation of the December 2016 criminal referrals regarding Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast (PPGC) and the illegal trade in fetal tissue from aborted children.

The letter was released by Congressman Mike Johnson (LA-04) and co-signed by Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn, who chaired the House Select Committee on Infant Lives tasked with investigating abortion providers and entities that trade in fetal tissue. The December 2016 Final Report cited invoices and other evidence obtained in a year-long inquiry, and concluded that “Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast may have violated both Texas law and existing U.S. law.”

Congressman Johnson, in the letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, noted that the 2016 Final Report was issued during the presidential transition period when DOJ personnel were in flux, and now deserves “swift action. ” 

Johnson’s press release said,

“The backroom deals being made to transfer and sell the body parts of unborn babies are not only shocking, but illegal. We must do everything in our power to stop this horrifying practice and protect the sanctity of human life.”

Benjamin Clapper, Executive Director of Louisiana Right to Life, said the following on the release of the letter, 

“The evidence uncovered seems to provide plenty of reason to investigate Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast for the illegal sale of the broken bodies of aborted babies. 

The letter to Attorney General Sessions indicates it was copied to the State Attorney General offices in Louisiana and Texas. It is critical for all state and federal agencies to ensure that Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast is subject to grand jury scrutiny based on the invoices from PPGC to the University of Texas, Galveston.”

Dorinda C. Bordlee, senior counsel of Bioethics Defense Fund, said her organization drafts model legislation to prohibit this shocking practice in state law, and noted that several abortion businesses are currently challenging a 2016 Louisiana passed fetal trafficking ban in federal court. 

Bordlee said,

“It is both unethical and illegal for any abortion provider to induce still undecided pregnant women to sign consent forms to allow their aborted child’s tissue to be used for research. This amounts to coercive science-shaming that exploits women and unborn children.”

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Obama Gave $68 Million to Pro-Abortion UN Population Control Agency, Trump is Giving $0

By Int'l Nat'l Right to Life

Life News

The Trump Administration reinstated a policy Monday evening directing United States foreign assistance dollars away from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) on the basis that its activities in China are complicit with that nation’s coercive population control program, the implementation of which includes forced abortion and involuntary sterilization. United States funding will be directed instead to other family planning and health programs not involved in China’s population control program.

“We congratulate President Trump and his administration for making it abundantly clear the United States will not support a United Nations agency that cooperates in China’s brutally repressive population control policies,” said National Right to Life President Carol Tobias. “I heartily applaud what we at National Right to Life are seeing from this pro-life administration.”

The State Department memorandum issued Monday determined that the UNFPA was in violation of the Kemp-Kasten anti-coercion law. The amendment prohibits giving U.S. “population assistance” funds to “any organization or program which, as determined by the President of the United States, supports or participates in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.”

As the memo states:

The Chinese Government’s Population and Family Planning Law, even as amended in 2015, and related regulations and practices at the central and Provincial levels, clearly constitute a “program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization,” and are an integral part of the comprehensive population-control program the Chinese Government advances. 

While there is no evidence that UNFPA directly engages in coercive abortions or involuntary sterilizations in China, the agency continues to partner with the [National Health and Family Planning Commission] on family planning, and thus can be found to support, or participate in the management of China’s coercive policies for purposes of the Kemp-Kasten Amendment.

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