FDA Contracting With Business That Allegedly Profited From Selling Aborted Babies’ Tissue

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has contracted with a company that reportedly has sold aborted baby tissue for profit.

As CNS News reported, the FDA signed a one-year, $15,900 contract with Advanced Bioscience Resources in order to obtain babies’ fetal tissue “for implantation into severely immune-compromised mice to create chimeric animals that have a human immune system.” As Melanie Israel of The Daily Signal reports, “According to the government’s presolicitation notice, ‘ABR is the only company in the U.S. capable of supplying’ the fetal tissue and ‘no other company or organization is capable of fulfilling the need.’”

ABR is under referral for criminal investigation for allegedly making a profit selling fetal issue from aborted babies; some of the tissue was reportedly obtained from Planned Parenthood-affiliated clinics.

Israel explains, “Fetal tissue used for research purposes may be obtained via elective abortions. Such research is legal, but federal law prohibits buying or selling fetal tissue for valuable consideration. ‘Valuable consideration’ does not include payments “associated with the transportation, implantation, processing, preservation, quality control, or storage of human fetal tissue.’”

A Senate Judiciary Committee 2016 report accused ABR, as well as StemExpress, LLC, and Novogenix Laboratories, LLC (the latter has gone out of business) of having “paid Planned Parenthood Federation of America to acquire aborted fetuses, and then sold the fetal tissue to their respective customers at substantially higher prices than their documented costs.”

The report stated:

Support for the 1993 NIH Revitalization Act was premised on the idea that the ban on buying or selling fetal tissue would be a safeguard against the development for a market for human fetuses. Tragically, the executive branch has either failed or simply refused to enforce that safeguard. As a result, contrary to the intent of the law, companies have charged thousands of dollars for specimens removed from a single aborted fetus; they have claimed the fees they charged only recovered acceptable costs when they had not, in fact, conducted any analysis of their costs when setting the fees; and their post hoc accounting rationalizations invoked indirect and tenuously-related costs in an attempt to justify their fees.

CNS News reported that the FDA has contracted with ABR eight times since 2012.

The House Appropriations Committee has passed a funding bill with verbiage banning funding for research using fetal tissue gained from aborted babies, but the Senate’s version elided that passage.