The U.S. Department of Health announced yesterday that it will stop “all medical research in federal centres on tissues collected from aborted foetuses”. “Promoting the dignity of human life from conception to natural death is one of the top priorities of President Trump’s administration”, he said. “The federal state cannot be complicit in these horrible circuits of buying foetal tissue from aborted babies”, said Republican Senator Marco Rubio. As a result, the public funding contract, “for an amount of two million dollars per year”, concluded with the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) “for research work on foetal tissues” will not be renewed.
However, the ban is not absolute and private research will be allowed to continue “as long as it is not co-financed by public funds”. In addition, publicly funded research projects “at other universities or research centres” will not be banned but will be subject to a new procedure involving an advisory ethics committee.
AFP (5/06/2019)