New target

Planned Parenthood critics have new target — universities

Some state lawmakers try to limit or ban research using tissue from aborted fetuses.

By Brett Norman

Officials of the nation’s leading universities have watched with dread as the fallout from the Planned Parenthood sting videos has threatened to engulf labs that depend on fetal tissue for research.

Now the abortion wars are raging on their doorsteps as lawmakers in Wisconsin and Ohio try to ban such research and other states limit access to the tissue. More than three dozen of the universities, including Harvard, Yale and Johns Hopkins, have been drawn into the fight despite their traditional deep aversion to an issue that can divide faculties and donors and draw the ire of anti-abortion advocates nationwide.

“My faculty and I were linked to Nazi war criminals — really ugly stuff," said Dr. Robert Golden, dean of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine describing a state Assembly hearing on a bill that would make research on aborted fetuses a felony. “It’s the first time this has ever gotten any intense attention — it’s also never gotten as nasty and personal before,”

It’s also dredged up comparisons between researchers who use fetal tissue from aborted fetuses and the perpetrators of now-infamous abuses like the Tuskegee experiments that studied untreated syphilis in black men

"This really isn’t about science,” said Dr. Edward Halperin, chancellor and CEO of New York Medical College, where researchers use the tissue to develop vaccines. “This is really people making a point about abortion and it's outrageous.”

While the uproar on Capitol Hill has focused on eliminating federal funding for the women’s health clinics, the Wisconsin bill, which gained traction this summer, and another in Ohio would criminalize the research that has been mostly shielded from battles over abortion for more than 20 years.

The attention caught the medical community off-guard. Many research institutions and scientists have been reluctant to take a public position for fear of an anti-abortion backlash. Several researchers who receive NIH grants for fetal tissue research contacted for this article either didn’t respond or declined to comment.

“I think people are afraid to talk about it — they don’t want to draw the attention or fire of similar elements in their state governments or among their boards or trustees,” Golden said.

He said he has been sent “a flurry of emails and regular letters from people, really across the country, objecting to our doing research, mixing it in with objections to abortion and to the horrors that are evoked in some of the very callous discussions in the videos.”

The Association of American Medical Colleges is circulating a sign-on letter citing “grave concerns” about bills such as the one in Wisconsin. It has garnered support from more than three dozen top research universities so far, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Duke, the University of Chicago and the Medical College of Wisconsin — the other major medical school in that state.

Atul Grover, the group’s chief policy officer, said it was fielding concerns from “all across the country” and reached out to its membership to respond. “They resoundingly came back and said this is important work,” he said. “We understand people have concerns over these political issues, but we believe this is an important body of research to move forward in as ethically involved a way as possible.”

A handful of scientists are beginning to speak out, pointing out that therapies for end-stage breast cancer, diabetes and Parkinson’s disease depend on continued use of fetal tissue.

“When politics oversteps its bounds and enters the world of science, it’s dangerous,” said Paul Offit, chief of the division of infectious diseases at Children’s Hospitals of Philadelphia.

Even GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson, a retired neuroscientist, felt compelled to justify the research after a scientific paper he co-authored in 1992 involving fetal tissue experiments surfaced on a blog.

"To willfully ignore evidence that you have for some ideological reason is wrong,” Carson told The Washington Post in August. “If you’re killing babies and taking the tissue, that’s a very different thing than taking a dead specimen and keeping a record of it.”

While all the GOP candidates, including Carson, have condemned Planned Parenthood in the strongest terms since the release of the videos, none have targeted the research.

But that may change as the issue begins to bubble up from state capitals.

Counting Wisconsin and Ohio, lawmakers in at least eight states have introduced bills related to fetal tissue since the Planned Parenthood videos began circulating in July, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which monitors reproductive health laws. A wave of such laws passed in the 1970s and 1980s, with many of them struck down by the courts, according to the group.

Research on fetal tissue is a relatively niche field — with a budget of roughly $30 billion, NIH funded $76 million worth of fetal tissue projects in 2014. But it has yielded some major discoveries — the polio vaccine was developed using cultured fetal kidney cells. Fetal tissue experiments remain important to vaccine development, as well as work on treatments for a broad range of diseases, including HIV, dengue fever, flu and hepatitis B and C, according to NIH. It’s also used by researchers who study early brain development and associated cognitive disorders, as well as Down syndrome and congenital heart defects.

But opponents of the research say that it violates basic human dignity in the interests of science.

Rep. Andre Jacque, who is leading the push to pass the Wisconsin bill, said prohibition on aborted fetal tissue research is in line with the Nuremberg Code for research ethics which were developed after the atrocities committed by German researchers on people in the concentration camps during World War II.

“If you have a child killed through an abortion they are not able to consent in their use for research,” Jacque said. “A lot of it comes down to a basic respect for human dignity.”

Jacque, who was elected in the conservative Republican wave in 2010, had twice before introduced the ban on research using aborted fetal tissue. But it never got a hearing before this summer, when it was taken up by the GOP-controlled state Assembly and Senate. It's garnered substantial support from Republicans — although not enough yet to guarantee passage — but Jacque predicts the bill will be approved by the end of October.

Gov. Scott Walker, who dropped out of the Republican presidential primary earlier this month, declined to comment on the proposed research ban. A spokesman said he found the practices in the Planned Parenthood videos “disturbing and abhorrent” and pledged he would “work with members of the state Legislature to pass legislation to ban these practices in Wisconsin and address concerns about this organization.”

Barbara Sella, the associate director of Respect Life and Social Concerns at the Wisconsin Catholic Conference, supports the bill. Still, she acknowledged at a state Senate hearing last week that stopping the research won’t reduce abortions -- a point that proponents have tried to drive home.

“It’s true that this bill, if passed, would not decrease abortions, but it forces us to look squarely at what abortion has made possible,” she said, adding that there are “limits that we place on ourselves, on our intellects, in the interest of protecting human dignity.”

The debate in Wisconsin is animated by abortion politics, but research proponents liken the guidelines governing fetal tissue research to those for organ donation.

“Godawful things happen — people die in motorcycle accidents — but at least we try to make some of good of it with organ transplantations,” said Halperin of New York Medical College. “You can have your opinion about abortion, but are you going to throw it out, or use it to make a vaccine?”

University of Wisconsin bioethicist Alta Charo said the attacks on the research take advantage of the public's visceral aversion to thinking about the deceased human body as a resource.

"This is a debate about abortion — not fetal tissue research. That's just an excuse," she said. "If you were to show pictures of cadavers — of what we do when we take out their bones, take out their organs, it would be equally hard. These images are just hard ... But [fetal tissue research] is no different than working with another deceased human, whether murdered or dead of natural causes. And we do that as a matter of course."

Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, a pro-business group, and BioForward Wisconsin, a biotech trade group, are opposing the bill, along with the medical research community.

Golden is urging moderate Republicans in the state to develop an alternative that would address concerns about profiteering and potential relationships between abortion providers and the scientists conducting the experiments — and take the research ban off the table.

If the ban were to become law, “the domino effect is those scientists, whose life work it is, will pick up and leave,” he said. “You can only imagine what it means to attract new scientists here, if the government is going to step in and outlaw a certain kind of research. What’s next?”