Ahead Of March For Life, Trump Admin Ends Funding For Research Using Aborted Baby Tissue

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump’s administration is ending the use of human fetal tissue in federally-funded research, The Daily Wire can first report.

Effective immediately, National Institutes of Health funds will no longer be used for research that involves the fetal tissue of aborted babies. That policy will apply to all NIH grants, cooperative agreements, transaction awards, research and development contracts, and the NIH Intramural Research Program.

The move is a significant win for the pro-life movement, which has long pushed for the United States to respect the dignity of the unborn, whose tissue is bought by researchers after abortions. Under the first Trump administration, the president banned intramural use of aborted fetal tissue, meaning research conducted within United States government facilities.

This time, Trump’s NIH is going further, stating that it will not fund any research involving tissue from aborted babies. The institute frames the move as a significant milestone in the Trump administration’s efforts to “modernize biomedical science and accelerate innovation,” but it comes just one day before the annual March for Life, a significant nod to the pro-life Americans gathering in Washington who have worked for years to arrive at this moment.

“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 Trump’s leadership, taxpayer-funded research must reflect the best science of today and the values of the American people.”

National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

Only 77 projects using human fetal tissue were funded by NIH during the Fiscal Year 2024, declining steadily since 2019, NIH says. Simultaneously, other advances offer alternatives that can “drive discovery while reducing ethical concerns:” advances in tissue chips, computational biology, organoids, and other platforms.

In an interview with Daily Wire editor emeritus Ben Shapiro, Bhattacharya noted that the use of human fetal tissue from aborted babies has sparked arguments for years, putting “a large part of the population” in an ethical quandary. Given the significant advances in science and the plethora of alternatives, he said, there is no reason to put Americans in a position that might violate their consciences.

“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 also pointed out that tissue can still be used for NIH-funded research if it is not specifically from an abortion.

“Someone who has had a miscarriage and wants to do a meaningful thing and they donate the tissue from the miscarriage to science, that’s still allowed,” he told Shapiro. “The only ban is on, you have an abortion specifically to terminate the baby, and then the tissue then gets sold, that’s what’s being banned.”

The administration views the move as evidence of its commitment to both scientific excellence and “responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars,” ensuring that the United States is still the “global leader in biomedical innovation” while at the same time staying true to the values of the American people.

Bhattacharya stressed this point, reminding Shapiro that certain coronavirus vaccines were developed using embryonic stem cells.

“I heard from so many people during the pandemic, Catholics and others, who had qualms about using this technology because they didn’t want to be gaining from what their moral system said was the fruit of the poisoned tree,” he explained, adding, “I completely sympathize with this.”

“In public health and in science, we should seek to produce knowledge and products that are widely available for everybody,” the NIH leader continued. “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?”

As abortions in the United States became more common, the use of aborted baby bodies for research sparked national controversy. In the early 2000s, then-Senator Rick Santorum introduced the Fetus Farming Prohibition Act of 2006, banning any person or entity involved in interstate commerce from soliciting or knowingly acquiring, receiving, or accepting a donation of human fetal tissue obtained through an abortion.

David Daleiden (Photo by Eric Kayne/Getty Images)

President George W. Bush signed that bill into law in July 2006. But anxieties over the use of aborted baby bodies continued, and in 2015 and 2016, undercover pro-life activist David Daleiden, the head of the Center for Medical Progress, published videos allegedly showing Planned Parenthood officials describing how they extract aborted-baby body parts and joking about compensation.

Daleiden alleged that the videos prove Planned Parenthood was selling the aborted baby body parts for profit. Planned Parenthood said he was lying, sued him, accused him of deceptively editing the videos, and claimed they were only reimbursed for costs (meaning, the expenses incurred in transportation or delivery). After heavy backlash, Planned Parenthood announced in 2015 that they would no longer accept reimbursements for costs.

Daleiden suffered through almost a decade of legal battles, led by the California Attorney General’s Office headed at the time by Kamala Harris. Xavier Becerra, who would go on to become Joe Biden’s Health and Human Services secretary, carried on that legal battle against Daleiden after Harris left office.