Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

So there's some, we've been tracking this very carefully and the use of human fetal tissue and research has been declining pretty sharply.

Even after the Biden administration sort of reversed the ban, the amount of money that the NIH has spent on human fetal tissue during the Biden administration research has declined very sharply.

And so what's happened is there's all these like big advances where you can use alternate methods.

that you no longer need human fetal tissue.

A lot of the angst and fights over this that happened in the early 2000s, I think now that there's better technology, the point is that there's no scientific harm to this.

We're still going to be able to do the science we need for human health, for advancing health of babies and all that, while at the same time,

getting rid of this sort of like use of aborted human fetal tissue, which so many people, including me, find morally abhorrent.

Well, first, I'd ask them to look at the actual policy, right?

So someone who's at a miscarriage and then wants to do a meaningful thing with that and they donate the tissue from the miscarriage to science, that's still allowed, right?

So 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.

not all human fetal tissue.

The other thing I point out, Ben, is that if you look at the actual data on the use of NIH funds for this, during the Biden administration, there was a sharp drop in spending on human fetal tissue research.

And the reason is very simple.

It's because of the advances in alternatives to the human fetal tissue.

For instance, induced pluripotent stem cells, for many uses, you can produce tissues that are

comparable or better without having the sort of moral qualms.

And if I make another sort of public health case about this, during the pandemic, there were vaccines, for instance, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, not an mRNA vaccine, but another technology that was produced using human, basically embryonic stem cells.

I heard from so many people during the pandemic that 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 an illicit fruit of the poison tree, right?

And I completely sympathize with this.