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Showing posts with label Fetal Tissue. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fetal Tissue. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Planned Parenthood And Fetal Tissue Sale: Manufactured Controversy And The Real Ethical Debate

I. Glenn Cohen
Health Affairs Blog
March 9, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

The Real Debate (We Already Had)

As a bioethicist, what was perhaps most upsetting to me was the way the kabuki political theater obscured the fact that there was a real set of ethical questions to be discussed.

These are questions about complicity. For those who think abortion is seriously wrong, in what ways does the use of tissue from abortion make the user or downstream beneficiary of research complicit in that sin?

This is an interesting question that bioethicists have wrestled with for a long time. But when it comes to law, it is one the law has explicitly resolved in a way that allows fetal tissue use.

As my friend Alta Charo noted in a piece for The Washington Post:
Fetal tissue research is legal in all but a handful of states, and it has been conducted in the United States, with federal support, for decades, except for a brief moratorium on the use of National Institutes of Health funds in the 1980s. It is regulated by federal law, and was funded by the Clinton, Bush 43, and Obama administrations, most recently to the tune of about $76 million per year.
The blog post is here.

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Fetal Tissue Fallout

R. Alta Charo
The New England Journal of Medicine
August 12, 201
DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1510279

We have a duty to use fetal tissue for research and therapy.

This statement might seem extreme in light of recent events that have reopened a seemingly long-settled debate over whether such research ought even be permitted, let alone funded by the government. Morality and conscience have been cited to justify defunding, and even criminalizing, the research, just as morality and conscience have been cited to justify not only health care professionals' refusal to provide certain legal medical services to their patients but even their obstruction of others' fulfillment of that duty.

But this duty of care should, I believe, be at the heart of the current storm of debate surrounding fetal tissue research, an outgrowth of the ongoing effort to defund Planned Parenthood. And that duty includes taking advantage of avenues of hope for current and future patients, particularly if those avenues are being threatened by a purely political fight — one that, in this case, will in no way actually affect the number of fetuses that are aborted or brought to term, the alleged goal of the activists involved.

The entire article is here.