President Trump Ends All Tax-Funded Research With Aborted Baby Parts
President Donald Trump has ended federal funding for research involving the use of aborted baby parts, a major victory for pro-life advocates that halts taxpayer support for such studies effective immediately.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced the policy change today, which applies to all NIH grants, cooperative agreements, transaction awards, research and development contracts, and the NIH Intramural Research Program. The move prohibits the use of funds for research involving aborted baby parts obtained from elective abortions, while allowing ethical fetal tissue from sources such as miscarriages when donors consent.
“NIH is pushing American biomedical science into the 21st century,” NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya said. “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.”
Bhattacharya emphasized ethical considerations in an interview, noting that the use of body parts from aborted babies has long created moral concerns.
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“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 clarified the scope: “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. 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 framed the policy as a step toward modernizing biomedical research and respecting diverse moral views, including those who find the practice objectionable on conscience grounds.
“In public health and in science, we should seek to produce knowledge and products that are widely available for everybody,” Bhattacharya 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?”
The change builds on actions from Trump’s first term, when the administration banned intramural research using aborted fetal parts and established an Ethics Advisory Board that rejected most related grant proposals for ethical reasons. The Biden administration later removed those restrictions and fully funded the unethical research.
Only 77 projects using aborted baby parts were funded by NIH in Fiscal Year 2024, a number that has declined steadily since 2019.
The administration highlighted alternatives such as tissue chips, computational biology, organoids, and other platforms that advance discovery without ethical concerns.
The policy announcement came ahead of the annual March for Life in Washington tomorrow.
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