The National Institutes of Health announced it will no longer fund research using tissue from elective abortions, citing scientific advances and ethical considerations under the Trump administration.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
The National Institutes of Health announced Thursday that it is ending all federal funding for research that uses tissue obtained from elective abortions, a policy change that will apply across the agency’s entire research portfolio.
The decision affects all NIH grants, cooperative agreements, transaction awards, research and development contracts, and the NIH Intramural Research Program, according to reporting by the Daily Wire. NIH officials said the move aligns with the Trump administration’s broader effort to modernize biomedical research and accelerate innovation.
“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.”
According to NIH data, the agency funded 77 projects involving human fetal tissue during fiscal year 2024, a number that officials said has steadily declined since 2019. NIH cited advances in alternative research methods, including tissue chips, computational biology, and organoid technology, as reducing the scientific need for fetal tissue derived from abortions.
Bhattacharya said the use of aborted fetal tissue has been a source of ethical debate for years, placing “a large part of the population” in a moral conflict.
“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,” he said.
The NIH clarified that the policy does not ban all use of fetal tissue in federally funded research. Bhattacharya said tissue may still be used if it is not obtained through an elective 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 said. “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.”
Bhattacharya added that public trust and participation are critical to scientific progress. “In public health and in science, we should seek to produce knowledge and products that are widely available for everybody,” he said. “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 announcement was made one day ahead of the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., an event that draws tens of thousands of participants advocating against abortion.
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