WASHINGTON, Aug. 13 (UPI) — Republican presidential hopeful and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson defended his use of fetal tissue for medical research Thursday after he derided such research as “disturbing” and said “there’s nothing that can’t be done without fetal tissue.”
Carson said his work, which was published in Human Pathology and describes the use of materials “from two fetuses aborted in the ninth and 17th week of gestation,” is different from Planned Parenthood’s alleged use and sale of tissue from aborted fetuses. He described the revelation, uncovered after a blog published excerpts from the 1992 study, as “desperate.”
“You have to look at the intent,” Carson told the Washington Post. “To willfully ignore evidence that you have for some ideological reason is wrong. If you’re killing babies and taking the tissue, that’s a very different thing than taking a dead specimen and keeping a record of it.”
Carson is among many Republicans on the 2016 election trail who have condemned Planned Parenthood after undercover videos allegedly show organization leaders discussing the use of fetal tissue. In July, Carson said the use of fetal tissue for medical research is unnecessary. That drove Dr. Jen Gunter to find the research paper that described how tissue was used.
“Could he think his own research was useless?” Gunter said in her blog. “If it was non contributory to the field why was it published? Maybe he forgot that he’d done the research on fetal tissue?”
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