While the House of Representatives is trying to limit their anti-abortion fight right now to defunding Planned Parenthood, Republican legislatures across the country are going nuts, trying to
criminalize science by putting fetal tissue research off-limits.
Now the abortion wars are raging on their doorsteps as lawmakers in Wisconsin and Ohio try to ban such research and other states limit access to the tissue. More than three dozen of the universities, including Harvard, Yale and Johns Hopkins, have been drawn into the fight despite their traditional deep aversion to an issue that can divide faculties and donors and draw the ire of anti-abortion advocates nationwide.
"My faculty and I were linked to Nazi war criminals—really ugly stuff," said Dr. Robert Golden, dean of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine describing a state Assembly hearing on a bill that would make research on aborted fetuses a felony. "It's the first time this has ever gotten any intense attention—it's also never gotten as nasty and personal before." […]
The Association of American Medical Colleges is circulating a sign-on letter citing "grave concerns" about bills such as the one in Wisconsin. It has garnered support from more than three dozen top research universities so far, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Duke, the University of Chicago and the Medical College of Wisconsin—the other major medical school in that state. […]
Counting Wisconsin and Ohio, lawmakers in at least eight states have introduced bills related to fetal tissue since the Planned Parenthood videos began circulating in July, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which monitors reproductive health laws. A wave of such laws passed in the 1970s and 1980s, with many of them struck down by the courts, according to the group.
It's not as if the nation hadn't already had this discussion and that strict ethical guidelines weren't already in place. And as if some critical, lifesaving research wasn't at stake. But that's science, so it doesn't matter to Republicans. No more so than the lives of actual adult people compared to clumps of developing cells inside a woman's body. Because once those cells are out of a woman's body, she can't be controlled any more.