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At several labs across the US, researchers use fetal tissue from humans to investigate everything from viral infections to the developing brain. Such studies have been ongoing for decades, as have politically fraught debates about this research, because it primarily relies on tissue donated after terminated pregnancies.
Last summer, President Donald Trump’s administration announced that it would be placing restrictions on experiments involving fetal tissue obtained from elective abortions, which included banning government scientists from using this material for research and applying increased scrutiny for National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant proposals from nongovernmental scientists.
Researchers say that the new restrictions on fetal tissue research have required them to change their plans for future work or to search for alternative sources of funding. “It’s impacted almost all of the facets of the lab,” says Carolyn Coyne, a microbiologist at the University of Pittsburgh who uses fetal ...
