Ben Carson: No apologies for 1992 fetal tissue research
Source: Washington Post
Ben Carson defended the use of fetal tissue for medical research Thursday, after a blog published excerpts of a 1992 paper describing work the neurosurgeon-turned-presidential candidate carried out using aborted fetuses. In an interview with the Washington Post, Carson called the revelation "desperate," and ignorant of the way medical research was carried out.
"You have to look at the intent," Carson said before beginning a campaign swing through New Hampshire. "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, who has risen in primary polls since last week's debate, is among the Republicans who've condemned Planned Parenthood after undercover videos revealed executives in the organization coldly discussing the extraction and distribution of tissue from aborted fetuses. In a July interview on Fox News, after the first videos broke, Carson said that there was “nothing that can’t be done without fetal tissue" and that babies aborted at 17 weeks were clearly human beings.
That inspired Dr. Jen Gunter to excavate a 1992 paper, co-authored by Carson, in which doctors described how they applied "human choroid plexus ependyma and nasal mucosa from two fetuses aborted in the ninth and 17th week of gestation." That, wrote Gunter, was quite the contrast from Carson's 2015 denunciation of fetal tissue research.
<more>
Read more: Ben Carson: No apologies for 1992 fetal tissue research - The Washington Post
Total hypocrisy of the worse kind.