Historically, the use of fetal tissue has produced some groundbreaking scientific discoveries.
According to the American Society for Cell Biology, a nonprofit representing a large and varied group of scientists, “Fetal cells hold unique promise for biomedical research due to their ability to rapidly divide, grow, and adapt to new environments. This makes fetal tissue research relevant to a wide variety of diseases and medical conditions.”
According to the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit focused on sexual and reproductive health, tissue from fetuses
has been used since the 1930s for a variety of purposes. Perhaps most famously, the
1954 Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded to researchers who managed to grow polio vaccine in fetal kidney cell cultures.
In another example, Leonard Hayflick created a cell line from an aborted fetus in the early 1960s that has been used to create vaccines against measles, rubella, shingles and other diseases.
Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia,
told the journal Nature in 2013 that “[t]hese cells from one fetus have no doubt saved the lives of millions of people.”
In more recent years, however, the use of stem cells for therapeutic and research purposes has taken a more central role than fetal tissue. As
Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University,
told Buzzfeed News, “fetal cells are not a big deal in science anymore.”
In spite of the waning interest, it remains legal to donate tissue from a legally aborted fetus, and for that tissue to be used for research purposes
