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Fresh evidence of fetal tissue research
Samantha Gobba, WORLD News Service
July 28, 2017
3 MIN READ TIME

Fresh evidence of fetal tissue research

Fresh evidence of fetal tissue research
Samantha Gobba, WORLD News Service
July 28, 2017

Lawyers with the Thomas More Society plan to take the University of Minnesota to court again after discovering new evidence its researchers are still illegally experimenting with aborted fetal remains.

The legal group will file a motion for relief against a judge’s April decision dismissing a previous lawsuit against the university.

In October, Pro-Life Action Ministries and two individuals filed suit against the university accusing it of violating a 1988 statute that requires the burial or cremation of aborted or miscarried fetal remains and limits laboratory tests to those “necessary for the health of the woman or her future offspring or for purposes of a criminal investigation or determination of parentage prior to disposing of the remains.”

As evidence, the plaintiffs pointed to a 2015 video by the Center for Medical Progress that alleged the University of Minnesota conducted illegal research on aborted fetal tissue. Later, purchase orders surfaced showing the university purchased aborted fetal tissue directly from abortion centers between 2008 and 2014.

In court, the university claimed it had stopped doing illegal research on fetal remains, and the judge dismissed the cased based on a lack of evidence. But a few days later, Thomas More’s Erick Kaardal obtained an official university email admitting to ongoing fetal tissue research.

“We’re disappointed that due process rights were thwarted, but we are encouraged by the fact that we are correct, they are continuing to do the research,” Kaardal told me.

The emails came from a state legislator’s staff, who inquired separately about ongoing research using aborted fetal tissue. University of Minnesota staff member Christine Kiel said that within the past year, the university had procured 203 tissue slides from the Institute of Genetic Medicine at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom and obtained brain, eye and cochlea samples from 25 fetuses from the University of Washington. Kiel claimed the University of Minnesota didn’t pay for the samples.

Minnesota’s fetal disposition law survived a Planned Parenthood challenge in 1990, when a court ruled “the statute passes constitutional muster.”

Kaardal said “abortion politics” have made it difficult to pin down the university: “When you have large universities who are willing to violate criminal statutes in order to do illegal research, it’s a little disturbing, because we hope research universities would have the highest ethics, and we don’t want researchers to be subject to criminal sanctions. And I think there must be a problem with a research university, University of Minnesota in this case, in understanding that they, too, are under the law.”

(EDITOR’S NOTE – Samantha Gobba writes for WORLD News Service, a division of WORLD Magazine, worldmag.com, based in Asheville. Used with permission.)