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House panel on 'infant lives' clashes over subpoenas to researchers

Erin Kelly
USA TODAY
Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn.

WASHINGTON — Members of a special House investigative panel on fetal tissue research clashed during their first hearing Wednesday over issuing subpoenas to medical researchers as Democrats called for the panel to disband.

The Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives, part of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, was created by Republican leaders last October amid an uproar over Planned Parenthood's role in providing researchers with tissue from aborted fetuses.

The controversy was sparked by videos created by anti-abortion activists that purported to show Planned Parenthood selling tissue for profit, which is illegal. Planned Parenthood denied the allegations, and two people who made the videos have been indicted by a grand jury in Texas on felony charges of tampering with government documents.

"Faced with these facts, the Select Panel should have disbanded," said Rep. Jan  Schakowsky of Illinois, the senior Democrat on the panel, calling the investigation "a partisan and dangerous witch hunt." She said three congressional committees have already investigated the charges against Planned Parenthood and found no evidence that the group sold tissue for profit.

The panel's chairwoman, Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., said the videos released last summer "revealed that something very troubling is going on related to fetal tissue and research."

"The weak, the vulnerable, those with no voice — harvested and sold — there is something going on, something that deserves investigating and that demands our best moral and ethical thinking," Blackburn said. She added that Wednesday's hearing was about bioethics and not about "election year politics."

Before any of the six witnesses on bioethics could testify, members of the select panel fought over the committee's issuance of subpoenas to Stem Express, which procures fetal tissue for research; the University of New Mexico, which conducts research on fetal tissue; and Southwestern Women’s Options, a New Mexico medical clinic that performs abortions.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., asked Blackburn why the committee is demanding the names of researchers and medical students who conduct research on fetal tissue. Nadler said that making their names public could "endanger their lives" by making them subject to attack from anti-abortion extremists.

Blackburn said the committee is entitled to the information as part of its investigation. A motion by Nadler to quash the subpoenas failed by a party line vote of 8-6.

Four of the six witnesses invited by the committee to testify Wednesday said it is unethical to use tissue from aborted fetuses to perform medical research while two witnesses said the research helps save lives.

"We are a nation justly proud of the progress and achievements of our biomedical research, but lifesaving research cannot and should not require the destruction of life for it to go forward," said Gerard Kevin Donovan, a physician and bioethics professor at Georgetown University School of Medicine. "Alternatives clearly exist that are less controversial, and moral arguments exist that support our natural abhorrence at the trafficking of human fetal parts."

R. Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said fetal tissue research "serves a compelling health purpose."

"We gain nothing when we turn our backs on the benefits of this research for people who are sick today, or will be sick tomorrow — to say nothing of the irony of halting research that improves our chance of preventing miscarriages, of preventing birth defects, and of saving infants' lives," Charo testified.

$300,000 allocated to House panel investigating abortion providers

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