Nebraska University Med Center Will Get Fetal Tissue from Seattle Omaha, NE

Source: Infonet

Date 10/27/00

-- The University of Nebraska Medical Center is turning to another supplier of fetal tissue from elective abortions for its research, in part because its current supplier, LeRoy Carhart, has not responded to recent requests for more. The medical center created a firestorm of controversy earlier this year when relevations came to the forefront about it using tissue from abortions done at Carhart's abortion facility. Carhart, infamous for his partial-birth abortion Supreme Court case, also received a volunteer faculty position from the university. Officials at the Medical Center said Wednesday that the University of Washington's Birth Defects Research Laboratory in Seattle will provide fetal brain cells that Nebraska scientists need for their research on Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and AIDS-related dementia. David Crouse, associate vice chancellor for academic affairs, said the NU Medical Center is still committed to finding alternatives to brain cells from unborn children killed by abortions. In the past year, that practice has drawn criticism from pro-life groups and calls in the Nebraska Legislature to ban fetal-tissue research. In the interim, Crouse said, the Medical Center needed to take this step because its scientists were running out of the fetal cells that are central to their research. "It's (needed) to keep the research going," Crouse said. "It's not an alternative to the use of fetal tissue." Carhart did not return calls for comment on why he hasn't provided any fetal tissue to the Medical Center in recent weeks. The relationship between the abortion practitioner and the NU Medical Center has been eroding because Medical Center leaders are trying to remove Carhart from the volunteer faculty. Crouse said he did not know why Carhart has not been providing fetal tissue recently. But he said the new agreement does not mean that the Medical Center will stop using Carhart as a potential source. Researchers are not even sure that this new source of fetal tissue will be as useful - because of the logistics and potential time delays of receiving fetal tissue from another state - and will have to do some preliminary testing to determine that. The University of Washington, supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health, has provided fetal tissue to nearly 50 universities or research institutes but not to any pharmaceutical companies. A university spokesman said the laboratory has been obtaining fetal tissue from unborn children killed by elective abortions and providing it for research for 40 years. Researcher Anuja Ghorpade said NU's Center for Neurovirology and Neurodegenerative Disorders has not received any fetal tissue from Carhart in six weeks. Ghorpade said researchers have continued their efforts to find alternatives to fetal tissue, but even those efforts require the use of fetal tissue for purposes of comparison.