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Let’s Get Ethical: What the PA House Gets Wrong About Fetal Tissue Research

By Sarah Lindley

“Time is running out. Tell your lawmaker to save in-state tuition. State funding supports an in-state tuition discount that saves Pennsylvania’s students and families an average of $60,000 over four years.”  

In the spring 2022 semester, University of Pittsburgh students could not pass through a single campus building without seeing these messages full-screen on TVs and monitors. They made their way all over social media and into casual conversation.       

“What are you going to do if they get rid of in-state tuition?”  

“Transfer, I guess. I don’t want to think about it!”       

The urgency behind these statements and the whopping sum attached to them—$60,000—was enough to give myself and other in-state students a sharp prick of anxiety before heading off to our next class. But most of us never knew why lawmakers were even making such a threat. Was Pennsylvania’s budget in a deep deficit, with no room to spare for education funding? Not quite. In fact, funding for education actually increased almost 11% over last year’s budget. So, what was the problem?  

After investigating local newspapers online, I found the shocking reason, and I had to look at the budget bill to see it for myself. In order to receive funding for in-state tuition discounts, a new condition introduced by the Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman, Pat Browne (R-Lehigh), demanded that schools “must not engage in research or experimentation using fetal tissue obtained from an elective abortion”. The amendment passed through the House 108-92.  

Though there have been opponents to fetal tissue research for years, the hostility towards it only increased when the decision in the Supreme Court case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was leaked. The case effectively reversed the ruling of Roe v. Wade and overturned abortion rights, leaving it up to the states to decide. Both before and after the decision was officially released, debates intensified and pro- and anti-abortion activists alike led protests nationally. In Pennsylvania, Republican majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate struck fears of abortion restrictions, but Democratic governor Tom Wolf made it clear that he would veto any such legislation that landed on his desk.  

When abortion rights are attacked, anything associated with abortions comes under fire as well. That includes fetal tissue research, since fetal tissue is sourced from elective abortions; after all, if abortions are unethical, then so is fetal tissue research, right? But it is not quite that simple. Such research is regulated by strict laws on both the federal and state level. In Pennsylvania, fetal tissue cannot be procured “without the written consent of the mother,” researchers may not profit off of it, and any violations of the rules result in civil penalties of up to $5,000, not to mention a damaged professional reputation. Under pressure from lawmakers and anti-abortion groups, Pitt requested that an independent law firm write a report indicating whether their fetal tissue research was in compliance with these regulations, and the report found no evidence of wrongdoing.  

The University of Pittsburgh obtains all of its tissue for research from the Pitt Biospecimen Core, which sources it through University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC)  patients. Fetal tissue specifically is collected from elective abortions conducted at UPMC-Magee Women’s Hospital, after gathering informed consent. According to the Pitt Biospecimen Core website, it follows standards set by the International Society for Biological and Environmental Repositories (ISBER) Best Practices for storage, retrieval, and distribution of tissues. By Pitt Biospecimen Core’s policy revised and renewed in 2019, any transfer of tissue specimens to researchers outside of the University must be approved by the Human Biological Materials Committee, who act on behalf of the Senior Vice Chancellor for the Health Sciences.  

Though Pitt’s fetal tissue research is in compliance with the law, Pitt’s decision to take the lawmakers’ concerns seriously and provide evidence that the research is conducted properly was the right choice, even if the complaints were largely politically motivated. It is dangerous territory to neglect ethical procedures in research and just assume that something is being done ethically. Science has endless examples of unethical experiments and decisions that nobody put a stop to at the time.  

Take the Tuskegee syphilis study, for example. This 1932 study by the U.S. Public Health Service involved 600 Black male participants for whom informed consent was not collected. Researchers simply observed the progression of syphilis without providing any care or treatments, even though penicillin was already being widely used to treat syphilis. It is clear to see how withholding readily available, effective treatments for a disease simply to study it would be considered a violation of ethics. A similar story revolves around Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose cancer cells were collected without her or her family’s knowledge or consent in 1951. Those cells, now known as immortal HeLa cells, are crucially important and prevalent in scientific research to this day, but her family did not receive any compensation. Though they have their flaws, immortal cell lines such as HeLa allow researchers to reduce the costs of obtaining cell materials, since they can be propagated indefinitely, and limit undesired variation, because they are genetically identical.  

There are a whole host of activities that are considered unethical in science, such as falsifying or fabricating data, sabotaging others’ experiments, and failing to collect informed consent. Outright negligence, whether intentionally malicious or not, can also have devastating consequences, as demonstrated by Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 report that the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine can be linked to autism. This connection proved to be completely false, but not before it sparked an anti-vaccination sentiment that still exists today. As one can see, unethical science can target groups that are already marginalized or stigmatized, cause the rapid spread of disinformation, and fracture the public’s trust in science. But as far as the evidence suggests, fetal tissue research, at Pitt and beyond, simply doesn’t fit into this category.  

An in-state student might understandably think, surely whatever fetal tissue research that’s going on here isn’t worth the $60,000 it would take from thousands of students—including me! However, in reality, fetal tissue research is indispensable and has led to countless medical breakthroughs. It has helped develop medicines for rheumatoid arthritis, cystic fibrosis, and hemophilia, and many different vaccines for diseases such as chicken pox, shingles, rabies, rubella, and polio. At Pitt, fetal tissue is being used to study HIV, AIDS, cancer, and more, research for which they receive National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants. They cannot just use adult tissue instead because fetal cells grow more readily in laboratory conditions and are generally more resilient than adult cells. Additionally, scientists often create ‘humanized mice,’ which have undergone human tissue grafts, to use for research that could not feasibly or ethically be conducted with human subjects. Fetal tissue works better than embryonic stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells (derived from adult cells) for mimicking the real behavior of human cells in these mice. With the technology we have today, there are some forms of research that simply cannot yet be replicated with any other types of tissue.  

At the end of the day, the amendment to the budget bill requiring universities to stop fetal tissue research in order to receive funding for in-state tuition discounts did not pass through the Senate, but that doesn’t mean we should immediately let this topic go. The fact that the Pennsylvania legislature tried to withhold this discount and essentially hold in-state students hostage—over research that they couldn’t control even if they wanted to—is deeply concerning. Lawmakers should be actively incentivizing medically essential research, not punishing it, especially when they know it is being conducted in accordance with strict federal and state laws. As long as abortion and fetal tissue research is still legal in Pennsylvania, these threats do nothing but instill the fear that Pennsylvanians’ access to affordable in-state education will be limited.  

Though we must acknowledge that research has not always been conducted ethically and it is always better to err on the side of caution, it is worth recognizing that we are constantly learning from past mistakes and increasing regulations to minimize harm. Pitt’s fetal tissue research is in compliance with the law and is completely ethical for all intents and purposes, and no amount of budget threats or demands that go against the interest of young Pennsylvanians is going to change that.