President Donald Trump has decisively ended all federal funding for research using aborted baby parts, delivering a long-overdue blow to this barbaric practice. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced the policy on January 22, 2026, applying it immediately to all grants, contracts, and intramural programs. It bans taxpayer dollars from supporting studies involving fetal tissue from elective abortions.
NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya praised the move as a leap into 21st-century innovation: “NIH is pushing American biomedical science into the 21st century. This decision is about advancing science by investing in breakthrough technologies more capable of modeling human health and disease. Under President Trump’s leadership, taxpayer-funded research must reflect the best science of today and the values of the American people.” He underscored the moral revulsion: “The use of body parts from aborted babies has long created moral concerns… Now that there is better technology, there’s no scientific harm to this, we’re still going to be able to use the science we need … while at the same time getting rid of this use of aborted fetal tissue which so many people, including me, find morally abhorrent.”
Bhattacharya clarified: “Someone who has had a miscarriage and wants to do a meaningful thing and they donate the tissue from the miscarriage to science, that’s still allowed. The only ban is on, you have an abortion specifically to terminate the baby, and then the tissue then gets sold, that’s what’s being banned.”
He argued for inclusive science: “In public health and in science, we should seek to produce knowledge and products that are widely available for everybody. If there are large numbers of people with moral systems that say if you go down this line and use research with aborted human fetal tissue, I’m not going to participate in it…well what good was the research?”
This policy revives Trump’s first-term reforms, including an Ethics Advisory Board that rejected most proposals, only for Biden to unleash full funding. Just 77 projects used aborted parts in FY2024, down from prior years. Alternatives like organoids and tissue chips promise progress without ethical taint.
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