‘Age range 16-24 weeks … must be fresh and never frozen…’
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) The Food and Drug Administration entered into eight contracts over the span of six years to acquire “fresh and never frozen” tissue from a fetal tissue firm, according to a report by Judicial Watch.
Records show that the FDA worked with Advanced Bioscience Resources, a fetal-tissue supplier that has been the subject of multiple criminal referrals from House and Senate committees, to obtain 1st and 2nd trimester aborted fetuses.
FDA researchers intended to use this tissue to create “humanized mice” for ongoing research, according to the records.
In one 2017 exchange between the FDA and the supplier, an FDA official requests a quote.
“I am tasked with the purchase of tissues suitable for HM [humanized mice] research. I would like to request a quote. Please review the Statement of Work and quote your pricing as outlined,” the email states.
The FDA official then stated that the tissue could be “Age range 16-24 weeks,” and that it “must be fresh and never frozen.”
In total, the FDA spent nearly $100,000 between 2012 and 2018 on fetal tissue, Judicial Watch found.
ABR came under scrutiny in 2015 when a string of undercover videos revealed that Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, sold fetal tissue to various buyers.
It was never confirmed whether ABR was one of the buyers. But in one of the videos, Katharine Sheehan, former medical director of Planned Parenthood Pacific Southwest, specifically mentions ABR.
“We have already a relationship with ABR,” she says to someone posing as a competitor to the company. “We’ve been using them for over 10 years — a really long time. … They’re doing the big collection for government-level collections.”
The FDA isn’t the only agency to buy tissue from ABR. The National Institutes of Health also paid the firm hundreds of thousands of dollars for tissue that came from fetuses that were 17 weeks to 22 weeks old, according to Politico.