In a major victory for pro-life advocates, animal welfare advocates, and fiscal conservatives, the Trump administration has officially ended all federal funding for scientific research that uses fetal tissue harvested from aborted babies.
National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Jay Bhattacharya announced the complete ban on all funding across NIH grants, cooperative agreements, research contracts, and even the agency’s internal programs on Thursday.
The policy took effect immediately, pushing American biomedical research toward ethical alternatives, such as computational models.
Bhattacharya emphasized that only 77 projects using human fetal tissue received funding in Fiscal Year 2024, a significant drop from previous years, and assured that the shift to alternatives would not harm ongoing scientific advancements.
“NIH is pushing American biomedical science into the 21st century,” Bhattacharya said, according to a report from The Daily Wire. “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.”
Bhattacharya explained, “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.”
The use of fetal tissue is not banned fully, only if it comes from an aborted baby.
“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,” he added. “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.”
Bhattacharya explained that this became a major issue during COVID, as some of the vaccines were developed using embryonic stem cells.
“I heard from so many people during the pandemic, Catholics and others, who had qualms about using this technology because they didn’t want to be gaining from what their moral system said was the fruit of the poisoned tree,” he said. “I completely sympathize with this.”
“In public health and in science, we should seek to produce knowledge and products that are widely available for everybody,” Bhattacharya continued. “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 isn’t the first time the Trump admin has taken a stand against these practices.
During President Donald Trump’s first term, the administration implemented a ban on the intramural use of aborted fetal tissue in government facilities, effectively halting new federal funding for such experiments and ending in-house NIH testing.
That policy reduced annual spending on fetal tissue research from $109 million in 2019 to $53 million by 2024.
However, the Biden administration reversed this progress in 2021, letting taxpayers once again foot the bill for these atrocities.
White Coat Waste, a bipartisan organization dedicated to ending wasteful government-funded animal experiments, has been at the forefront of this fight against fetal tissue experiments.
The organization has consistently highlighted the gruesome details of NIH-backed studies, including the creation of “humanized” mice by implanting fetal scalps, organs, and other body parts from aborted babies into lab animals.
In a landmark investigation released in September, WCW uncovered 17 active NIH grants involving human fetal tissue, totaling $21,755,292 in taxpayer funding for 2024 alone.
Shockingly, 16 of these grants, 89%, supported animal experiments, with many approved under Dr. Anthony Fauci’s former division at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and slated to continue through at least June 2026.
Less than 24 hours after WCW’s report was released, NIH issued a statement confirming that the exposed grants, all initiated under the Biden administration, would not be renewed.
In February, WCW provided testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, exposing NIH’s continued funding of these abuses.
The House committee overseeing NIH’s budget followed suit by voting to defund such experiments in the agency’s 2026 spending bill.
This ban represents a long-overdue correction and ensures that federal dollars no longer support research that treats human life as a disposable commodity, while advancing innovative, cruelty-free alternatives to medical advancement.
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