David Weldon: “I want to thank Chairman Barton. And I particularly want to thank the cosponsor of this legislation, Subcommittee…”

“I want to thank Chairman Barton. And I particularly want to thank the cosponsor of this legislation, Subcommittee Chairman Deal. And I am certainly pleased that this legislation that we introduced passed the Senate unanimously. I fully expect something similar here in the House. This bill, and I just want to point out to my colleagues, we are not revoting H.R. 810. We are talking about the bill to ban the procedure called fetal farming. And we are taking up the Senate version of the bill, which is a verbatim equivalent to the bill that Mr. Deal and I introduced. This bill sets a very, very important ethical boundary for biomedical research in this country, and obviously there is an ethical boundary that today we all agree on. It is a modest, but important, update to the Waxman 1993 fetal tissue research prohibitions. These laws, as developed in the 1990s, attempt to protect women from being coerced into having an abortion for the purpose of providing fetal tissue for research. What they were trying to do is say you can only use voluntarily aborted fetal tissue. Then, as now, the concern was that women would be exploited. Because of this, in my bill the researchers are held accountable, not any woman who may be engaged in this procedure. My bill adds a simple provision that would hold researchers criminally liable for intentionally implanting a human embryo, either in a womb or in an animal womb, for the purpose of harvesting the tissue for research.…”