Not even a full day after GOP presidential hopeful Ben Carson told Fox News' Neil Cavuto that the abortion industrial complex known as Planned Parenthood was designed to collect fetal tissue and control the black population, BuzzFeed's Virginia Hughes reports that Carson and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins actually used fetal tissue in a 1992 study about the development of the brain's ventricles.
As Dr. Jen Gunter noted on her blog, Carson has repeatedly claimed that there's no research that "can't be done without fetal tissue," and that the promise of fetal tissue research has been exaggerated, while the results have "very much under-delivered."
On "The Kelly File" last month, Carson spoke of the humanity of fetuses at 17 weeks, saying "you’ve got a nice little nose and little fingers and hands and the heart’s beating. It can respond to environmental stimulus. How can you believe that that’s just an irrelevant mass of cells? That’s what they want you to believe, when in fact it is a human being."
That he specified the 17th week of gestation in his conversation with Kelly is significant, given that in his 1992 study -- Colloid Cysts of the Third Ventricle: Immunohistochemical evidence for nonneuropithelial differentiation -- the brain and nasal cavity tissues were "obtained from two fetuses aborted at the ninth and 17th week of gestation."
As Dr. Gunter pointed out, this fact might be inconvenient for Ben Carson the fringe Republican presidential candidate, but it was de rigueur for Ben Carson the celebrated Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon.
"As a neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson knows full well that fetal tissue is essential for medical research," she wrote. "His discipline would have a hard time being [where] it is today without that kind of work."
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