Ben Carson Has Done Research on Fetal Brain Tissue

Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson, who has been sharply critical of Planned Parenthood and its practices for shipping fetal tissue for research, has himself conducted medical research on fetal brain tissue, he acknowledged Thursday after an old research paper of his was made public.

Dr. Jen Gunter, an OB/GYN and science blogger, posted an excerpt and screenshots of one of Carson’s academic research papers that noted how he used “human choroid plexus ependyma and nasal mucosa from two fetuses aborted in the ninth and 17th week of gestation.”

• Related: Group Claims Planned Parenthood Sells Fetal Tissue

Carson, who was previously the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University medical school, said in an interview last month with Fox News that there’s “nothing that can’t be done without fetal tissue.”

“At 17 weeks, you’ve got a nice little nose and little fingers and hands and the heart’s beating,” Carson told Fox. “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.”

The current home page of his campaign, seen in the screenshot above, asks for Congress to defund Planned Parenthood.

His critics, including Gunter, questioned if fetal parts were not necessary or useful for research, why Carson used them and then published his findings.

“Could he think his own research was useless?” Gunter asked in her blog post. “If it was non contributory to the field why was it published? Maybe he forgot that he’d done the research on fetal tissue?”

But Carson defended his research in an interview with The Washington Post.

“You have to look at the intent,” Carson told the Post. “To willfully ignore evidence that you have for some ideological reason is wrong. If you’re killing babies and taking the tissue, that’s a very different thing than taking a dead specimen and keeping a record of it.”

Planned Parenthood has been accused of selling fetal parts for profit but says the tissue is donated for medical research, with consent of patients, and the only money it receives, and is allowed to receive, is used to cover expenses like transporting samples.

Carson also released a statement to BuzzFeed:

There is absolutely no contradiction between the research I worked on in 1992 and my pro-life views. The issue of fetal tissue has everything to do with how the tissue is acquired. My primary responsibility in that research was operating on people to obtain diseased tissue for comparison to banked tissue samples. Killing babies and harvesting tissue for sale is very different than taking a dead specimen and keeping a record of it, which is exactly the source of the tissue used in our research.

Carson’s campaign did not immediately respond on Thursday to a request from Patch seeking further clarification.

Image via Wikimedia/Gage Skidmore under Creative Commons