A House committee led by anti-abortion Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) is on the verge of issuing 17 subpoenas to medical companies to gather the names of medical researchers, graduate students, laboratory technicians, and administrative staff who are in any way involved in fetal tissue research.
According to Blackburn: “We are going to review the business practices of these procurement organizations and do some investigating of how they have constructed a for-profit business model from selling baby body parts.”
The committee — called the “Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives” by the conservative representatives behind it — was originally created by former House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to find out if Planned Parenthood has any involvement with the sale of fetal tissue, an idea sparked by a now-discredited undercover video campaign. Nearly 30 states that conducted similar investigations failed to turn up any evidence to support this claim.
This new focus — that many say threaten the lives and livelihood of anyone involved in research that uses fetal tissue — openly exhibits the GOP’s wild mission to find someone to hold accountable for a baseless accusation made in a few discredited attack videos. The attack has spiraled so far into broad areas of the medical industry, it’s almost hard to remember it’s solely rooted in lawmaker’s beliefs about abortion.
