Planned Parenthood to No Longer Accept Reimbursement for Fetal Tissue Donation

On Tuesday morning, Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, sent a letter to the director of the National Institutes of Health to make known that, moving forward, any Planned Parenthood affiliate clinic involved in fetal tissue donation programs will accept no reimbursement for expenses.

Cecile Richards announced on Tuesday that Planned Parenthood would no longer accept reimbursement for expenses incurred from fetal tissue donation.

The move comes in response to calls by conservative lawmakers to withdraw the organization’s funding, spurred by a series of videos released by anti-abortion activists over the summer. 

(If you need to catch up on the controversy, here’s everything you need to know in one place.) 

The letter makes it clear that, while the organization’s policies on fetal tissue donation already exceed the legal requirements (reimbursement is fully permitted under the 1993 law regulating fetal tissue donation practices), Planned Parenthood enacted this policy because it removes the “smokescreen that extremists have been using to attack Planned Parenthood, and lays bare their real agenda.”

“When the attacks in Washington and in states continue, as we unfortunately expect they will, let it be clear once and for all that that they have nothing to do with concern over fetal tissue donation and everything to do with banning abortion in the U.S.,” Richards said in the letter. 

Presently, only three Planned Parenthood clinics — or 1 percent of all its health centers — facilitate tissue donation for fetal tissue research. One of the three clinics already does not accept any reimbursement; the remaining two clinics will now be following that clinic’s protocol. Also made explicit is that Planned Parenthood’s decision to no longer except reimbursement “should not be interpreted as a suggestion that anyone else should not take reimbursement or that the law in this area isn’t strong.”

The letter concludes by noting how there are now proposed federal and state measures that would ban fetal tissue donation for medical research and urges the NIH to work with Congress, providing medical and ethical expertise in the area.

Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., the ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said in a written statement to Yahoo Health, “I think this makes total sense. Even though the law allows for reasonable expenses, this change eliminates any remaining argument by opponents and demonstrates how critical this type of research is for millions of Americans.”

Meanwhile, the House’s Energy and Commerce Committee issued a press release to its members in response to the letter, quoting committee Vice Chair Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., saying, “I’m glad to see Planned Parenthood is finally recognizing the need to end this disgusting practice. It’s about time. However, there are still many questions yet to be answered surrounding Planned Parenthood’s business practices and relationships with the procurement organizations. This is exactly why the House is investigating abortion practices and how we can better protect life.”

It is an interesting — and telling — move that the committee elected to have Blackburn give a statement on behalf of the majority party, as opposed to the committee’s chairman, Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich.

Upton supported and voted for the 1993 law referenced by Richards in her letter that allowed for research on human fetal tissue regardless of whether the tissue came from voluntary abortion. Upton, who implemented and oversaw his committee’s own hearing investigating Planned Parenthood last month, has become a vocal opponent of exactly the kind of law and practices his vote helped formalize.

Last week, for example, during the Rules debate for the creation of the special select panel to further investigate Planned Parenthood in the House, Blackburn stated, “This will be a broad-based, information-gathering, fact-finding mission to answer questions about how we treat and protect life in this country.” Her words, and her voice rising as the voice of record for her committee, continue to suggest that, as Richards speculates, the continued investigation of Planned Parenthood by Congress is not, in fact, about fetal tissue donation and research, but about undermining the right to abortion care as guaranteed by Roe v. Wade itself.