The National Institutes of Health, the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, announced Thursday that it would no longer support research that utilizes fetal tissue donated to science after elective abortions.
“This decision is about advancing science by investing in breakthrough technologies more capable of modeling human health and disease. Under President Trump’s leadership, taxpayer-funded research must reflect the best science of today and the values of the American people,” NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya said in a statement.
The policy move was celebrated by antiabortion advocates but criticized by scientists who said it would set back efforts to understand crucial questions about human development and the search for treatments. The announcement was not a surprise — the first Trump administration established restrictions on fetal tissue research that were later reversed by the Biden administration. Halting fetal research was highlighted as a policy goal in Project 2025, the plan for President Donald Trump’s second term published by the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Mississippi), in a post on X, called the change a “welcome policy shift that aligns scientific advancement with our values.
“It reflects a clear recognition that medical progress can continue through innovative, ethical research methods without affronting respect for human life,” she wrote.
Tomasz Nowakowski, a neuroscientist at the University of California at San Francisco who relies on the tissue to probe questions about human development, such as the factors that increase risk for brain disorders such as autism, said the abrupt shift is a setback for U.S. science.
“If we want to understand the origins of these disorders and come up with potential therapies, we critically need research directly in human brain tissue,” Nowakowski said.
He added that it is an “extreme privilege” to work with fetal tissue, which is donated to science under strict ethical oversight and would otherwise be discarded as biomedical waste. Alternate systems that do not rely on fetal tissue, such as lab-grown models of brain tissue called brain organoids, are promising and useful, according to Nowakowski, but do not capture the full complexity of the developing brain.
For example, Nowakowski said, his own work has found that certain “progenitor” cells that appear to be important in brain tumor formation don’t occur in brain organoid models. Scientists can use research on fetal tissue to improve the organoid models.
“This policy means we will no longer be able to contribute to the discovery,” Nowakowski said.
In its announcement, the NIH said that the number of fetal tissue research projects supported by federal funding has been declining since 2019, and that there were only 77 projects in fiscal year 2024. “Advances in organoids, tissue chips, computational biology, and other cutting-edge platforms have created robust alternatives that can drive discovery while reducing ethical concerns,” the statement said.
Lawrence Goldstein, an emeritus professor at University of California at San Diego who served on the NIH’s Human Fetal Tissue Research Ethics Advisory Board during the first Trump administration, disagreed. He said that human fetal tissue is necessary to ensure that alternate models are accurately replicating the real thing.
“If you want to deduce the actual molecular features of human organ development during fetal stages and if you want to be sure you’re making the right kinds of cells from stem cells, you need actual fetal tissue. It’s just straight logic and thinking about rigorous scientific standards,” Goldstein said in an email.
Tyler Lamb, director of policy for the International Society for Stem Cell Research, said in an email that human fetal tissue research has been crucial to understanding human development and has contributed to vaccine and drug development.
“NIH’s new policy to end this responsibly conducted, ethically regulated research will deny researchers an essential scientific tool, slowing discovery and setting back efforts to advance treatments and interventions that directly benefit patients,” Lamb said.
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