Pennsylvania Budget: University of Pittsburgh Must End Research on Aborted Babies or Lose Funding

Pennsylvania House Republicans have put a condition on providing funding for four universities: University of Pittsburgh, Penn State University, Temple University, and Lincoln University must certify that they are not engaging in research or experimentation using fetal tissue obtained from elective abortions.

The University of Pittsburgh, commonly known as “Pitt,” attracted criticism in 2021 when the public became aware that the school uses tissue from aborted human babies in its research. A 2020 article in the journal “Nature” detailed, in words and photos, how Pitt researchers grafted scalps of human babies onto the backs of lab rats and mice and grew patches of hair.

There has been no evidence that the other three schools used aborted babies in their research, but they were lumped in with Pitt when the Pennsylvania Senate passed a funding bill to the House covering these four schools.

Pitt’s cut is $151.5 million, a healthy portion of its total $2.6 billion operating budget.

Pennsylvania state Rep. Jerry Knowles, a Republican. (Courtesy of Jerry Knowles)

“Last year it was a problem for many of my colleagues, including me, because of what we had heard was being done at the University of Pittsburgh,” state Rep. Jerry Knowles, a Republican, told The Epoch Times. “As a result of that, last year when we talked about it, we were told that OK, we’ve got to work with it and deal with it over the course of the next year.

“Unfortunately, that never happened. So what I did was I introduced [the] amendment.”

A New Requirement

The amendment added the requirement that, to get their funding, the schools must certify that they are not using aborted babies from elective abortions for research.

The amendment required a simple majority, and on June 27, it passed in a 108–92 vote, with four Republicans

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