A major pro-life organization is pressing two powerful Senate chairmen to investigate whether the National Institutes of Health broke the law by funding experiments that implanted organs from aborted babies into lab mice.
Shawn Carney, president of 40 Days for Life, sent a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Senate HELP Committee Chairman Bill Cassidy of Louisiana demanding a formal congressional investigation into NIH's fetal tissue research funding. The letter asks whether the agency's practices "complied with the laws, regulations, Congressional funding restrictions, and ethical requirements expected of our nation's public health institutions."
The push comes weeks after a July 29 Senate hearing that put the issue squarely in public view. Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican, confronted Dr. Anthony Fauci during a panel on COVID-19, pressing him on taxpayer-funded experiments involving fetal organs. Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and refused to answer. Ernst's line of questioning went viral, and 40 Days for Life now wants Congress to follow through with a full accounting.
Carney's letter describes the research in blunt terms. As the New York Post reported, the 40 Days for Life president wrote that American taxpayers bankrolled experiments in which researchers "surgically implanted livers, thymuses, and chunks of lung from nearly five-month-old aborted human babies into mice." He noted that the researchers themselves dubbed the result "BLT-L mice" and described the procedure as a "sandwich of aborted body parts."
That language alone should stop any reasonable person cold. Federal dollars, drawn from the paychecks of Americans who had no say in the matter, paid for experiments that treated the organs of unborn children as raw material for rodent testing.
Carney framed the organization's interest as rooted in direct experience with the consequences of abortion.
"We have a unique perspective on the damage that abortion causes, women, society and obviously, the unborn. We also see daily the abuses of the abortion industry, including the exploitation of aborted baby body parts and tissues."
NIH spending on human fetal tissue research hit nearly $120 million in fiscal year 2018. By fiscal year 2024, that figure had fallen to approximately half that amount. And in January 2026, NIH announced it would stop funding research that used fetal tissue obtained from elective abortions altogether.
The Trump administration argued that the practice had become unnecessary. Officials pointed to alternatives, organoids, tissue chips, computational biology, and other platforms, that they said rendered fetal tissue experimentation obsolete. The administration also moved to reduce animal testing in government-funded research more broadly.
But ending the funding going forward does not answer the questions about what happened during the years the money was flowing. That is precisely the gap 40 Days for Life wants Congress to fill. The letter asks whether NIH complied with existing law while the research was active, not just whether the policy changed after the fact.
The July 29 hearing gave the issue its sharpest public moment. Ernst questioned Fauci directly about the practice of taking parts from human fetal organs and implanting them into mice. Fauci declined to answer, citing his constitutional right against self-incrimination.
Invoking the Fifth Amendment is a legal right, not an admission of guilt. But when a former senior government health official refuses to discuss taxpayer-funded research practices under oath, it raises an obvious question: what is there to hide? The viral clip of that exchange gave pro-life groups a concrete, public illustration of the accountability gap they had long described.
40 Days for Life's letter channels that energy into a specific procedural demand. Grassley and Cassidy chair the two committees with the clearest jurisdiction over NIH conduct and federal health research policy. Neither senator's office responded to requests for comment before the story was published. NIH also did not immediately return a request for comment.
Several questions remain unresolved. The letter does not specify which laws or funding restrictions 40 Days for Life believes NIH may have violated, nor does it identify the full scope of studies it wants examined. Whether Grassley or Cassidy will act on the request, or even acknowledge it publicly, is unknown.
The broader issue, though, is not complicated. For years, a federal agency spent tens of millions of dollars on research that used organs harvested from aborted children. The administration ended the practice. Congress has not yet examined whether the agency followed its own rules while the practice was underway.
A policy change without accountability is just a press release. If NIH operated within the law, an investigation will confirm it. If it didn't, taxpayers deserve to know, and so do the senators who approved the funding.
