Sen. Marco Rubio is demanding that the Biden administration investigate whether Planned Parenthood is dealing with fetal tissue harvested from abortions.
In a letter Tuesday to Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Florida Republican referenced a recent report by the Center for Medical Progress, a pro-life group.
The CMP reported that Planned Parenthood provided the tissue to the University of California-San Diego in exchange for promises of ownership of any patents and other intellectual property the university developed from research on the samples.
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In his letter, Rubio called the report “stunning” and noted, “If confirmed, this relationship represents a flagrant violation of federal law, which explicitly prohibits the transfer of fetal tissue for any compensation.”
Rubio also pushed Garland to “hold any guilty parties accountable to the fullest extent of the law.”
According to Rubio’s letter, the college and Planned Parenthood first entered this relationship in 2009.
In their deal, Planned Parenthood agreed to provide “fetal and placental tissue” to UCSD for non-commercial research “for the purpose of deriving cell lines from and determining gene expression, genomic, and epigenomic profiles of the materials.”
In return, Planned Parenthood retained all rights, titles, and interests in patents and patent applications and any other intellectual property rights related to fetal tissue.
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UCSD also agreed to credit Planned Parenthood as the source of the material in any publications or studies that resulted from its research, Rubio wrote.
“Most notably, the contract between UCSD and Planned Parenthood was made for ‘valuable consideration.’ The inclusion of this phrase in the contract is significant because federal law explicitly forbids ‘any person to knowingly acquire, receive, or otherwise transfer any human fetal tissue for valuable consideration,’” Rubio added.
Violations of this law are punishable by up to 10 years in prison, he noted.
The GOP senator also wrote that the deal appears to be much more than a “mere contract.”
UCSD was also giving Planned Parenthood regular feedback and briefings about the progress of the research. In 2021, UCSD also kicked in a $10,000 donation to Planned Parenthood in 2021.
“The University of Pittsburgh is already under investigation for its experimentation on aborted babies and its cozy relationship with Planned Parenthood. I ask that you launch an investigation into University of California San Diego and its use of Planned Parenthood’s aborted fetal tissue in an apparent violation of federal law,” Rubio wrote.
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“Both of these organizations receive hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars every year, and the American people deserve answers.”
Among those answers, Rubio sought to learn whether UCSD and Planned Parenthood are still engaged in the agreement and how many aborted babies Planned Parenthood provided to the college.
He also wanted to know what the tissue was used for, if Planned Parenthood gained financially from its ownership stake in the fetal tissue, and whether the National Institutes of Health or any other federal agency has funded fetal tissue research like UCSD’s.
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