At the March For Life rallies and events, the pro-life community and representatives from various churches gather to protest the practice and legality of abortion. While the pro-life movement and the Catholic Church proclaim the dignity of every human life by confronting the practice of abortions, there has been a lack of similar zeal from those organizations to address the exploitation and continued and growing use of aborted fetal cell lines and tissue in biomedical research.
The scope of this problem has been largely ignored by the pro-life movement and the Catholic Church, which will negatively affect religious consumers and health care providers and likely end the Catholic identity of the Catholic hospital system.
Collecting the HEK293 Cell Line
Among the 60 million unborn children that have been aborted, there is one abortion that has changed medicine forever. In 1970, Dr. Frank Graham, a scientist at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, successfully cultured a cell line that changed the course of medical research. The cell line was manufactured from the kidney cells of a first-trimester electively aborted female child whose parents were unknown.
It is likely that informed consent from the parents was never obtained given the era in which this tissue was harvested. That cell line received the abbreviated name HEK293, which stands for human embryonic kidney. The 293 designation refers to the number of attempts required to create this immortalized cell line. Unfortunately, this sad story does not end in a lab in the
