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(NEW YORK) — Last week, the Trump administration announced it was banning the use of human fetal tissue from some abortions in federally funded medical research. 

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) said the policy would go into effect immediately and advance “science by investing in breakthrough technologies more capable of modeling human health and disease,” NIH director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said in a statement.

Scientists told ABC News that research using human fetal tissue has contributed to understanding diseases better, such as HIV and Ebola, and helped in the development of some vaccines and drugs.

Some scientists worry the ban could prevent groundbreaking discoveries about the behaviors of certain diseases and stop the development of life-saving therapies.

“It’s not a scientific decision,” Dr. Lawrence Goldstein, a professor emeritus of cellular and molecular medicine at the University of California, San Diego, told ABC News. “It’s a moral decision that places the rights of fetal tissue that would be discarded above the rights of sick people who will benefit from that research.”

How human fetal tissue has been used

Human fetal tissue has been used to study serious diseases and disorders, including AIDS, cancer, Parkinson’s disease, dengue, Ebola, hepatitis C, diabetes and spinal cord injuries.

Cell lines have been created from human fetal tissue that have led to the development of vaccines for rubella, rabies, chickenpox, shingles and hepatitis A. Research has also led to the development of drugs to treat HIV, hemophilia and sepsis.

President Donald Trump himself benefited from the research: the experimental antibody treatment he took to treat COVID-19 was developed using cells derived from human fetal tissue. At the time, Trump praised the treatment as a “cure.”

The tissue has been also used in reproductive medicine research to study fertility issues, pregnancy issues, and pregnancy conditions such as pre-eclampsia.

Goldstein said that human fetal tissue research also helps create humanized mouse models to study human immune systems.

“Using fetal tissue, you can make mice that have human blood-forming and immune systems,” Goldstein said. “And that’s valuable because a lot of the viruses that trouble human health don’t grow properly in mice. But if you can make mice with human blood and immune systems, those viruses will frequently grow, and you can learn how to make therapies to block them.”

There are very strict guidelines that researchers have to follow when using human fetal tissue, ensuring they are in compliance with federal and sometimes state requirements.

Additionally, the research must be reviewed and approved by the NIH’s Institutional Review Board (IRB), which specifically assesses federally funded research that uses human subjects.

The IRB assures that donation and reception of human fetal tissue were done with consent and not coercion and that there were no enticements provided to the participant, the clinic or the research team.

A researcher with knowledge of the matter, who asked that their name not be used due to fears of retribution, told ABC News that federal law states that donation cannot be even brought up to a pregnant individual deciding to terminate their pregnancy before the decision to terminate.

“These are extremely important guardrails that are in place to ensure that everything is handled properly,” the researcher with knowledge of the matter said.

Impacts of ending NIH funding

The Trump administration first instituted a ban ending all human fetal tissue research at NIH in 2019, but it was reversed by the Biden administration in 2021.

The current ban stops NIH funds from supporting all “grants, cooperative agreements, other transaction awards and research and development contracts,” the agency said in a statement.

Some groups praised the Trump administration’s new policy, including the Independent Medical Alliance, a group that promoted unproven treatments during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There is no ethical justification for performing experiments on tissue derived from aborted human beings,” Dr. Joseph Varon, president and chief medical officer of the Independent Medical Alliance, said in a statement. “The fact this practice continued for years within federally funded research institutions shows just how far removed parts of HHS had become from foundational medical ethics. This correction is long overdue.”

However, some scientists say the ban will affect ongoing and future work.

Dr. Anita Bhattacharyya, an associate professor of cell and regenerative biology in the school of medicine and public health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said she was hoping to apply for a future NIH grant to study human fetal tissue research and will now not be able to do so.

Bhattacharyya explained she currently uses human-induced pluripotent stem cells, which are reprogrammed cells that are similar to embryonic stem cells, in her work. However, the loss of NIH funding for human fetal tissue research could affect future work.

“My reaction was, ‘How are we going to do some of our research if we can no longer use human fetal tissue?'” she recalled to ABC News. “In particular, my lab studies Down syndrome and so we know that in Down syndrome, the brain develops differently to lead to the intellectual disability that people with Down syndrome have.”

Bhattacharyya said human fetal tissue is valuable when studying Down syndrome or neuropsychiatric disorders because it can recapitulate what’s happening in brain development.

“And so that’s where the human fetal tissue really provides us with a benchmark or the ground truth so that we can validate our models,” she said.

Finding alternative methods of funding is another issue, scientists told ABC News. The NIH was the largest funder of research involving human fetal tissue, and no longer financially supporting such research may leave scientists scrambling to find other donors.

Goldstein said there are private disease foundations that will sometimes fund human fetal tissue research, such as the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, which funds stem-cell-related research in California.

However, experts say the hole left behind by the lack of NIH funding cannot be made up through private donations.

“There’s really nothing adequate to substitute for the federal effort,” Goldstein said. “It is the largest funder of medical research in the United States. It has systems in place to regulate quality and ensure that ethics and scientific principles are being adhered to. We really can’t move ahead as efficiently as we would like with the absence of the NIH.”

Although the NIH said tissue from spontaneous abortions will still be available, the researcher with knowledge of the matter said this tissue is very often not suitable for research purposes.

“The reason is because, most often, spontaneous abortion happens as a result of some sort of genetic abnormality or some injury, infection, some kind of damage to the fetus itself, that renders that tissue completely unusable for scientific research,” they said.

“Additionally, because spontaneous abortions are just that, they’re spontaneous and therefore completely unpredictable,” the researcher continued. “We have to be very careful in the way that we handle that tissue. It makes those studies intractable. And so, for that reason, spontaneous abortions are not a suitable replacement for fetal tissue research that we would normally obtain.”

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(NEW YORK) — As many as 724,000 service members, their families and veterans may rely on health care at hospitals that face financial vulnerability, partly due to cuts in President Donald Trump’s megabill, according to a new analysis.

The bill, known as HR.1, was signed into law in last summer and included sweeping changes to health care including Medicaid. Strict work requirements, reduced federal funding and tightening provider tax rules impacts hospitals that are dependent on Medicaid, increasing their risk of uncompensated care and reducing revenue.

Service members and their families — many of whom are covered by the military health insurance program TRICARE — rely heavily on civilian hospitals for health care, particularly in areas without military treatment facilities.

The analysis, conducted by researchers the Healthcare Quality and Outcomes Lab at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH) and first viewed by ABC News, looked at how many TRICARE beneficiaries may be reliant on hospitals considered at risk of financial distress under these new changes.

The researchers said many hospitals rely so heavily on Medicaid reimbursements that cuts to the program under HR.1 will affect care the hospitals provide to other patients, including those in the military community.

“We wanted to get a sense of how many hospitals are potentially at risk for becoming potentially financially unstable with the upcoming looming HR.1 Medicaid cuts,” Dr. Jose Figueroa, co-author of the analysis and associate professor of Health Policy and Management at HPSH told ABC News. “There’s a big focus on rural hospitals, but it is not just rural hospitals at risk, that we were finding that across the country, many urban hospitals are at risk.”

Figueroa said medical services that many TRICARE beneficiaries need are often only offered in civilian hospitals or in civilian health care systems. These beneficiaries are then exposed to hospitals that are potentially at financial risk, he noted.

“Military active duty service members on TRICARE and their families also on TRICARE are increasingly relying on civilian hospitals for their care, even when they’re living within a military base,” Figueroa said. “If we’re finding evidence that there are many hospitals across the country that are at risk, to what extent will that affect military personnel and their families?”

TRICARE is run by the U.S. Department of Defense for those connected to the military, including active duty members, National Guard and reserve members, military retirees and their families. It is not the same as Medicaid, although some may qualify for both.

For their analysis, the team used three different criteria to identify a hospital that might be at risk.

If more than one in four of patients being treated at the hospital are on Medicaid, given that the HR.1. cuts are disproportionally affecting those on the federal health insurance program.
If the hospital is a safety net hospital, which serves a large number of patients with no insurance or with Medicaid, or a critical access hospital, which is a rural facility that provides essential health care services to underserved communities.
The Altman Z-score, which is an aggregate measure of the financial health of a hospital, combining liquidity, profitability, financial efficiency and solvency measures to categorize a hospital as being at risk for bankruptcy.
About 4% of hospitals were considered at higher risk of financial distress — meeting three of the criteria and about 19% were at moderate risk of financial distress — meeting two — according to the analysis.

The team then used a dataset to help to identify 8.9 million TRICARE beneficiaries and their ZIP codes.

The analysis estimated that more than 117,000 TRICARE beneficiaries are currently living on or near military installations potentially exposed to a hospital at higher risk of financial distress. Additionally, more than 607,000 are living near a hospital with a moderate risk of financial distress.

This means that more than 724,000 TRICARE beneficiaries are living in military installation ZIP codes — including bases, camps, posts, depots and stations — where at least one hospital has multiple risk factors for financial distress.

Additionally, more than 3.5 million TRICARE beneficiaries living in ZIP codes without a military installation are potentially exposed to a higher-risk or moderate-risk hospital, the analysis found.

“As a country, we should do our best to take care of the people protecting us,” Figueroa said. “Military personnel and their family members should be protected, and sometimes we have to remind ourselves that drastic cuts to our health care that affect our health delivery system also affects our active military personnel and their families as well.”

Last month, during a Senate hearing, Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force David Wolfe said troops were struggling to get health care appointments and made reference to issues with TRICARE’s reimbursement rate for providers.

“What we’ve all seen over the length of our careers is a gradual erosion in the availability of that health care for our service members and their families,” Wolfe said, according to the Military Times.

Based on the results of the Harvard analysis, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D- Mass., is launching an investigation into how the Pentagon is guiding military families through health care cuts and whether Republicans and the Trump administration consulted the Pentagon before the cuts were made, her office told ABC News first.

Warren is also pressing the Pentagon to explain how these cuts are affecting military readiness.

“Donald Trump is putting troops’ lives on the line in the Middle East while ripping away health care from their families at home,” Warren said in a statement to ABC News. “Republicans swore the Medicaid cuts in their Big Beautiful Bill were about cutting waste, fraud, and abuse — is that what they think of our military families’ health care?”

In a statement sent to ABC News, the Pentagon didn’t address Warren’s comments.

“As with all congressional correspondences, the Department will respond directly to the authors as appropriate,” a spokesperson said.

A Pentagon official also said it wouldn’t be appropriate to comment on the methodology of studies not conducted by the department.

The White House didn’t respond to ABC News’ request for comment.

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(NEW YORK) — The number of women with risk factors for cardiovascular disease could significantly increase over the next 25 years, the American Heart Association (AHA) warned on Wednesday.

Without improving prevention and early detection tools, about six in 10 women could be diagnosed with hypertension or obesity by 2050, and risk factors could appear in children and teenagers as well, according to the AHA’s scientific statement.

“Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death, and fewer than half of women know that fact,” Dr. Stacey Rosen, executive director of Katz Institute for Women’s Health and volunteer president of the AHA, told ABC News. “And the percentage of awareness is even lower in African Americans and Hispanics.”

Published in the journal Circulation, the AHA’s projections suggest that 59.1% of women could have high blood pressure by 2050 — up from 48.6% in 2020 — even as diet, physical activity and smoking rates are projected to improve.

About one in four women may have diabetes in 2050, up from 14.9% in 2020, and more than 60% are estimated to have obesity, an increase from 43.9% over the same period, according to the report.

Heart health risk factors won’t hit all demographic groups of women equally, the report predicted.

High blood pressure will increase the most among Hispanic women with a projected rise of 15%, the report noted.

Additionally, more than 70% of Black women could have high blood pressure and obesity may increase the most among Asian women by nearly 26%. 

Young women and girls may also see an increase in heart risk factors, partially driven by less opportunity for exercise as well as an abundance of inexpensive foods that often are not heart health.

Estimates also suggest that nearly one-third of girls between ages 2 and 19 will have obesity, an increase from 19.6% with obesity in 2020.

Dr. Jennifer Miao, a board-certified cardiologist, told ABC News that earlier hormonal changes in girls may also contribute to cardiovascular risk later in life.

“Several studies have also shown that starting menstruation at an early age can lead to increased risk of heart disease down the road,” she said.

Miao said she counsels parents that it’s never too early to start thinking of heart health for their children by “choosing good foods, physical activity over screen time and regular pediatrician check-ups.” 

Despite the report’s predictions, Rosen stressed that meaningful progress for women’s heart health is still within reach. 

“As a medical community, we have amazing tools to treat disease and detect it early, but lack when it comes to primary prevention,” Rosen said, adding that managing diseases like obesity requires a time intensive, multidisciplinary approach that the current U.S. health care system is not built to support. 

She also said that optimizing health doesn’t require a costly gym membership or expensive organic foods.

“Every bit of movement counts, whether that means taking a walk or standing more if you work at a desk,” Rosen said.

Small, sustainable changes, like cutting back on sweetened beverages, can make a meaningful difference over time, she said.

Miao added that both the medical community and local leaders can do their part. By partnering with local health clinics, expanding home visit programs and leveraging telemedicine, health systems can extend their reach and bring essential care directly to isolated and underserved populations.

Takisha Morancy, MD, is a chief emergency medicine resident, medical ethics fellow and member of the ABC News Medical Unit.

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