Amendment No. 1891 to Amendment No. 1502

Floor Speech

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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, all human lives from conception to natural birth have innate, immeasurable dignity and worth. They are not play things. They are not mere objects for scientific experimentation.

Experiments that use aborted fetal tissue and practices that create and destroy human embryos or human lives in their earliest stages of development flatly deny that truth. Unfortunately, our own tax dollars sometimes incentivize experiments of this very kind. And the bill before us provides no exceptions, no protections to prevent it.

The Endless Frontier Act includes over $80 billion of authorized funding for key areas of biotechnology, medical technology, genomics, and synthetic biology without any ethical guardrails or protections for the earliest stages of life.

Many Americans do not want to see their taxpayer dollars used to destroy, experiment on, or unethically alter human life, and they shouldn't be forced to do so.

Now, thankfully, there are some of these protections in annual appropriations measures that go through the Department of Health and Human Services. And they have been there for decades, but because this bill expands research at the NSF, the Department of Commerce, and the Office of Science and Technology, which are funded through a different appropriations bill through CJS, the HHS riders do not apply.

That is why I am offering this amendment, which would simply prohibit any research funded through the Endless Frontier Act from using fetal tissue obtained from an abortion and creating, destroying, discarding or putting human embryos at risk.

While the NSF currently has an Agency policy that bans research in which a human embryo is created or destroyed, this would codify that. We need it to codify that. We need this to be consistent with what we do elsewhere to protect the sanctity of human life.

Look, human lives at every stage are too precious to tinker with. Our research and laws should uphold this truth. This amendment would help ensure permanent protections to do precisely that.

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Mr. LEE. I call for the yeas and nays.

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