Following the Supreme Court’s June 24 ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the Cancer History Project has created a timeline of the regulatory history of women’s reproductive rights based on news stories from The Cancer Letter that track the impact of “pro-life” policies on cancer research and cancer care.
Over the past 50 years, this battle has been waged on three fronts:
- Fetal tissue and embryonic stem cell research,
- The alleged link between breast cancer and abortion, and
- State laws governing access to abortion.
A half-century ago, the debate over fetal tissue research emerged in the context of standards for human subject protection in government-funded experiments. In 1974, research using fetal tissue was mentioned alongside experimentation on prisoners and patients in mental institutions.
On several occasions, appropriations for NIH were held hostage to the issue of funding fetal tissue research. Every year since 1996, Congress amended the Labor-HHS appropriations bill to prohibit NIH funding of research “in which a human embryo [is] destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury greater than that allowed for research on fetuses in utero.”
To adjust, NIH created two types of fetal tissue research—the sort that requires destruction of fetal tissue and the sort that doesn’t.
For more than a decade, NCI-funded research had to be limited to 60 cell lines that were already in use. Mouse models were seen as a potential alternative to the “NCI 60.” The ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research was ultimately lifted by then-President Barack Obama in 2009.
“This research has been a political football over the course of the last 30 years, with different administrations of the federal government taking different positions on it,” I. Glenn Cohen, deputy dean and faculty director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology & Bioethics at Harvard Law School said to The Cancer Letter.
Dobbs changes the rulebook. “Essentially, what Justice Alito’s opinion is saying, or what I understand him to say, is that if the state were to want to ban this research entirely, to say, ‘Any research involving the destruction of an embryo is banned in X state,’ there’s nothing in the Constitution that prohibits that,” Cohen said. “That’s how I read his opinion, which is to say, because it involves the destruction of potential life, and there’s no right to destroy potential life.”
The alleged link between abortion and breast cancer surfaced—and quickly became politicized—during the George W. Bush Administration. No evidence exists to demonstrate that women who had had abortions or miscarriages are at an increased risk of breast cancer, NCI said at the time.
The political atmosphere was so charged and pitfalls so deep that, in 2012, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, a fast-growing breast cancer charity, was dealt devastating blows from both sides of the abortion issue. Komen’s attempt to stop funding breast screening at clinics operated by Planned Parenthood triggered boycotts from pro-choice advocates. As the charity reversed course, anti-abortion groups attacked.
Last year, after Texas enacted a law that restricted abortion, two scientists who coordinated peer review for Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, resigned in protest. CPRIT officials thanked the departing scientists for their service, saying that the research institute is focused on cancer, describing abortion as an describing the law in question as “unrelated to CPRIT’s mission.” Subsequently, 50 physicians and scientists who conduct reviews for CPRIT signed a strongly-worded letter stating:
“The state’s overt attack on women’s reproductive rights and its misguided and harmful COVID policies demonstrate an unwillingness by Texas lawmakers to prioritize the long-term health of citizens over short-term political gain,” CPRIT’s reviewers said in the statement shared with The Cancer Letter. “We strongly believe in the CPRIT mission and are committed to supporting it, but we must speak out against policies that are anathema to its spirit. Failure to do so would implicitly signal that we accept those policies; we do not.”
Post-Dobbs, this debate has gone national.
