© 2024
NPR for Northern Colorado
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Gingrich Calls For Panel To Look At Rules For In Vitro Clinics

While talking with the media outside the Exciting Idlewild Baptist Church in Lutz, Fla., on Sunday, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called for a commission to look at new rules for clinics that perform in vitro fertilization.
Matt Rourke
/
AP
While talking with the media outside the Exciting Idlewild Baptist Church in Lutz, Fla., on Sunday, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called for a commission to look at new rules for clinics that perform in vitro fertilization.

Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich is changing another of his positions in an effort to woo socially conservative voters.

Over the weekend he told churchgoers in Florida that as president he'd work to ban research using stem cells derived from human embryos.

Gingrich has long been a strong backer of federal funding for scientific research. In 2001 his support extended to research on stem cells derived from human embryos left over from in vitro fertilization efforts.

But apparently that's no longer the case.

Now he says he'd ban such research, which, he says amounts to, "the use of science to desensitize society over the killing of babies."

Gingrich is also questioning whether those embryos should be left over in fertility clinics in the first place.

"If you have in vitro fertilization you are creating life. And therefore we should look seriously at what should the rules be for clinics that do that because they're creating life," Gingrich said outside the Exciting Idlewild Baptist Church where he attended services Sunday.

Gingrich opposes abortion and says life begins at conception.

Currently the only federal regulations require such clinics to report their success rates.

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Julie Rovner is a health policy correspondent for NPR specializing in the politics of health care.Reporting on all aspects of health policy and politics, Rovner covers the White House, Capitol Hill, the Department of Health and Human Services in addition to issues around the country. She served as NPR's lead correspondent covering the passage and implementation of the 2010 health overhaul bill, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.