Like all the Republican candidates (and in fact, nearly all Republican politicians), young Earth creationist Dr. Ben Carson advocates defunding Planned Parenthood. He told Fox News’s Megyn Kelly recently that medical research can be conducted without the use of fetal tissue, saying the Planned Parenthood “sting” videos make him question “how far we have drifted in terms of our humanity.”

But as OB/GYN physician Dr. Jen Gunter points out at her blog, in 1992 Dr. Ben Carson himself, along with three other authors, published a study on research conducted using 17-week old fetal tissue.

Carson also said, “At 17 weeks, you’ve got a nice little nose and little fingers and hands and the heart’s beating. It can respond to environmental stimulus. How can you believe that that’s just a[n] irrelevant mass of cells? That’s what they want you to believe, when in fact it is a human being.”

Dr. Carson, like everyone, is entitled to an opinion no matter how wrong, What he says doesn’t change the fact that fetal tissue plays a vital role in medical research. For example it is being used to develop a vaccine against Ebola. Many researchers depend on fetal tissue to understand and hopefully develop treatment for a myriad of conditions from blindness to HIV. Without fetal tissue neurosciences research, something essential for the development of neurosurgical techniques, would be far less developed. Dr. Carson should be intimately aware of this fact.

While opining on the uselessness of fetal tissue research to Megyn Kelly Dr. Carson neglected to mention his own paper Colloid Cysts of the Third Ventricle: Immunohistochemical evidence for nonneuropithelial differentiation published in Hum Pathol 23:811-816 in 1992. The materials and methods describe using “human choroid plexus ependyma and nasal mucosa from two fetuses aborted in the ninth and 17th week of gestation.”

Dr. Carson offers the following excuse/explanation/incoherent justification to the Washington Post:

In an interview with the Washington Post, Carson called the revelation “desperate,” and ignorant of the way medical research was carried out.

“You have to look at the intent,” Carson said before beginning a campaign swing through New Hampshire. “To willfully ignore evidence that you have for some ideological reason is wrong. If you’re killing babies and taking the tissue, that’s a very different thing than taking a dead specimen and keeping a record of it.”