Texas’ top Republicans made it pretty clear that most of them are strongly opposed to abortion when, in 2021, they took the shockingly drastic step of imposing a near-total abortion ban in the Lone Star State. In the more than year since that controversial decision, much bigger decisions have been made on the topic of a woman’s right to choose — including the Supreme Court’s unprecedented decision to reverse the half-century old Roe v Wade ruling. But Texas senator Bob Hall has an entirely different — and absurd — reason for wanting to end abortion: so that all those aborted fetuses stop ending up in our food products.
This is not a drill!
As Vice reports, Hall recently introduced a bill in Texas requiring that any food containing “human fetal tissue” be “clearly and conspicuously labeled” to indicate so much. Which shouldn’t really be a problem, since the idea that food manufacturers are adding aborted babies into their products is outright insane.
A spokesperson for the FDA provided Vice with a statement in response to Hall’s absurd accusations, stating: “There are no conditions under which the FDA would consider human fetal tissue to be safe or legal for human or animal consumption.”
Cannibalism is a popular topic around which conspiracy theories are being created in recent years. As Carter Sherman writes for Vice:
“Prominent conspiracy theory movements like QAnon hold (falsely) that elite Democrats are running a cannibalistic, Satan-worshiping, child sex-trafficking ring. QAnon’s beliefs are linked to antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ tropes that hold that Jewish and LGBTQ people are trying to hurt children, and even drink their blood. These conspiracies, which have flourished partly through lockdown isolationism and election denialism, have radicalized a stunning number of Americans and torn families apart.”
While food manufacturing would in no way be impacted should Hall’s bill become law, it could require changes to scientific and legal studies as, according to Sherman, “fetal cell lines can be used to develop and test drugs. These lines can be collected from a single miscarriage or abortion, then replicated in labs, over and over again, for decades. (Cell lines derived from aborted fetal tissue can be preferable, both because it’s easier to collect and because fetal tissue derived from a miscarriage may carry whatever genetic or chromosomal problem may have caused the miscarriage in the first place.) Fetal cell lines have led to development of many major vaccines, such as the vaccines against chickenpox and Hepatitis A.”
(Via Vice)