On Wednesday, the Department of Health and Human Services announced it would end the use of human fetal tissue from elective abortions for medical research. This is yet another victory for the Trump administration in the never-ending battle to protect human life.

For over 25 years, Congress has allowed the National Institutes of Health to dole out what now amounts to more than $100 million each year to researchers who utilize the fetal tissue of aborted babies. There is little to show for this money. As a House select investigative panel found, fetal tissue research didn’t fulfill any promises of major scientific discoveries. As Sean Duffy and Kathleen Schmainda write in The Federalist, “the panel investigation further discredits the claim that fetal tissue plays an indispensable role in 'life-saving' research.”

Pro-abortion lobbyists falsely claim there are no alternatives to fetal tissue obtained from elective abortions. Yet, as Tara Sander Lee testified before Congress last December, “After over 100 years of research, no therapies have been discovered or developed that require aborted fetal tissue.” In fact, only three out of the 75 vaccines available in America still utilize legacy fetal cell lines, and none require the use of new fetal samples.

In the field of neuroscience, there is excitement over the use of fetal tissue transplants to replace failing dopaminergic neurons in patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease, yet Sander Lee points out that induced pluripotent stem cells (a type of cell derived from adult tissue) offer a promising alternative. Just last fall, researchers in Japan transplanted induced pluripotent stem cells into a Parkinson’s patient for the first time. Additionally, the NIH has pledged $20 million towards research that advances alternatives to fetal tissue.

If the Trump administration were to continue to pour taxpayer dollars into fetal tissue research while ignoring viable alternatives, the demand for the body parts of aborted babies would only climb.

Already, we have seen instances of greedy entrepreneurs eyeing the fetal tissue marketplace. In 2010, Cate Dyer, an employee of a nonprofit fetal tissue processing company, formed her own for-profit company called StemExpress. Her former bosses called her “totally unethical,” recalling that “she went into our office one night, looked around, and took everything we had, and started her own business.”

Dyer’s company featured heavily in an undercover video sting that surfaced in 2015. In response to footage of herself laughing about shipping the severed heads of fetuses to laboratories, she claimed her “tiny” fetal tissue business was actually costing her money. She subsequently refused to cooperate with congressional investigators who turned up evidence that her 37-employee company was aggressively marketing its need for fetuses to abortion clinics, promising the endeavor would be “financially profitable” for all involved.

From 2010 to 2014, StemExpress increased their revenue from $156,312 to a whopping $4.5 million (see page 155).

It’s not difficult to see the temptation for profiteers. Abortion clinics sell deceased babies to fetus processors for as little as $30 while the processing companies sell each “component” of the baby to researchers for up to $550.

The clinics also stand to profit from the increased demand for aborted babies, but their marketing strategies are less obvious: discounted procedures, the promise of future medical care — all targeted at poor women and minorities. According to Biola University ethics professor Scott Rae, methods like these are “difficult to detect and impossible to adequately police.”

Finally, the acceptance of fetal tissue as a research tool or “miracle cure” undermines long-standing Hyde Amendment protections, which prevent taxpayers from being forced to financially support an industry that many find abhorrent.

The importance of the Hyde Amendment, which Democrats have promised to repeal, cannot be overstated. Prior to the Supreme Court’s finding in favor of the amendment, approximately 300,000 pregnancies were terminated with taxpayer funds every single year — a state of affairs that can never be allowed to reoccur.

It’s clear that due to the availability of fetal tissue alternatives and the fragility of our current protections against taxpayer funding of abortions, this current administration made the right and moral call today and ruled to protect our nation’s unborn.

Mary Vought (@MaryVought) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. She is a Republican strategist and executive director of the Senate Conservatives Fund. Previously she was press secretary to the House Republican Conference under then-Chairman Mike Pence.