In case you missed it because the story has been drowned out by the blare of a thousand toy trumpets, there's some serious McCarthyite damage being done to medical research by a congressional committee chaired by a member of Congress whose brains are leaking out of her shell-pink ears. You should pay attention if you or any members of your family has been struck by diseases like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's or ALS. I think, at this point, former NFL football players should take special note, too.

A House committee led by anti-abortion Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) is on the verge of issuing 17 subpoenas to medical companies to gather the names of medical researchers, graduate students, laboratory technicians, and administrative staff who are in any way involved in fetal tissue research. According to Blackburn: "We are going to review the business practices of these procurement organizations and do some investigating of how they have constructed a for-profit business model from selling baby body parts."

This is dangerous stuff. The "business model" of the anti-choice movement thus far has been to identify people involved in helping women exercise their reproductive freedom, harass them at home and on the job, make their lives utterly miserable, and, on occasion, shoot them dead in their kitchens. Now, they've moved on from the people who actually perform abortions to the people who use fetal tissue in medical research. Imagine that you're some underpaid lab tech, or some poor post-doc, buried under student loans, and one day you get a subpoena to testify in front of Congress. You have to hire a lawyer, and not somebody who pitches himself on late-night cable access, either. And, even with all that stress, you know that you're now being pursued by the respectable face of a political movement that kills people.

And you also know that the committee that has dropped its subpoena on you is chaired by a woman in whose hands scientific information generally shrivels up and dies, and which includes one member of Congress—Vicki Hartzler of Missouri—who thinks the Chinese might be spying on us through our toasters. You might become just nervous enough to decide on another career. Which is, of course, the point.

There's no legitimate reason for this committee to have the information that it's demanding. (For that matter, there's no earthly reason for this committee to exist at all, since it was formed to "investigate" the phony Planned Parenthood videos, the ones that led to their producers being indicted in Texas.) The demand is simply a method of harassment and intimidation. Are you now, or have you ever been, a fetal-tissue researcher?

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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