A professor at the University of California, San Diego, told his students that unborn babies are “parasites” during a class lecture. Now, a scientist from LSU is pushing back against this absurd claim.

Breitbart News reported in April that University of California San Diego Professor Pascal Gagnuex told students that fetuses are a “legitimate parasite.” The lecture then compared fetuses to a “cancer” that “rapidly grows,” and “invades” the body.

No joke, a friend just sent me this slide from her upper-level biology course. I'm speechless. Create your own caption. pic.twitter.com/4sS6AvdRV1 — Dylan Griswold (@DylanPGriswold) April 25, 2019

Gagneux has pushed back against criticisms of the slide, arguing that he was not trying to make a political point. “Most of you probably realize that my point was to show that mammals are especially prone to invasive cancers because mammals evolved invasive placentation,” Gagneux wrote. “My point was not to indoctrinate you with the notion that fetuses are cancers, as insinuated in the article.”

Scientist and associate Professor Michael Behnke of LSU, who specializes in studying parasites, told the College Fix this week that Gagnuex’s description of unborn children is not only incorrect but also “borderline satanic.”

“A parasite is something that takes from a host without providing any significant benefit to that host. An unborn baby carries half the genes of the mother. In a purely gene-centered view of biology, the baby will benefit the mother in the most fundamental way. The more children the mother gives birth to, the more genes she passes on, the more benefit she derives in a biological sense,” Behnke said.

A spokesperson for UC San Diego told Fox News that the slides represent an accurate scientific analysis of unborn babies. “The slide presents common, widely accepted scientific concepts and in no way represents a political statement,” the spokesperson said.

Stay tuned to Breitbart News for more updates on this story.