Okla. Senator Proposes Bill Banning Aborted Fetuses in Food
Ralph Shortey, a Republican Oklahoma state senator, has introduced a bill banning the use of aborted fetuses in food.
The bill, brought forward Tuesday, is a preemptive and meant to raise awareness, as no cases of aborted fetuses have ever been discovered in foods or food products in the U.S.
Senate Bill 1418, requested to become effective in November 2012, asserts, "No person or entity shall manufacture or knowingly sell food or any other product intended for human consumption which contains aborted human fetuses in the ingredients or which used aborted human fetuses in the research or development of any of the ingredients."
Get Our Latest News for FREE
Shortey informed media outlets that he proposed the bill after independently searching the Internet and found that some companies allegedly employ the use of embryonic stem cells to test the taste quality of their products.
"People are thinking that this has to do with fetuses being chopped up and put in our burritos," Shortey told Oklahoma news source NewsOK. "That's not the case. It's beyond that."
"There are companies that are using embryonic stem cells to research and basically cause a chemical reaction to determine whether or not something tastes good or not," Shortey explained, although he confirms that he has no evidence of companies actually partaking in this practice.
"As a pro-life advocate, it kind of disturbed me that we would use aborted embryos or aborted human fetuses to extract stem cells and use them for research to basically make things taste better," added the Oklahoma City senator.
The United States Food and Drug Association informed The Associated Press, in an email statement Tuesday, that they were "not aware of this particular concern."
Sen. Brian Cain (R) told AP that he believes Oklahoma has far greater, existing issues to focus on besides this bill.
"We've got too many challenges facing Oklahomans today. We don't need to go looking for possible challenges that may come about sometime in the future," Cain said.
"I'd hate to think we're going to spend our time coming up with possibilities of things we need to stop," he added.
Shortey is not the first to make these claims. In Aug. 2011, South Korean SBS TV aired a documentary that alleged Chinese pharmaceutical companies were incorporating ground-up baby corpses into pills meant to boost stamina.
China's Ministry of Health later announced it would launch an investigation into these said "baby pills."
Although rumors of aborted fetuses have circulated in the past, many members of Oklahoma's Senate are brushing off Shortey's proposed bill.
"You can't control what a guy does when he files legislation," Oklahoma Senate President Brian Bingman (R) told The Huffington Post Tuesday.
"It's all a process, and at the end of the day you want to look at the final bills that are actually passed and signed by the governor," he stated.
