The Truth About Pregnancy
During pregnancy, women must reconsider many choices that they might normally take for granted, such as what to eat, how to exercise, which medications to take, and whether to smoke or drink alcohol. The wrong decisions can lead to gestational diabetes, preeclampsia, and other life-threatening diseases for pregnant women and to low birth weight, developmental problems, birth defects, or even death for the baby. Pregnancy research is vital to ensuring the health of women and their babies. Unfortunately, the U.S. government often chooses to fund animal experiments rather than clinical and epidemiological studies of pregnant women. These animal tests are costly and unreliable, not to mention cruel to the pregnant animals who are used.
The National Institutes of Health funds countless wasteful and cruel experiments. The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development funds studies of pelvic muscular injuries that involve mutilating the genitals of rats, monkeys, and other animals. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism consistently funds experiments in which pregnant animals are force-fed alcohol so that researchers can study the resulting deformities in their babies. Not to be outdone, the National Institute on Drug Abuse pays for similar studies that force pregnant animals to ingest cocaine, nicotine, inhalants, and other drugs. The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute is currently financing an experiment in which pregnant rabbits are forced to run on a treadmill. Researchers study the rabbits’ blood flow and the effect that the strenuous exercise has on their fetuses. How do they study the effects on the fetuses? They kill the mother rabbits and then cut the babies out of their bodies. This needless and absurd experiment receives $100,000 of American tax revenue each year. Learn more about experiments in which rabbits are forced to run on treadmills.
These animal studies ignore the plethora of reproductive differences that exist between species, including the length of gestation, the phases of neural development, and the form and function of the placenta. These differences invalidate animal studies and make epidemiology and the clinical study of pregnant women the only reasonable choices for pregnancy research.