A congressional panel investigating fetal tissue exchange held its first hearing this week, and among the topics of debate: Should institutions be forced to turn over a list of names of the people involved? Officials at the University of New Mexico have expressed concerns about doing so.
UNM’s Health Sciences Center supplied the House investigative panel with thousands of pages of documents in the middle of February. That same day, they got a subpoena for even more information, including a list of people who participated in the research.
Communications Director Billy Sparks said that could be dangerous, considering recent violence against providers in the neighboring state of Colorado. "We have been in discussion about both the scope and the rationale for providing individual names of individual faculty, staff and students, who’ve been involved in the research and various abortion procedures," he said.
Sparks also specified that UNM did provide published research papers, which included some names.
Southwestern Women’s Options, an abortion clinic in Albuquerque, was asked for the same information, and refused to turn over all the names for safety reasons.