Conservative Reps. Majorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado made headlines April 16 as the only two house members to oppose bill H.R.941, or the Transplant Act. This bill extends the National Marrow Donor Program for another 5 years and overwhelmingly passed the house in a 415-2 vote.
The rookie representatives are anything but headline-shy and receive generous space on national news networks to spew their wacky theories, almost never grounded in fact. This time, both women have crossed the line and muddied the integrity of the party they claim to represent.
The Transplant Act reauthorizes the National Marrow Donor Program and the National Cord Blood Inventory for another five years. These programs match bone marrow donors and cord blood units to patients with leukemia and other diseases in need of life-saving transplants.
Greene defended her opposition in another headline-seeking, baseless claim, saying, “Nothing in this bill prevents the funding of aborted fetal tissue by taxpayers.” Rep. Boebert supported the concern raised by Greene and added, “This bill added hundreds of millions of dollars to the national debt, while not receiving a CBO score or going through the committee process,” referring to a cost estimate of proposed legislation done by the Congressional Budget Office. The programs reauthorized in The Transplant Act do not harvest or include fetal tissues in their inventory of cord blood and database of bone marrow donors, contrary to arguments raised by Greene and Boebert.
While their conduct is far more outlandish and inappropriate than other right-leaning representatives, Boebert and Greene hold influence over an alarming fraction of conservative voters. In response to the false claims perpetuated by Greene and Boebert, the National Marrow Donor Program released a statement confirming it “does not use fetal tissue/embryonic stem cells for transplant or research. For more than 30 years, NMDP/Be The Match has helped facilitate more than 105,000 transplants for patients battling blood cancers and blood diseases. We only use cells voluntarily donated by either an adult donor or cells collected from the umbilical cord, which occurs only after a full-term delivery where both mother and baby are healthy and safe.”
