Carson: Saying I Researched Fetal Tissue ‘Desperate Attempt’ to Justify Abortion

WALLACE: “One sign I guess of your rise in the polls is that you were attacked by the left this week for your involvement in a 1992 study that involved fetal research. The charge is that you're hypocritical now when you call for defunding Planned Parenthood because you were involved in a study that involved fetal research 23 years ago. And even one of your conservative critics, rivals, Rick Santorum, says that the position you're taking is morally suspect. How do you respond to all this?”

CARSON: “I say a lot of people are getting pretty desperate if they're going back almost a quarter of a century looking for things that aren't even true. You know, what I did as a surgeon is take tissue samples and give those to the pathologist who then compared them with their archives. It's sort of like if you were an archaeologists and you find something in a dig that has some writing on it, you don't recognize it, you give it to your archivist and they go through all of the archives that they've been able to maintain over the many decades and they say, you know, that looks like something from Mesopotamia. It's the same kind of thing. It has nothing to do with an abortion or even touching fetal tissue. It is a desperate attempt by some people to try to change the argument and also to justify some of the things that are being done by Planned Parenthood. Completely different from anything that I was doing.”