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Lincoln - The political pressure to resign as a volunteer faculty member started almost immediately after it became known that Dr. LeRoy Carhart was providing fetal brain tissue to the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Carhart said Monday in federal court.
Carhart, a Bellevue abortion provider, testified that the pressure came from university officials, state lawmakers and the Nebraska Republican Party. Everybody wanted his resignation, he said, to temper the controversy that erupted after The World-Herald reported in November 1999 that the Medical Center was using tissue from aborted fetuses in research. At one point, Carhart said, he was asked to quit by Drew Miller, a member of the NU Board of Regents. Carhart is suing the university for terminating his unpaid voluntary faculty position. He says that he was fired for political reasons and that his First Amendment right to free speech was violated. The university said his termination was not linked to the fetal-tissue controversy but came about as part of a reorganization of volunteer faculty positions. David Buntain, the university's attorney, said officials never succumbed to political pressure to fire Carhart. "Throughout that time, the Medical Center kept Dr. Carhart on the faculty. They did not bow to that pressure," Buntain said. The lawsuit is being heard in U.S. District Court before Judge Warren K. Urbom. Carhart was terminated in October, less than a year after it was learned that he was contributing fetal brain tissue for research at the Medical Center and after he had successfully challenged Nebraska's ban on the "partial-birth" abortion procedure. Carhart said he and Dr. Howard Gendelman, director of the Medical Center's neurological research program, talked quite a bit after The World-Herald's disclosure. "Dr. Gendelman never asked me to resign," Carhart said, "(but) Dr. Gendelman told me on many, many occasions that he was under extreme pressure to have me terminated." Carhart said he resisted all calls to resign because to do so would be to give in to pressure from anti-abortion activists. "That would contribute to supporting terrorism," he said. The Legislature is again considering a bill that would ban the use of fetal tissue from elective abortions. A similar bill failed last year.
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