Birth defects are prevented and babies are saved when research dollars go to effective and relevant research, which comes from studying human problems and human babies, not from sewing kittens' eyes shut or addicting rats to cocaine. Subsequent human clinical trials confirmed that women who had previous NTD pregnancies could greatly reduce their risk of another NTD-affected pregnancy by taking folic acid supplements. The link between pre-pregnancy obesity and neural tube defects also was uncovered by human, not animal, studies. Every penny spent funding questionable experiments on ferrets or kittens is a penny that could go to educating mothers, providing folic acid supplements, and directly helping babies at risk. Again, we find that a major victory in the war against birth defects involved absolutely no animal tests.
Animal experiments can give dangerously misleading results that put human babies at risk.
Tragedy occurred when many babies who were given the drug were blinded, went deaf, suffered brain damage, and even died. Visual development experiments have been done for decades without yielding anything of clinical relevance that could not have been learned from human studies. In these March of Dimes experiments, no mention is made of how the results of these studies might solve a human birth defect problem. In addition, a veterinary ophthalmologist commented that because cats and ferrets have much of the development of their retina and brain projections after birth, while in humans much of this development occurs prior to birth, the results of these studies are meaningless for humans. Diaphragmatic hernia is simply a hole in the diaphragm that allows the abdominal organs to pass into the chest.