Secret Ingredient
It has been widely spread in the 1970s and 1980s especially among fundamental fundamentalist Christian groups in the United States that collagens taken from the fetuses of aborted babies were being used to manufacture cosmetics. It was claimed that these “youth-preserving” products depended on the slaughter of millions of unborn babies every year in foreign countries which would be sold widely in the United States.
In 1985, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a statement denying these rumors and stories because of the massive surge of pamphlets, letters to newspapers, and broadcast talk shows spreading these stories. The FDA said that that while protein substances are sometimes collected from placentas or from animals, use of human fetuses have never been documented as a source.
(Source: Brunvand, Jan H. Encyclopedia of Urban Legends. 2001.)
