December 17, 2018 | David F. Coppedge

How to Scientifically Justify Horror

A leading American science journal whimpers over loss of access to body parts of murdered humans.

When the Center for Medical Progress released in 2015 undercover videos of abortionists harvesting and selling body parts of babies, people were horrified. People who didn’t know about it were horrified that such a ghastly activity was going on. People doing it were horrified that they were caught. This included the abortionists and the scientists who benefited from the fetal tissue for ‘research.’ Selling fetal tissue for profit is illegal, and manipulating abortions to preserve the ‘best’ tissues for scientists is also illegal, but legalities aside, the idea of intentionally murdering someone to use their body parts for someone else should horrify anyone at a gut level. How can it be justified?

An unborn baby is not its mother; it is not its father. It is its own human being, with its own genetic code, its own sex, and its own body. It has its own hopes, and its rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In the womb it is practicing for that. A recent study showed that in the womb, the baby is learning about its body as it kicks and moves about (see Live Science article, “Babies Create a Mental Map of Their Body Before They Ever Leave the Womb”). These are little people, with bodies and minds, preparing to live independently. If not intentionally killed by abortion, they would grow to be just like us. What sane person could justify using babies like farm animals or crops for harvesting?

Scientists could, that’s who. In a Policy Forum in Science Magazine last week, Meredith Wadman and Jocelyn Kaiser were given the powerful journal’s print space to whimper that “Trump officials move to limit human fetal tissue research.” (Read Medical Xpress for an account of the dispute.) As we list their reasons for objecting to the change in policy (mostly based on pragmatism), let’s think about the horrifying precedent that could spring from their rationalizations. Suppose, for instance, that scientists started harvesting body parts from patients in comas, or prisoners, or the mentally ill, because ‘they are going to die anyway, and we could learn worthwhile things from the material.’* The last time that excuse was tried was by the Nazis, and then, like now, the scientists were complicit in it. Most civilized people condemn the Holocaust, which included Nazi medical experiments on Jews, as the nadir of human evil.

*Notice, please, that this is very different from willing one’s organs or bodies to science after natural death. The ‘medical research’ done on Jews in the 1940s was definitely not with their consent! Nor are unborn babies consenting to being killed. We realize that comparisons to Hitler are often overdone. But in this case the comparison is apt: what Nazi scientists did to non-consenting adults is what abortionists do to unborn babies—and they use some of the same excuses.

Translating Rationalizations

Here are Wadman and Kaiser’s reasons for whimpering about the Trump administration’s change in policy to limit or forbid the use of fetal tissue in research. It’s a case study in how to justify evil. To make it clear how the rationalizations fail, we add comparisons in brackets to Nazi doctors using similar excuses.

The actions have prompted fears that NIH-funded university scientists who work with fetal tissue could face a broader clampdown.

[Nazi scientist: ‘We might face a shortage of Jews to work on if the government reduces the quota.’]

The administration’s actions are already affecting research, scientists say. The NIH order, which was not made public, disrupted one study of the virus that causes AIDS. “We were all poised to go and then the bombshell was dropped,” says HIV researcher Warner Greene, director of the Gladstone Center for HIV Cure Research in San Francisco, California. “The decision completely knocked our collaboration off the rails. We were devastated.

[Nazi lab: ‘They didn’t even tell us they were going to cut our supply of imbeciles. We were going to study how long they could survive in a freezing cold cell. The announcement completely knocked our research off the rails. We feel we’re going to cry.’]

Research using human fetal tissue from elective abortions is legal in the United States, but antiabortion groups and some lawmakers in Congress fiercely oppose federal funding for such work.

[Nazi lab: ‘Hitler had told us it was OK to experiment on Jews. It’s those pesky anti-Nazis who get in our way.’]

“RML [Rocky Mountain Laboratories] researchers use fetal tissue to create humanized mice, which have immune systems that behave like a human’s.”

[Nazi lab: ‘We were using the prisoners to see if they could breed with chimpanzees, which have genomes 95% similar to humans.’]

According to emails provided by Greene, RML researcher Kim Hasenkrug had prepared humanized mice for testing an antibody that might prevent HIV from quickly establishing reservoirs in the human body.

[Nazi lab: ‘We already had Jewish women inseminated by chimpanzees, to see if we could prevent typhoid from infecting them.’]

HHS had “directed me to discontinue procuring fetal tissue from ABR, the only source for us. … This effectively stops all of our research to discover a cure for HIV.”

[Nazi researcher: ‘This effectively stops all of our research to discover a cure for typhoid.’]

Academic scientists with federal grants now worry that they, too, could face restrictions. “Everything I am doing involves humanized mice. It would shut my lab down if we were not able to use fetal tissues,” says Jerome Zack, a virologist who studies HIV at UC Los Angeles and has been using humanized mice for 25 years. The mice, he notes, are also used by cancer scientists developing immunotherapy drugs.

[Nazi researcher: ‘Scientists all over Germany are worried now. My whole career has involved medical experiments on Jews. I know other scientists experimenting on them to try to cure tuberculosis.’]

One concern is that HHS will cut off supplies from ABR [Advanced Bioscience Resources], the largest commercial source of fetal tissue in the United States, which could hurt a swath of U.S. scientists who rely on the firm. “ABR is the most reliable,” Zack says.

[Nazi hospital: ‘Auschwitz is the largest supplier of Jews. Cutting them off could hurt a swath of German scientists who rely on that prison camp for material.’]

Why are we having this discussion?” about alternatives [to fetal tissue], asks biologist Irving Weissman of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who is invited to the HHS event. The impetus for seeking alternatives, he says, is “not from scientists working in the field and trying to understand and treat diseases. It’s a political force apparently coming from above the NIH level.”

[Nazi scientist: ‘Why are we having this discussion about alternatives to prison inmates? That discussion isn’t coming from us German scientists. It’s coming from parties not loyal to the Fuhrer.’]


Are you impressed by Big Science’s complaints that we can’t cure HIV or cancer without baby body parts? How did medical science manage for millennia? Never in the history of medicine have doctors considered it ethical to kill one person to help another. There’s a long-standing Hippocratic Oath that says, ‘Do no harm.’ It’s never right to do wrong to get a chance to do right. Abandonment of human exceptionalism (see yesterday’s article) is leading to infanticide and euthanasia, even in Canada (listen to Wesley J. Smith on ID the Future.)

It happened before, and it can happen again. No; it is happening again. When pragmatism trumps human dignity, the potential horrors become unimaginable. There are reports of North Korea committing Nazi-like atrocities today in the name of scientific research. Evil was not exhausted by the Nazis and communists. Eternal vigilance is the price of human rights.

If you are not horrified by Science Magazine’s rationalization of evil, you should be. Christians are not the only ones saying that human life begins at conception. Genetics and science show that to be true. But look how some scientists dodge the issue of when life begins in this piece on WND.

Study the following resources to see what is at stake.

  • Video clips by the Center for Medical Progress show executives at Planned Parenthood acting flippant and cavalier about baby body parts. One of them wanted to sell enough baby parts to get a Lamborghini. They admitted to manipulating the fetus before the abortion to preserve the parts scientists pay more for, like calvaria (baby skulls with brains intact).
  • Videos by former abortionist Anthony Levitino demonstrate how the most common abortion procedures are done. These clips often turn pro-aborts into pro-lifers within minutes.
  • The film Gosnell  portrays the worst serial killer in American history running a filthy lab for 30 years where women died during abortions, and he was protected by the state from inspections. This was going on in Philadelphia just a few years ago. One startling moment shows a sanitary abortion doctor on the witness stand testifying that her lab is sparkling clean. But then she admits that she performs the same skull-crushing operations on fetuses that Gosnell was accused of doing (as shown in the above videos). Big Media and Big Hollywood tried to censor this well-done, popular movie.
  • The testimony of Gianna Jessen, who survived a saline abortion, includes a strong plea that people like her, who were intended for abortion, have a right to life and a future.

 

 

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