Killing Babies for Stem Cells?
The BBC has a very disturbing report that newborn infants may be being killed in the Ukraine to harvest their stem cells. This follows hard on the heels of another story that women in the Ukraine are paid $200 to get pregnant for purposes of aborting at 8 weeks gestation to harvest stem cells--for beauty treatments, no less.
These stories fall fast on the heels of people going to China to buy organs for transplant that were probably taken from executed prisoners, and perhaps, Falun Gong religionists. And there are the stories of destitute Pakistanis and Turks selling one of their kidneys.
This commoditization of human life is pernicious, may be growing, and is of crucial concern in many fields. Cloners need human eggs for each cloning attempt. If human cloning ever took off, it would require tens of millions of eggs, and the worry is that poor women will become so many egg farms. I am convinced that cloning will research will eventually lead to fetal farming--which if personhood theory is accepted, would be perfectly permissible. Meanwhile, bioethicists and biotechnologists urge that we harvest people in PVS and use them in radical human experimentation.
When we lose sight of the need to promote human exceptionalism and its corollary, the intrinsic value of human life, these are the territories we enter.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 9:04 AM
3 Comments
3 Comments:
It looks from the first article as if these babies may have been snatched at birth even against their mother's wishes. Don't the _mothers_ have any rights, even among those who believe the children have none?
Second, the article linked re. beauty treatments is pretty misleading at the beginning. It describes stem-cell treatments using *umbilical cord* cells and then says that President Bush has "condemned stem-cell treatment as 'godless.'" Now, first of all, I'd love to see where those quotes come from. I'd bet he never used the word, but that's the UK perception of the American Yahoo theocrats. Second, neither Bush nor anyone else has condemned (per se) umbilical cord stem-cell treatment, but this part of the article implies that they have. Of course, exploiting people with untested treatments using umbilical cord cells is unethical for its own reasons, but not because of anything to do with stem-cells.
Media bias on parade. Bush has actively PROMOTED UBC stem cells. Indeed, he was instrumental in helping pass the bill that permits a UBC stem cell national banking system.
There is real value to using bone marrow as a source of stem cells; such treatments have been used with volunteer adult donors for many years. Yet the rich clients who pay to obtain them from dead babies cannot seriously expect that some sort of "ethics" will guide the Ukrainian doctors who are complicit with murder.
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