Our sensibilities are shocked when we hear of China killing people and selling their organs. Yet the same occurs in our nation, with the Planned Parenthood scandal being a prime example. And now a related case has come to the fore, with a New Mexico academic official admitting that high-school students were given babies’ brains to dissect at his institution. Not only that, but this was done in violation of state law, according to LifeNews.com. As the site reports:
A new video interview [shown below] has surfaced that confirms allegations made by the U.S. House Select Panel on Infant Lives, that staff from the University of New Mexico used brains of aborted babies for dissection by high school students at a summer camp.
Dr. Paul Roth, chancellor of the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center and dean of the School of Medicine, was questioned by Marcie May after a UNM meeting where the disposition of human fetal remains was apparently discussed.
“Can I ask you to repeat what you said before about the workshop with UNM fetal remains with high school students?” May is heard asking during the brief video clip released by the New Mexico Alliance for Life (NMAL) on Youtube.com.
“Yes, we had a faculty member who obtained some tissue, and during one of these summer workshops, uh, dissected I think one or two fetal brains,” Dr. Roth replied.
Roth refused to mention the source of the fetal brains or exactly how they were procured.
Charges haven’t yet been brought against the complicit UNM officials. Yet their actions clearly violate “New Mexico’s Jonathan Spradling Revised Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, which prohibits the use of aborted baby remains in medical research,” LifeNews.com tells us.
And many may wonder if justice will ever be done, as increasingly today “laws are for the little people” (a hallmark of Third World countries, mind you). A case in point is investigative journalist David Daleiden and his Center for Medical Progress, which exposed Planned Parenthood’s practice of trafficking in babies’ body parts. While observers expected that the pre-natal-infanticide organization might be held to legal account, instead, Daleiden was placed in the crosshairs of an activist district attorney and charged with a number of offenses.
Yet what’s offensive is the cold, cavalier attitude Dr. Roth and others have toward trading in flesh. We’d be outraged upon learning that a deceased loved one’s body parts were taken without permission and used for experimentation. Likewise, most understand how wrong it is when Chinese officials do the same with political prisoners, although the emotional distance lessens the passion. But the passion is often replaced by indifference when at issue are aborted babies. There is, somehow, this curious idea that development dictates worth, that size suggests status. And then, of course, we’re told that an unborn baby is an “unviable tissue mass.”
One thing about lies, however, is that the liars never can keep their lies straight. Just consider a 2015 NPR article complaining that the targeting of female babies with pre-natal infanticide, as is relatively common in certain countries, is discriminatory. (Of course, pre-natal infanticide itself is discriminatory: The idea is that while you may not murder people outside the womb, those within it are fair game.) Among the piece’s curious complaints is that discrimination “starts even before they’re [girls are] born, when parents decide to abort a pregnancy if the fetus is female.” This prompted the Daily Wire to ask, “Wow. Is NPR acknowledging that fetuses are human beings deserving of equal rights?” Good question. Why is discriminating among unviable tissue masses a concern? Our battles over discrimination and anti-discrimination laws involve people, not “lumps of cells.”
NPR also writes, “Consider the girls who were never born.” Huh? An unviable tissue mass can be of a sex? Moreover, a “girl” isn’t just a female, but is defined as a female human. So, NPR, is that entity inside the womb a person or not?
Then we have our schizophrenic laws. A man causing a woman to miscarry can be charged with murder — of the very same child the woman the next day could have had a doctor murder.
The reality is that it’s wrong to use your loved one’s or a Chinese prisoner’s body parts without consent because it violates a certain principle: You don’t use people, as if they’re animals or even objects. This principle is either valid or it isn’t. If the latter, we have no business complaining about that loved one being treated like a side of beef or the Chinese trespasses. But be it valid, then, well, as Dr. Seuss famously wrote, “People are people, no matter how small” — or, we might add, how undeveloped.
The truth, though, is that we don’t value an adult more than an infant because he’s bigger. Nor do the sane among us assign a greater right to life merely based on development, although there’s now a growing number of people who believe it’s okay to kill even four- or five-year-old children because, supposedly, they aren’t yet “self-aware.”
This may seem shocking, but it’s merely a step in a progression. Consider: If it’s okay to kill or experiment on an unborn baby of a certain age, what about one a nano-second older? What about one nano-second after that? And what about another nano-second, and another and another and another…? Carry it forward and it follows that if it’s morally licit to kill or experiment on the youngest of humans — who just happen to occupy the womb — it’s also licit to kill or experiment on the oldest of them or anyone in-between. Carry it back and it follows that if the Nazis were wrong to experiment on eight-year-old children, it’s also wrong to experiment on eight-day-old children.
If anyone would disagree, it’s incumbent upon him to explain what moment the “unviable tissue mass” becomes human and why. How is it that one nano-second the being is a person, whereas the previous one it was a ______?
Of course, there is only one moment that matters here: conception. Without it, there is no development as a human because there’s nothing human to develop; with it, the person will start developing and continue changing until naturally induced death — whether from cancer at 50 or miscarriage at 5 months — or until someone kills him. It’s as with a fire. Once the right ingredients for its existence combine, combustible materials, oxygen, and a spark, it will burn until it burns itself out. Or until someone snuffs it out.
Aside from the contradictions mentioned earlier, there’s one more interesting example here of the truth slipping out. Writing in March about how the remains of infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele would now be used for “medical research,” the Daily Mail called the development “a bizarre twist of fate” and wrote, “Observers said there was at least a ‘modicum of satisfaction’ [in the fact that] the infamous German physician, who performed hundreds of thousands of cruel experiments on adults and children, will now be experimented upon in death.” And this satisfaction certainly was reflected in the article’s comments section. Consider, however, what’s implied by this: that the “normal” research on Mengele’s remains is, at least to a degree, relatable to his horrid Nazi experiments.
That “normal” research, mind you, is the same kind for which the babies’ remains are used.
Of course, people will justify this with Mengele because he was guilty of monstrous acts.
What, though, is the excuse with the babies?
