FETAL TISSUE RESEARCH

The question of whether the federal government ought to fund research on aborted children has recurred periodically since 1975, when an "Ethical Advisory Board" at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare approved experimentation on aborted—but still living—fetuses. Public outcry when the nature of such experiments was revealed brought a temporary end to the research, not only because of its grisly character, but also because the people recognized no clear purpose in experiments such as severing the heads from aborted babies and maintaining their brains alive.

But fetal tissue research is no longer on the grotesque fringe of science. Some researchers have suggested that fetal tissue—particularly fetal brain tissue—may be spectacularly regenerative and adaptable, and hence suitable for transplant into victims of diabetes, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease for near miraculous cures. This unsubstantiated promise of relief for millions of sufferers has brought fetal research to the forefront of the abortion battle.

Justifying the Abortion Industry:
When the facts of the case are laid out, it is evident that experimentation on aborted children has less to do with helping sick people than with justifying the abortion industry. The effect will not, of course, be immediate, and therein lies part of the problem. People who should know better have been persuaded that safeguards {e.g., preventing the aborting mother from specifying the recipient of her baby's tissue) will prevent any abuse.

But opponents point out that once the barrier between abortion and government funding is penetrated, it can be only a matter of time before the supposed safeguards are shunted aside. As Georgetown University Professor Daniel Robinson—a member of the 1988 NIH [National Institutes of Health] panel on fetal tissue transplantation—put it one evening on CNN's Crossfire, we can establish safeguards in 1392, but ". . . if it turned out that a significant public health problem could be addressed by taking down that so called impenetrable wall, how long do you think it would be before some progressive and right thinking Congressman" would move to strike down the barriers? . . . Abortion proponents can afford to be generous with "safeguards" because they know that safeguards never last long.

They deride the notion of a slippery slope even as they take advantage of it in achieving their ends in Congress. Some tactical ground may have been ceded to the abortionists when the Bush Administration adopted as its chief argument against the bill the possibility that potential good coming from research would encourage women to have abortions. This triggered angry complaints from feminist groups that the White House was "patronizing" women, suggesting they choose to have abortions lightly.

But no one has suggested that fetal tissue research will cause women to become cavalier about abortion; the issue is that abortion itself may become ennobled. As Professor Robinson put it, "To do something that will save other human lives is not to do something cavalier." Again, fetal tissue experimentation is only the first step. Once it is tolerated it will be embraced. Once embraced, what then? How long before we have an unregulated "fetus industry" in which the organs of unborn babies are bought and sold as commonly as pints of blood?

Babies as Biological Raw Material:
Treating unborn babies as a kind of medical cornucopia would be unwise in any circumstance. It is no accident that abortion supporters combine one highly questionable assumption—that fetal tissue therapy will work—with a second even more dubious proposition—that the federal government by statute can establish (or, for that matter, disestablish! fundamental rights. Both are part of a larger agenda of maintaining abortion on demand.

Fetal tissue transplants are dubious science, ethically bankrupt and an open invitation to treat the unborn as so much biological raw material. They should be vigorously opposed.

The New York Times once called the comparison between abortion and the Holocaust obscene." Contemporary researchers bridle at any analogy between themselves and Nazi scientists. The fact remains that, as Joseph Sobran noted (in a column titled "The Angel of Choice"), the Nazi researchers shared the premises of some of those who think they are exactly the opposite of Nazis. Writing of Dr. Joseph Mengele, the Nazi Angel of death" who spent the latter years of his life working as an abortionist in Argentina, Sobran says:

He saw himself as a progressive, and he was right. He had liberated himself from stifling moral traditions, and he was in the vanguard of change, seeking new scientific answers through experimentation. He shared the Darwinian materialism of his time, which is still our time, even if the Nazi wing has gone a little out of fashion. Abortion, fetal experimentation, surrogate motherhood, genetic engineering—he would have been right at home with these new developments. In fact, he could fairly consider himself a pioneer, a casualty of progress who was ahead of his time.

The "murderous science" of the Nazis didn't begin with Hitler and it didn't begin overnight. Eugenics programs—always begun in the name of high humanitarian principles—were well established during the Weimar Republic. Germany didn't accidentally wake up evil one morning; the German people simply got slowly accustomed to breaking down the safeguards separating science from atrocity.

"Squandering" Goof Material:
The late Dr. Leo Alexander, a consultant at the Nuremberg trials once interviewed a Nazi doctor who defended his experimentation on the carefully removed brains of 100 Holocaust victims. He was not a murderer, he argued, because he had not marked the victims for death. But it would have been a shame to squander "such wonderful material!" It would have been a pity not to get something good for humanity from their deaths!

Is that not the precise argument of those who ask with respect to fetal tissue experimentation? Wouldn't it be a pity not to get something good for humanity from the babies marked for death in any case? With all due respect to Senator Thurmond, when he asked from the Senate floor, "If this is going to help humanity, why not do it? What could be the objection to it? was he not rejecting the world's collective verdict at Nuremberg? The world indeed decided at Nuremberg that it had numerous objections—chief among them the judgment that "progress" erected over the graves of the innocent is not worth achieving.

Fascination and Danger:
Not that progress doesn't have its attractions. In her best-selling novel, The Witching Hour, Anne Rice explores the fascination and danger of fetal research from a scientist's point of view: "I saw it in the incubator, this little fetus. Do you know what he called it? He called it the abortus.... and this thing had been sustained, alive, she said, "from a four month abortion, and you know he was developing means of live support for even younger fetuses. He was talking of breeding embryos in test tubes and never returning them to the womb at all but all of this to harvest organs. You should have heard his arguments, that the fetus was playing a vital role in the human life chain, could you believe it, and I'll tell you the horrible part the really horrible part, it was that it was utterly fascinating, and I loved it. I saw the potential uses he was describing. I knew it would be possible some day to create new and undamaged brains for coma victims. Oh, God, you know all the things that could be done, the things that I, given my talent, could have done!

He nodded. "I can see it," he said softly, "I can see the horror of it and I can see the lure."

Is the real creed of our Science that what we can do, we must do? There is no question but that "progress"—no matter how achieved—can be enticing. But it is equally clear that by funding research on aborted babies, even under supposedly well controlled circumstances, our Congress will be opening Pandora's Box. As Daniel Robinson noted (citing Hegel) in his debate on Crossfire: "What the state permits, it encourages."

Fetal Tissue Research and Parkinson's Disease:
Fetal Tissue Research is an abominable practice and not only is it morally wrong, it's unessential. One of the main diseases that the medical field is using to push fetal tissue research is Parkinson's disease. Just to hear the name of this ailment makes most of society smile with joy and say great! Keep up the good work. Now I want to share with you the story behind the scenes.

For those of you who might not know, Parkinson's disease is a brain disorder that is progressive, and the person who has it suffers a loss of motor control. It strikes on out of every 100 people over the age of 60, and there's no cure for it at this time. Parkinson's disease is due to the decline of a brain chemical called dopamine.

Fetal tissue researchers believe that the use of fetal tissue transplants will replace dopamine and cause an improvement in patients. It doesn't. There isn't any credible research suggesting that fetal tissue transplants work. When patients are given the tissue transplants, holes are actually bored through the head. This is so doctors can administer the fetal tissue directly to the brain. The needle containing the fetal tissue causes damage to deep structures "which are abnormally overactive in Parkinson's disease".

These cuts in the brain is what may cause improvement to a patient's functions, by making those cuts in the deep nuclei that's responsible for movement, not the fetal tissue. There is already a medical treatment called surgical lesions that does just what I have described. So why are some doctors determined to transplant fetal tissue into people's heads when it isn't doing the patients any good? If the surgical lesions are making patients better, then why not admit that a tried and true medical treatment is effective, rather than give the illusion that fetal transplants work?

Fetal tissue research exploits women by altering abortion techniques, because doctors need good tissue samples to use. The suction procedure macerates fetuses "before they are removed from the uterus". This causes the least pain and danger to women. When women consent to donate their fetuses to research, doctors modify the suction procedure, so it won't be hard to identify various tissues and so they will be able to retrieve intact fetuses. This means that the time it takes to perform an abortion is extended, and women are at a greater risk of danger. Doctors are less concerned about the aborting woman, than the potential recipient of the tissue. "The role of women in fetal tissue research is, after all, to provide the raw material"

Fetal tissue research cannot justify abortion by citing a benefit from it. The fact still remains that unborn babies are being killed and now what's left of their little bodies are being used in experiments in an attempt to preserve the lives of other. These babies don't get a say in either matter.