101 USES FOR A DEAD OR ALIVE BABY - PART II
By David W. Balsiger
In our 1984 edition of the Presidential Biblical Scoreboard, weran an article by Dr. Olga Fairfax dealing with experimentation on
aborted fetuses. The article generated so much reader interest that
when we deleted the article for an alternative feature on infanticide,
dozens of customers returned thousands of magazines demanding the
edition containing Dr. Fairfax's articles. As the experimentation on
aborted fetuses shocked and awakened our readers to this heinous
activity in 1984, our Part II article about "fetal harvesting" for
bizarre experiments and transplants may again encourage our readers to
action.
The headlines read - "Spare Parts' Use of Fetuses Sets Off Moral
Debate," "Abortions May Supply Brain Cell Transplants, ""Dead or Just
Dead 'Enough' - The Use of Anencephalic Infants as Organ
Donors,""Obscene Harvest: Selling Fetal Baby Parts for Profit," and
"Trade in Human Tissue Needs Regulation."
The debate behind the headlines centers around "harvesting" fetal
tissues from aborted babies for transplants and the treatment of such
ailments as Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's
chorea, hemophilia, spinal cord injuries, diabetes, leukemia, aplastic
anemia, epilepsy, and radiation sickness.
HOT NEW MEDICAL DEBATE
Harvesting fetal tissue has also led to "organ farming," a
practice of keeping anencephalic babies(those born without an entire
brain) on respirators to preserve the organs in a well-oxygenated state
for transplantation. Critics have charged that doctors are often
removing life-sustaining organs from infants too early - when they are
still alive!
The use of tissues and organs from newborn and unborn babies is
shaping up as the hottest medical debate of the next decade and will
present pro-lifers with a new challenge - women willing to lease their
wombs from the production of fetal tissue to allow an older generaion
to live off the spare parts of the unborn!
Here's a sample of what is already taking place in the U.S. and
Europe:
A California woman wants to be inseminated by her father, who
suffers from Alzheimer's disease, so she can abort the baby and its
brain tissue can be transplanted into her father.
Another U.S. woman whose father suffered from a kidney disease
demanded to be inseminated with his sperm so she could abort the fetus
in the third trimester, thus proving kidneys for implant into her
father.
Mexican doctors removed fetal tissue from both the brain and the
adrenal gland of an aborted baby and transplanted the tissues to the
brains of two Parkinson's disease patients.
Doctors in West Germany have successfully transplanted three
kidneys from two fetuses into two children and one adult.
A California doctor transplanted human fetal thymus glands into
two older children. Both donor humans were killed.
A six-month-old aborted baby had his testicles transplanted into a
28-year-old man who had been unable to become fully sexually active.
TRANSPLANT INDUSTRY
In the U.S. in 1986, 1,400 hearts, 8,000 kidneys, 30,000 corneas,
and 900 livers were transplanted at a cost of nearly one billion
dollars. A transplant industry based on fetal tissue technology and
the pool of 1.5 million aborted babies annually could dwarf the present
organ-transplant industry.
Abortionists, opportunists, and medical entrepreneurs are sizing
up the profits. Witness these public statements:
Judy Rosner, director of the United Parkinson's Foundation in
Chicago, says relief from the disease is more important than attitudes
toward the experiments. "The religious people can go bury their heads
in the sand for all we care."
Dr. Antonin Scommengna at Chicago's Michael Reese Hospital clearly
said what many doctors haven't wanted to say publicly - "I realize this
opens up a Pandor's Box, but I foresee growing fetuses someday for
spare parts. Growing fetuses for spare parts - I think it can be
done!"
A nurse who still works in New York City abortion clinics and
formerly with one-time abortionist Dr. Bernard Nathanson wrote him a
letter in 1987 containing the following excerpt:
"What is going on now at the clinic I work at turns even me off.
(The clinic abortionists) are now discussing with some business people
about selling the tissue and parts.
"I overheard them discussing this last week, and they are even
charging more for brain tissue than for arms and legs and other parts."
THE OBSCENE HARVEST
Dr. Nathanson, arthur of Aborting America and narrator of the
video "The Silent Scream" forecasts the future of fetal tissue use as
an "obscene harvest":
"Since living or freshly-killed, mid-pregnancy tissue is more
desirable, it is obvious that the pool (the potential supply) of
available unborn is restricted to: (1) babies slated for abortion in
the mid-trimester (by far the largest number), (2) babies delivered
prematurely between the 16th and 24th week of pregnancy (a
comparatively small group), and (3) anencephalic infants, children
born with a seriously malformed brain who can survive only a few days
or weeks (2,000 to 3,000 such babies born each year).
"On the other hand, the potential demand for fetal tissues and
organs includes perhaps one million people dying from Parkinson's
disease (a fatal affliction of the brain), two to three million
suffering from Alzheimer's disease (another deadly brain disorder),
400,000 stroke victims, perhaps six million diabetics, and hundreds of
thousands of people wit spinal cord injuries and chronic kidney
disease.
"If we factor in the statistic that, of all the 1.3 million
abortions performed annually in the U.S., only eight percent (120,000)
are done in the period of mid-pregnancy, we have a seriously disordered
market in which demand overwhelmingly exceeds supply.
"Classically, this can only lead to massive abuses; skyrocketing
prices (thus excluding the poor from equal access to these organs),
black marketeering, international trafficking and smuggling with
exploitation of Third World women as fetal organ farms, encouragement
of women to defer abortion until later in pregnancy (inviting rising
complication and death rates from this procedure), and enticing women
to become pregnant and to abort as frequently as possible.
Other potential and equally repulsive scenarios include the
withholding of treatment of extremely premature babies in order to
assure their death and the harvesting of their organs, 'special
arrangements' worked out between transplant surgeons and companies
marketing tissues, and kickbacks to the companies in return for the
referral of the surgeon's names to the purchasers of the organs.
"And where would it end? Now it is proposed that these organs be
used for the treatment of disease, but tomorrow these abhorrent
practices will certainly be proposed for failing sexual function
(transplantation with fetal testicular tissues at $10,000 or so), and
the day after tomorrow for cosmetic purposes (fetal skin, probably
$20,000 an ounce).
DEAD OR ALICE?
Already there are some evidence that live fetuses are being used
for tissues and transplants.
In 1987, the Foundation on Economic Trends (FET), an organization
opposed to genetic engineering, accused the National Institute of
Health (NIH) of failing to monitor whether fetuses have been declared
dead when the tissue is taken. The NIH funds 115 fetal tissue research
projects for $11.6 million annually.
Jeremy Rifkin, president of FET, has asked the NIH to cease
funding of the Philadelphia-based National Disease Research Interchange
(NDRI) which distributes tissue and organ from human fetuses for
scientific research.
Rifkin says NDRI may be harvesting fetal tissue in violation of a
1985 federal law because it does not verify that the aborted infants it
harvests are dead before the organs or tissues are removed. The law
forbids federal funding for the harvesting of fetal parts while the
unborn child is still alice.
Rifkin has also requested the federal Health and Human Services
Department to prevent the attempted commercial sale of fetal tissue by
Hana Biologies of San Francisco. This is the first biotechnology
company actively seeking to profit from the collection and sale of
human fetal tissues and organs.
THE FINAL REDUCTIONISM
Proponents of fetal tissue-transplants are also hinting at
harvesting organs from people who have no economic or social value
(those under 40 I.Q.) and those on the "dead" patient list- people in
comas, the retarded, the brain damaged, and senile, and those in
persistent vegetative states (PVS).
Rifkin summed up the obscene harvest of 101 uses for a dead or
alive baby when he said, "You have the specter of one generation
literally consuming its offspring - harvesting the next generation for
spare parts. That is macabre regardless of what position you take on
abortion. It represents the final reductionism - the reduction of life
into nothing more than matter for manipulation."
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