Ignorance is often a preference. It allows us to benefit from things our conscience might deny us. ‘Informed consent’ can be something we need to force upon ourselves.
Science, we prefer to think, has removed us from the dark inhumanity of human sacrifice and the historic callousness that would kill and dismember a child as insurance against starvation. The Aztecs and Maya dismembered living prisoners to appease gods and ensure crop fertility, which they believed essential to survival. The Egyptians and Norse killed servants of their deceased wealthy to improve the quality of their after-life. Our futures now are secured on the laboratory bench rather than the stone altar. We have Science, and consider ourselves far better off because of it.
A few days ago, someone shared this short video, ‘It’s OK’, about four minutes long and worth watching. It is made by a group opposing abortion called Choice42. The abortion issue is complicated and evokes emotions and is discussed later. What matters here is that the video is well researched, objective and explains how scientists are paid to cut and disembowel live humans on laboratory benches in the hope of improving the futures of those who pay them and the rest of us. As a society, we have developed well-organised, methodical ways to do this, and pride ourselves in their cleverness. The video is very moving – it is meant to be because pulling little humans apart without anaesthetic for the benefit of others is something that, when removed from its veil of scientific progress, can be hard to think about.
The use of aborted human foetuses and embryos brought us many of the vaccines we use today, including some promoted by the Roman Catholic Church and those used by many who oppose abortion itself. The cell cultures derived from the unborn babies represented in the video, and from similar cases, are used widely by people working in the biological sciences. They can be purchased online. Undoubtedly, many lives of people who lived after have been saved by the use of some of these cell lines, and people are therefore born today who would not be if the cells had not been harvested.
The researchers who regularly work with these cells come from a whole swathe of different cultures, religious beliefs and political perspectives. Mostly, they probably never seriously consider whom the cells in the petri dish descended from. If they do, they may dismiss the harvesting as too long ago to be relevant (though the practice continues) or somehow necessary (as the Aztecs did, needing to keep the world itself habitable). The video simply reminds us of certain truths, and of how willing we are, or how far we will go, to ignore them.
What is a human foetus?
Abortion is an emotive subject, but unfortunately also politicised, and this makes any discussion like this difficult. So, to be clear, this article is not about abortion, on which my views are nuanced. As a doctor, I have taken part in abortions, as prior family members took part in bombing people and machine-gunning them. I have used some of the products mentioned in the video here and have no high ground to stand on. I have also worked in a country where several thousand women die of septic abortions every year, because they cannot access practices safe for them. Taking a life is a terrible thing, and sometimes circumstances can lead to choices between terrible things. Nearly all of us find ways around “Thou shall not kill”. But we need to understand what is happening.
The other thing to be clear on here is whether a developing foetus is a human (i.e., a person). The World Health Organisation (WHO) considers them “pregnancy tissue” until delivery from the womb in its hopelessly incoherent Abortion Care Guidelines, and ”lives lost” if they happened to be born prematurely before being deliberately aborted. Such a position, that personhood is purely geographical (in or out the womb) is convenient but obviously bankrupt, telling us more about WHO than the status of a foetus. The unborn foetus can hear, respond, feel pain, move, and is fully genetically human.
Having spent months nursing a baby born at 28 weeks, I had no doubt of that child’s humanity. I have cradled premature babies born far earlier before they died. They move, struggle to breathe sometimes for hours, and I am unable to see how they were not human children, helpless though they were. Outside of a eugenicist or fascist mindset, I also struggle to see how there can be a hierarchy of human worth. We are equal or we are not, and that is not dependent on an arbitrary time of existence or the arbitrariness of position within or without the womb. This does not mean humans cannot be killed (sadly, we have wars still and may sometimes also face other difficult choices), but those we kill are our equals.
Most of us also consider humans different in worth and essence from other animals. However, irrespective of one’s view on this, we do have strict rules on the use of animals in research. Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) for ethics are usually reluctant to allow the infliction of pain on animals. There was a loud outcry when the National Institutes of Health were shown to have been torturing beagles in the name of science. Hollywood movies using animals have a standard line in the credits reassuring us that “no animal was harmed”. We don’t, for whatever reason, afford the same care to developing, unborn members of our own species, and we don’t at present label our medicines to indicate their derivation from such practices. That is a strange thing, and seems somewhat cowardly.
Inflicting pain on living beings
So, the point of the video, and this article, is not the rightness or wrongness of abortion. It is that we sacrifice others in horrific ways for our own good, or accept others (the high priests of our Science) doing it for us. We accept that it is worth cutting open a developing human without anaesthetic, disembowelling him or her and using bits we cut out for experiments that may or may not prove useful to someone. The only really relevant factor is that someone was willing to pay for it to be done. So, we accept it.
This practice (which you would be jailed in the United States for doing to a cat) is considered so acceptable when done to our own that many jurisdictions actually mandate that people have vaccines developed from such practices injected into them. There is strong political pressure at present to block religious exemptions in the United States, preventing people from opting out of partaking in the results of such practices. With some religious leaders insisting that the use of products derived from foetal mutilation is an act of love, refusal based on revulsion at the slicing and tearing of live humans becomes very much a personal matter that can elicit considerable retribution from society.
The choices we make
It is not necessary to do these experiments. This is true on two levels. Firstly, the human race was not dying out before we started doing this. Most health gains come from what we eat, how we live and our environment (e.g. good sanitation). What we derive from foetal stem cells and organs is a small fractional gain on top of this. For some people it may be life or death, but for nearly all it is not. There is no such thing as “essential medical research”, just desirable research, and research that someone is paying to have done (which may or may not coincide). Secondly, it is possible to get stem cells from adults, from bone marrow and other organs. It is harder, and they are less adaptable, so such cells may be less effective in developing the products we desire. But this is certainly a risk we can reasonably choose to take.
We can do well, as a society, without tearing aborted, still-living babies apart. We choose to do this for small incremental gain. We are horrified at what the Aztecs did, and think we are better, but objectively we are essentially the same. We sacrifice growing humans, with pain and lack of concern, in the hope of a common good for the rest of us. We make a choice, based on how we value others and value ourselves.
Facing what we do, or have become party to, should not always be a comfortable thing. The past is in the past, but foetal harvesting is still happening. For those who believe a person exists beyond their organic form, the past also continues to have relevance today. We can block from our minds what we do to others for our benefit, but if humanity is worth anything, then we should recognise the act of betrayal that involves.
At the very least, based on logic, rationality and decency, we should be transparent. This should ensure truly informed consent, labelling medicines, for instance, as having been derived or not through procedures or experiments on unconsented humans. Then, clearly, we should respect those who say “no” and wish no part in the outcomes of what they may consider repugnant or immoral practices. Forcing others to follow our own choice in this matter through mandates would be unjustifiable under any enlightened system of human values.
Dr David Bell is a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and background in internal medicine, modelling and epidemiology of infectious disease. Previously, he was Programme Head for Malaria and Acute Febrile Disease at FIND in Geneva and coordinating malaria diagnostics strategy with the World Health Organisation. He is a Senior Scholar at the Brownstone Institute.
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