The Drudge Report recently highlighted a shocking story from the BBC that centered on "disturbing video footage" of "dismembered tiny bodies." "Healthy new-born babies" in the Ukraine, "the self-styled stem cell capital of the world," have allegedly been killed "to feed a flourishing international trade in stem cells."
Apparently this isn't an isolated problem. The Council of Europe "describes a general culture of trafficking of children snatched at birth, and a wall of silence from hospital staff upwards over their fate." Imagine the horror of young mothers who "gave birth to healthy babies, only to have them taken by maternity staff." What happened to these newborns was anybody's guess, but recent footage obtained by the BBC may provide insight into their fate: "The pictures show organs, including brains, have been stripped--and some bodies dismembered."
The BBC report comes as a complete shock to most readers. But to those steeped in biotech news and bioethical literature, the latest out of the Ukraine is only a partial shock. While no one expected baby-snatching in maternity wards, it seemed inevitable that the business of stem cell research would, at some point, produce an abomination of this kind.
At least publicly, supporters of various embryo-, fetus-, or infant-killing programs have always argued that these options were reluctantly chosen, out of dire necessity, and only on the least-human of subjects--so-called "spare" embryos, "unwanted" pregnancies, and gravely disabled newborns.
And so at first the abortion lobby argued that fetuses aren't human. Then, as embryology and developmental biology
decisively demonstrated that an unborn child is most definitely a complete, though immature, human being, the rhetoric shifted to discussions of competing rights and interests between the mother and her unborn child, along with appeals to the right to privacy. It was conceded that the decision for abortion is tragic, and, though it entails the ending of a life, sometimes it is an absolutely necessary result of the conflicting needs between the mother and child. And it was insisted that it is best if doctors and women are allowed to adjudicate these situations, in private, for themselves.
Intellectual defenders of abortion painted a picture of simply ceasing a pregnancy: The unborn child has no inalienable right to inhabit the mother's womb. A woman doesn't make a choice to kill, simply a choice to end pregnancy--to remove the unwanted baby from her body. Her body, her choice.
Yet this didn't prove to be satisfactory. The further claim was made that the "right" to an abortion consisted in the right to an "effective abortion." And an effective abortion entails not the ending of a pregnancy, but the death of a child. Witness the phenomena of partial-birth abortion and born-alive abortion.
But the issue of stem cell research can not appeal to any of these claims of women's welfare, privacy, or "the right to choose." Though the case of embryonic stem cells doesn't pose a direct competition of rights or interests--unborn embryos do not pose a threat to anyone--public arguments were made about competing interests of patients: "You pro-lifers are favoring embryos over Parkinson's victims." When these arguments prove ineffective, defenders of embryo-destructive research turn to a utilitarian one: embryos can be put to better use as raw material for biomedical research.
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