HISTORY
The use of fetal tissue for the purposes of biomedical research dates back to the late 1920’s. As Mary Carrington Coutts explains, “As early as 1928 unsuccessful attempts were made to transplant fetal pancreas cells into diabetics (VII, Fichera 1928). Fetal tissue was used effectively in biomedical research during the 1950s, and was instrumental in the culture of the polio virus, which led to the development of the polio vaccine. Fetal tissue cultures were also essential in the development of the rubella vaccine, and continue to be used in virology research. Transplantation of fetal thymus cells into patients with DiGeorge Syndrome has been recognized as effective therapy since the late 1960s.”[1]
There are those who would claim that the incidence of acquiring fetal tissue from a still living baby in the womb is rare, but reality contradicts that claim. Bernard Nathanson, M.D., world-renowned expert in fetology and abortion, describes a certain procedure this way: “Pregnant women, 13-18 weeks are placed on an operating table, the cervix is dilated, the bag of waters is broken, the fetal head is guided into position just above the open cervix. The fetal skull is drilled open and suction device is placed into the brain. The brain tissue is then suctioned out and placed immediately on ice to preserve its viability. The fetus is then aborted.”[2]
As grotesque as this may sound to you, it is no more so than the 1968 research done by Geoffrey Chamberlain during which he delivered a 26-week-old fetus (baby) attached to an “artificial placenta” and then kept that baby alive for five hours before it died.
The problem is that it is legal in America to carry on such experiments, and to do so with the greatest human respect in some quarters. Since the baby is not recognized as a human being in the law of this country, no one is even considered as speaking on his or her behalf with regard to consent. The baby becomes human enough for experimentation and research but not human enough to be respected.
HAS CONGRESS APPROVED AN AMERICAN EUGENICS PROGRAM?
Eugenics: the science of improving the genetic qualities of the human race.
In the field of biomedical research, scientists are constantly pushing the edge of ethics, and surely this new science of fetal tissue research cloaked with the respectability of government sanction raises a specter many will find uncomfortable and disconcerting. For example, think about the lead paragraph in a May 18, 1993, USA Today article: “At a hospital laboratory in Denver, a cluster of brain tissue collected from aborted fetuses is being kept alive and nourished in a bath of umbilical cord blood.”
Or this statement from the same article, “Scientists are studying the remarkable life-giving properties of fetal tissue and trying to mimic its abilities.”
Now compare those comments with the description researchers Daniel Wikler and Jeremiah Barondess give to the German eugenics program, which they also refer to as biomedical politics: “it was susceptible to a world-view in which the basic unit of biology was something larger than the individual. Whether that unit, the ‘patient,’ was the race, the nation or mankind as a whole, the ‘defective’ individual would be viewed as a diseased part, harming the larger organism through its contributions to the latter’s gene pool and impairing its functioning by its inability to contribute usefully to the work done by others.”[3]
Is the preborn child a defective? The answer is yes, because that child has been deemed to be less than human: unwanted and disposable.
Is the preborn child a “diseased part”? Yes, the child causes inconvenience to the woman carrying him or her, but yet can at the same time make a contribution to the cell pools of those who are working to eliminate disease from those already born and still considered to be human.
Couldn’t this preborn child contribute usefully to the work done by others if allowed to be born? No one needs to answer that question because in the United States that baby is not even a legal human being.
Authors Wikler and Barondess say that society must recognize the moral disease that afflicted the physicians who began the eugenics program in Germany in the 1920s, and they suggest that we cannot prevent society from beginning the moral slide downward unless that slide is “blocked at the top.” But as we know, in America, it is those very institutions positioned at “the top” that have pushed for fetal tissue research, clamored for government approval of the same and are now raking in extraordinary amounts of money and fetal body parts.
THE RUSSIAN CONNECTION
As reported on 60 Minutes, and by Fiona Fleck for Reuters News Service, U.S. plastic surgeon Michael Molnar left his practice in Hollywood, California, to pursue “research” at the world’s largest fetal tissue bank, the International Institute of Biological Medicine in Moscow.[4], [5] Funded by Western dollars, located in a country where millions of abortions occur each year, and encouraged by his American counterparts, it is Molnar’s institute that is shipping containers of fetal tissue on ice to the Sansum Clinic in Santa Barbara, California, so that greater inroads can be made in the science of fetal farming.[6]
And when you read such phrases as “joint venture” and “new funding sources” you can readily assume that, as a matter of plain fact and good business, there is a fortune to be made in this new American-style form of research that attempts to improve the quality of life of those already born by harvesting the bodies of those deemed only human enough for research purposes. It would seem that some scientists do not ask the question “Just because we can, should we?” but rather ask, “What possible rewards might we earn?”
THE SALES PITCH IS NOT NEW
As we have read so many times, the many applications the use of this tissue might serve are still unknown, for the research is very much in the experimental stage. There is every possibility that the very existence of legal abortion provides a ready market whereby men and women of science can make extraordinary amounts of money and pursue their research while perhaps offering financial incentives to women who might not otherwise choose to destroy their preborn children. How appealing it might be to a woman who is distressed over a pregnancy if she heard that by submitting her child to death by abortion, a great good would come from that child’s death and sick people would be made well again! Though this emotional sales approach has no basis in fact, the truth is that women in distress could be made to feel quite comfortable with a decision to abort their children.
But what about the mother? Surely science at least cares about her health! According to our analysis of a report from the University of Minnesota Center of Bioethics, abortion practices are actually altered. “Abortion procedures are at times altered, without telling the woman, in order to procure a higher quality, fresher specimen. These changes include: using forceps to extract the fetus prior to sectioning, using larger cannulas, catching the fetus intact before it is macerated by the suction machine, using general anesthesia rather than local, and choosing the D & E abortion technique. The procedure is thus lengthened from less than 10 minutes to thirty minutes. The above alterations increase the woman’s risk of complications such as: perforated uterus, infection, laceration, hemorrhage, incompetent cervix, and systematic complications from general anesthesia.”[7]
“Moreover, there are further problems for the mother and for the potential recipient of the newly harvested tissue: “It is ‘uncommon’ for the mother to be told in consent forms that the abortion procedure is being changed to obtain a better specimen.” (page 8)
“Consent forms ‘rarely’ indicate whether tests for HIV or other infectious agents will be done, who will have access to this information, or what types of research will be done on the fetus.” (page 8)
“‘None of the reports reviewed discuss testing for infectious agents before transplantation.'” (page 43)
“Where fresh tissue is required (as with thymus, liver, and usually brain tissue) ‘there are significant time limitations on which quality control studies can be performed prior to transplantation.'(page 201)”[8]
So, while the mother may be able to justify her abortion, she is also putting her own life at risk, not to mention a future patient who truly believes that the “fresh” tissue will cure a disease. These matters do not seem to be of concern to the fetal tissue (aficionados) entrepreneurs.
LISTEN TO OTHERS
There has been so much written about the many problems we face as a nation willing to recycle our children that it is well for us to ponder the comments of credible Americans who agree with our position. The following excerpts from such writings may assist you in acquiring a better understanding of the problem and dealing with it properly in your community and with your elected officials.
James Huston, an attorney who lives in Escondido, California, and who describes his mother as a woman ravaged by Parkinson’s disease before her death, writes: “Ultimately, the way people feel about fetal-cell implantation will depend on how they feel about abortion. If what is being aborted is a human being with a brain and a heart, the fact that it will ultimately be used for a noble purpose makes the killing no less acceptable and the use no more honorable.
“If it is not a human being, then the end use doesn’t matter and we shouldn’t be troubled in the least by what is done with it outside of normal health concerns.
“I, for one, am troubled.”[9]
Robert J. White, M.D., who is deeply involved in brain research, writes, “In the final analysis, transplanting fetal brain tissue to the brains of patients with terminal neurological disease represents a double violation of medical morality. First, it involves human experimentation without adequate animal-model investigation significantly demonstrating its therapeutic advantage and safety; and, second, the absolute requirement of transplanting living tissue from a viable brain–a brain that remains a functioning entity until direct surgical dissection removes the deep structures needed for grafting. At that moment, the fetal brain is immediately and irreversibly destroyed.”[10]
Bernard N. Nathanson, M.D., writes, “Abortion itself is such an unmitigated evil that no morally acceptable benefits can be derived from it. How many of us–no matter how ill–would have accepted tissues and organs harvested from Jews put to death by the Nazis in the infamous gas chambers of Eastern Europe? How many opponents of capital punishment would accept the tissues and organs of the subjects of sanctioned execution by the State? How many of us–even though terminally ill and desperately needing organ transplants–would accept the heart or pancreas or brain cell of the victim of a lynching? If you have answered in the negative to any of these questions you then must understand the visceral abhorrence of this fetal tissue technology on the part of those who still believe in the sanctity of human life.
“If you have answered yes to any of these questions–God help you.”[11]
Senator Robert Smith (R-NH) writes, “Why has such an obscure and untried technology as transplanting human brain cells been treated as a miracle cure? “One suspects that, in many cases, this is hardly more than a cynical attempt to enlist another group of hope-starved Americans into efforts to achieve abortion on demand.
“The radical abortion-on-demand lobby is taking advantage of the highly charged emotions surrounding the issue of medical research in order to further its own agenda of abortion at any time, for any reason.
“Using the remains of an aborted child for ‘medical research’ is just one more way to justify the abortion of unwanted babies. It is time to end the manipulation.”[12]
IS MEDICINE ACCOUNTABLE?
One final thought about those German eugenics programs and their popular counterpart in the United States comes from an understanding of exactly what physicians did not understand about what was going on in the name of science as early as the 1920s:
” . . . all of the physicians of Germany were participants in the sense that they were aware of the program’s existence. . . . Selection was made on the basis of [their reports], and patients selected would be transferred to the killing institutions. No doctor could have been unaware of the depletion of the hospital wards or the disappearance of his patients. The doctors stood silent as their chronic patients received medical referrals to other doctors who would kill them. (1990, pp. 62-63; emphasis in original)”[13]
As Stanley Fahn, M.D., Director, The Center for Parkinson’s Disease and Other Movement Disorders, wrote, “We are not talking about babies, we are talking about fetuses.”[14]
Notes
1.Coutts, Mary Carrington, “Fetal Tissue Research,” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, Vol. 3, #1, pp. 81-101.
2.Johnson, Walter, M.D., “Don’t Be Lulled: Live Fetuses Used in Tissue Transplants,” New Earth, 5/93, p. 14. Further reading:
(A) Haskell, Martin, M.D., “Second Trimester D and X, 20 Wks and Beyond,” National Abortion Federation presentation, 10/92, 10 pages;
(B) Hutchinson, Robert, “Fetal Harvesting Insanity,” You! 5/93, pp. 20-23 complete with graphic drawings of how the baby’s brain cells are extracted prior to the completion of the abortion.
3.Wikler, Daniel, and Barondess, Jeremiah, “Bioethics and Anti-Bioethics in Light of Nazi Medicine: What Must We Remember?” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, Vol. 3, #1, pp. 39-55.
4.Fleck, Fiona, “Russians Start Human Foetal Tissue Transplant Operations,” Reuters News Service, 3/20/93, #2115.
5.”Human Fetal Tissue Transplantation Treatment for Diabetes (DM), Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s Disease Available to U.S. Patients in Moscow,” PR Newswire, 9/24/92.
6.”Fetal Tissue: Moscow Clinic and U.S. Doc Enter Partnership,” Abortion Report, 5/18/93, p. 10.
7.Marshall, Hon. Robert, “Excerpts, Summary and Analysis of ‘The Use of Human Fetal Tissue: Scientific, Ethical and Policy Concerns,'” prepared by American Life League, 1992.
8.Ibid.
9.Huston, James W., “Fetal-Tissue Implants: An Ethical E-ticket Ride,” San Diego Union-Tribune, 4/27/92.
10.White, Robert J., M.D., “Fetal Brain Transplantation: Questionable Human Experiment,” America, 11/28/92, pp. 421-22.
11.Nathanson, Bernard, M.D., “Fetal Tissue Research and Experimentation,” ALL About Issues, 3-4/92, pp. 33-34.
12.Smith, Senator Robert, “There Is a Moral Line We Cannot Cross When It Comes to Fetal Tissue Research,” Roll Call, 5/21/92, pp. 33-34.
13.Wikler and Barondess, op. cit., p. 47, quoting By Trust Betrayed, by Hugh Gallagher.
14.1/6/93 letter from Dr. Fahn to Ms. Mary Barron.
RECOMMENDED READING:
LeJeune, Jerome, M.D., The Concentration Can, Ignatius Press, 190 pp., $11.95
Rini, Suzanne, Beyond Abortion: A Chronicle of Fetal Experimentation, 186 pp. Request item #EG2 from American Life League, $7.95+s/h
