Posted on 04/10/2013 3:57:42 PM PDT by NYer
I try to be acutely sensitive to those in the Jewish community who are angered by any comparison between the Holocaust of the Jews and the executions of 55 million unborn babies.
And yet reading various accounts yesterday, Holocaust Memorial Day, I was irresistibly drawn to something Mark Twain once said: “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
There were doubtless hundreds, if not thousands, of well-written and often heart-breaking accounts published on Monday. I read one (of many) in the Washington Post: “A Train back in time: Held at Auschwitz as children, sisters now teach young people.” If your heart doesn’t break reading the story of Andra and Tatiana Bucci, it’s made of stone.
This account of monstrous evil, written by a mother and daughter team of Emily Langer and Ellen Belcher, can be gotten through only by remembering the girls’ courage and the writers’ conclusion that “They are burdened, but not destroyed by their past.”
But what made me think of what we pro-lifers are fighting began with the fact that the children “were spared because they were mistaken for twins, who were prized by the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele for medical experiments.” We read that relatively early in the story.
Near the end we read this:
“Decades later, they learned that [their cousin] Sergio and the other children had been taken to Germany, where they were infected with tuberculosis for a Nazi medical experiment. In an effort to conceal the brutalization of 20 human guinea pigs, Nazis hanged the children in the basement of a school in Hamburg less than a month before the war ended.’
In my life I have read a number of books about the Holocaust. Many images—especially those written by Elie Wiesel–will remain with me the rest of my days.
This story of the “human guinea pigs” hung in a school basement literally turned my stomach.
The connection to abortion and aborted babies? We forget—or many of us are too young to have ever known—some of the most grotesque experiments performed on aborted babies.
The most infamous was conducted at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Babies aborted by hysterotomy—essentially a C-Section–were kept alive and then their heads cut off (or, as researchers put it, “isolating surgically from the other organs”).
The alleged purpose? According to the June 1973 issue of “Medical World News,” to determine the chemical-processing capability of live fetal brain cells. There are a host of equally vile stories of brutality and unbelievably cruelty.
And that doesn’t even begin to touch on what abortionist Kermit Gosnell is accused off—inhumanity so soul-grinding, so barbaric it need take a back seat to nothing, in this or any other century.
I was about to go through list a range of atrocities, and decided otherwise. Let me instead focus on the one that is not 40 years old, or ten years old, or five years old. A dry run on this grotesque practice is in the headlines now. It is a story that future historians will mine for insight into the ethos of our age.
Last week we ran a story by bioethicist Wesley J. Smith, “Scientists Want to Scavenge Aborted Fetal Ovaries” (http://nrlc.cc/17ns7gj). He quoted from a story in the British newspaper, the Daily Mail
“Scientists have known for some time that female foetuses develop ovaries after as little as 16 weeks in the womb. Now researchers from Israel and the Netherlands have kept ovarian tissue from aborted foetuses alive in the laboratory for several weeks. They stopped the experiment at the point where they believed eggs were about to be produced. Chief researcher Dr Tal Biron-Shental said it was ‘theoretically possible’ that with extra hormone treatment they could have produced mature eggs suitable for IVF use.”
What does this say about us? Plundering the ovaries of aborted babies for IVF treatment, which “raises the nightmare prospect of a child whose biological mother has never been born,” in the words of reporters Beezy Marsh and James Chapman?
They quote Dr. Tom Shakespeare, director of the Policy, Ethics and Life Sciences Research Institute at Newcastle University, who told them “he was ‘deeply uneasy’ about the idea of using aborted foetuses as a source of eggs. ‘My personal view is that it is wrong,’ he said. ‘Partly because it would cause widespread revulsion and partly because you would have somebody born who is the child of someone who never lived. We need to consider the welfare of the child and the impact of finding out that your mother was aborted.’”
But if the child could somehow work his or her way through how they came into existence; if nobody’s stomach turned because “revulsion” had become so passé, it would still be wrong, wrong, wrong.
It would be—and I am confident of this—right up Josef Mengele’s alley.
Ping!
ARGJJH!! That’s disgusting!
We are in SUCH DEEP TROUBLE with the Lord... No wonder everything about this country is falling to *bleep* and the dogs are eating it.
I don't get it.
It is what scientists do.
I know of at least one other university that conducted the very same research.
I have always wondered if the scientists slicing up the babies ever suffer with pangs of guilt.
Thriftiness compelled the Nazis to make lamp shades out of the skin of all those....corpses.Now this.Good to see *some* good coming from an otherwise difficult situation.
(end sarcasm)
I don't want these to be the end times, I don't God to have to come down and rescue us, but Dear Lord, send us some inspiration...
Either the ethical level has fallen or the market for human eggs is growing. I remember discussions on this a decade ago, where they declined doing so because of the moral concern of children finding out their mothers never lived.
The article cites the holocaust against the Jews. In contemporary society, the attacks are against innocent human life in the womb. While different, the purpose is identical ... destruction of the innocent.
It was inevitable.
She is famous because her father helped get a multiple murderer to walk (OJ Simpson) and she was urinated upon in a pornography video.
the stories of history sound a lot like what is happening now... like words that rhyme.
human nature is human nature and everything may not be exactly as it was, but it is surely similar.
mark twain was a genius.
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