Posted on 10/18/2005 11:41:01 AM PDT by NYer
AUCKLAND, October 18, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Pro-life groups are roundly criticizing Auckland University scientists who are conducting research on eyes obtained from babies aborted in the US.
New Zealand’s Investigate magazine uncovered what it describes as “Auschwitz-style” experiments on aborted children at the university. Investigate reveals the university has been importing slices of aborted fetuses into New Zealand from America for the past 18 months, in what’s believed to be the first research of its kind in New Zealand.
The University said it approved the research led by Dr Keely Bumsted O'Brien, from the Optometry Department, on the basis of ethical approvals allegedly obtained in the United States, where the fetal body parts are being harvested at abortion clinics. Inquiries by Investigate suggest, however, that there are serious questions about the quality of the ethical approval process in the US. Bumsted O'Brien won a three-year grant worth $827,930 from the taxpayer-funded Health Research Council in May.
A Family Life International statement released Tuesday stated, “The research being conducted at the Auckland University on the remains of aborted foetuses is gravely immoral and it should be stopped immediately. The research that is being carried out on the remains of aborted children at Auckland University is gravely immoral and it can only lead to an even worse devaluing of human life.”
“The mentality that drives such experiments, that the ends justifies the means, is the exact same mentality that fuelled the horrific experiments carried out by Nazi doctors during the Second World War,” the FLI emphasized. “The purchasing of foetal remains, for any reason, turns abortion into a heinous money making exercise, and it further degrades the life of the baby that is lost to abortion and the mother involved.”
The university’s dead baby experiments are currently legal because fetal tissues are excluded from the Human Tissue Act, however new legislation expected in 2006 is expected to make it clear that consent of the mother is necessary before her baby’s remains be used in experiments. The new guidelines are being written by the National Ethics Advisory Committee.
Listen to an Investigate interview with Linda Tracy, the President of Advanced Bioscience Resources Inc, the organisation carrying out fetal body part harvesting in the US: http://www.investigatemagazine.com/ABRinterview.mp...
"her BABY's remains"? I thought that before birth, it's not a baby! Oops, they made a terminology error. Hopefully, these slips will help more people realize that abortion involves a baby, and not just some tissue.
Indeed. Secular humanist liberalism (with its moral relativism)has weakened the sense of moral outrage that people should feel regarding such atrocities. The genocidal crimes of Nazi war criminals still seemed shocking to most people in the 1940s.
Now most liberals embrace the warped eugenic ideas of euthanasia, abortion, and fetal tissue harvesting. Enter, Terri Schiavo. The culture of death has eroded whatever moral foundations protected us in the past. It's a sad legacy to be handed on to future generations.
Back in the eighties I remember hearing about (and I cannot recall the source) that in some foreign countries, ghastly experiments were being performed on aborted children who were at a minimum of 20 weeks along in development. The abortion had to be performed in a specific way (no saline or d&c) so as to preserve and keep intact the head of the infant so that the head would be cleanly severed from the body and 'kept alive' in some manner that seemed like it was a scene out of a horror movie. The purpose was supposedly to carry out neurological research.
Does anyone else out there remember hearing about this or was this urban legend? I genuinely would like to know.
Thanks for the ping!
You pretty much summed it up. This is a result of the macabre left.
Many years ago, HARVEST was such a nice word to me, conjuring up orange pumpkins and cornstalks with frost upon them. Now, the word "harvest" is being thrown around by feminists and leftists in an effort to sanitize atrocious, horrible "crops".
They did not force the Americans into the clinics.
By the time most women realize they are pregnant, their baby has all the bits and pieces made. It's only a matter of growing in size and shape that a person changes from several weeks after conception to adulthood.
IMO how you handle a corpse says a lot about how you regard a living being. And those who lack respect for the vessel, usually lack respect for the life it once contained.
Indeed, in a sense we are all corpses to those who do not respect life; objects and commodities due no special regard.
With all due respect, this hellish practice is a precurser of harvesting body parts from aborted fetuses (and another potential source of income for Planned Parenthood et al).
"baby's remains"
Oops! That writer needs a bit of re-education.
Interesting that the article can't be bothered to mention what the purpose or methods of the research are. And referring to this research as "Auschwitz style" is an obscene mockery of the horrors that alive and aware children and adults were subjected to in the Nazis "research".
Sounds like an urban legend, along with the tales of aborted fetuses being sold in China as edible delicacies, with female fetuses fetching a higher price as they wre supposedly more tender and tasty.
To those who would raise the objection that the babies pre-partum are not human "in the full sense of the word," I can only note that that's what the Nazi race theorists said about the Jews.
And while preborn babies are certainly human, I find myself having twinges of doubt about bioethicists.
This article is about research being done on tissue from aborted fetuses, not living ones. And note that "aborted" in medical terms, refers to the stage at which a pregnancy ended, with no implication of whether it ended naturally or artificially. If a woman loses a baby she was carrying, should she be probibited from donating its body to research, that might help a lot of people? If a parent loses a child in an accident, should that parent be prohibited from donating the child's organs for research or transplant?
This article carries no information whatsoever about the type of research being done, but since it's being done at a legitimate medical institution, it's probably legitimate research. What's the problem? You may have a problem with induced abortions, but it's a big jump from that, to condemning all research using fetal tissue, regardless of its origin.
It's doubtful that the researcher in question has any knowledge of what percentage of the fetuses whose tissue he is using comes from spontaneous abortions, what percentage comes from abortions that were urgently needed to save teh mother's life (quite common, when pre-eclampsia becomes severe, and it will kill both the mother and baby, if the baby isn't taken first), and what percentage comes from "choice" abortions. I seriously doubt that there is any fetal tissue supplier in the world that categorizes tissue that way. This researcher is doing research, not performing abortions, nor causing abortions to be performed that otherwise wouldn't have been.
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