So is everyone on board with using our tax dollars to let scientists play Doctor Moreau? Obama and his league of leftists sure are. In their progressive worldview, if something is technologically possible we should be totally unencumbered by any trivial moral or ethical concerns.
In the real world, this do-it-because-we-can mentality translates into such “compassionate” medical “advances” as killing babies in the womb, cutting penises off males – and adding them to females, euthanizing “undesirables,” abandoning fertilized embryos and sterilizing unsuspecting African women.
Naturally the Left is anxious to embrace the next brave new medical frontier: creating animal/human hybrids for science. This recent article from To the Source explains what’s involved ~
(They’re conducting) experiments by which human stem cells are injected into animal embryos, creating what are known as “chimeras,” that is an organism with the genetic makeup of more than one species. Of greater concern this experimentation could, one day, lead to the birth of mostly animals that exhibit some human attributes, such as, say rationality.
What could possibly go wrong?
Nothing that progressives can imagine that’s for sure. Which is why your federal government, specifically the Nation Institutes of Health (NIH), thinks they should lift the current moratorium on using tax payer funds for this nefarious research. As LifeSite News reported last month ~
On August 4, 2016, the NIH announced that it will begin spending taxpayer dollars on the creation and manipulation of new beings whose very existence blurs the line between humans and animals.
We’re not talking about using a pig’s heart valve to fix a human heart. Nor are we talking about growing human cancer tumors in mice to study disease processes. These non-controversial practices have been going on for decades and don’t pose any serious ethical problems.
Chimera research however is fundamentally different from those technologies, in a very frightening brave new world way ~
First, it relies on the killing of humans at the embryonic stage to harvest their stem cells. Second, it involves the production of animals that could have partly or wholly human brains. Third, it involves the production of animals that could have human sperm or eggs (with a stipulation that precautions are taken so such animals are not allowed to breed).
Finally, introducing human embryonic stem cells into very early animal embryos will make it very difficult to know the extent to which human cells contribute to the final organism.
This is another key moral problem with the NIH proposal: If researchers can’t know for certain whether the resulting being has human status or characteristics, they won’t know what their moral obligations may be toward that being.
This experimentation is effectively another assault on the biblical view of humans as unique beings; the understanding that we were created by God in His own image, superior to – and having dominion over – all other forms of life. It is this core belief that allows us to see see the dignity and worth of every human life.
Wesley J. Smith at To the Source explains the serious moral and philosophical consequences of lifting the ban on human/animal embryos ~
Anti human exceptionalists would declare that the creation of these chimeric animal/human beings obliterates the wall that has traditionally divided us from all other life forms on the planet. To quote philosopher Mortimer Adler, who wrote many years ago in “The Difference of Man and the Difference it Makes”, if we were to so dismantle the unique moral status accorded to human beings, universal human rights become impossible to sustain philosophically:
Those who now oppose injurious discrimination on the moral ground that all human beings, being equal in their humanity, should be treated equally in all those respects that concern their common humanity, would have no solid basis in fact to support their normative principle. A social and political ideal that has operated with revolutionary force in human history would be validly dismissed as a hollow illusion that should become defunct…
Why, then, should not groups of superior men be able to justify their enslavement, exploitation, or even genocide of inferior human groups, on factual and moral grounds akin to those that we now rely on to justify our treatment of the animals we harness as beasts of burden, that we butcher for food and clothing, or that we destroy as disease-bearing pests or as dangerous predators?
These are serious (scary!) concerns that progresssives refuse to consider – or worse, they have considered them – and dismissed them as irrelevant.
Feigning impartiality about this research, NIH recently provided a limited time period for public feedback on lifting the ban. We only had until September 6th to register our opinions on this hugely controversial issue.
A cursory glance at the NIH website reveals that those who did comment are strongly opposed to this whole concept – especially using federal funding for this experimentation. I estimate that negative comments (majority are quite thoughtful and sincere) were running 20-30:1…
Do you think the feds actually care?
I’m not sure when a final decision was to be made… can’t find any confirmation that NIH has actually gone ahead and permanently lifted the ban on funding. But given progressives proclivity to play God it’s a safe – but depressing – bet that they will.
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Related:
No more funding for “Snowflakes?” O’Ministration’s anti-life priorities
Bring Your Chimera To Class Day! NIH May Lift Ban On Human And Animal Embryo Mashups
