Pondering People Pills: Don't think it can't happen here

by: daniel clark | published: 05 16, 2012

According to the U.K. Daily Mail, customs officials in South Korea have confiscated about 17,000 Chinese "miracle cure" capsules, filled with the powdered flesh of aborted and stillborn babies. The existence of these pills was first uncovered last summer by a South Korean documentary, which found that the manufacturers received a regular supply of tissue from a network of affiliated abortion clinics and hospitals.

It's tempting to assume that this outrage will confine itself to the Far East. After all, reporter Yojana Sharma revealed in a 1995 Daily Telegraph story that, in China, the eating of human fetuses for health reasons is not uncommon. She even obtained a "fist-sized glass bottle stuffed with thumb-sized fetuses" from a state hospital, by pretending to be sick. "Normally, we doctors take them home to eat," she was told.

That doesn't sound like the kind of thing we have to worry about over here, where taboos against cannibalism have held up quite nicely over the years. Nevertheless, the Daily Mail story ought to concern Americans, because many other elements conducive to that result are present in our society today.

We have a government that condones the destruction of unborn human life, and a pop culture that practically revels in it. We have an academic elite that promotes a utilitarian view of humanity, which it spreads through the pseudo-scientific field of "bioethics." A corrosive, anti-human philosophy has crept through our society, in the form of environmentalism, animal rights activism, and militant atheism. Our liberal media promote this depravity by portraying it as the norm, and its opponents as the lunatic fringe. Finally, there's the lucrative and virtually unregulated abortion industry, which is able to sell a product that it's been paid to take in the first place.

In March of 2000, congressional hearings were held on the trafficking of human fetal tissues and organs. If you don't remember this happening, that's because it was barely reported at the time, despite the sensational nature of the testimony. The proceedings focused on two wholesalers that acted as conduits between the abortion clinics and their buyers. Because selling human body parts is prohibited by federal law, they claimed instead that the clinics "donated" the parts to the wholesalers, charging only a "site fee" for the rooms in which the dissections took place, and that the wholesalers then "donated" the parts to their clients, while charging handsomely for delivery.

That evasion was contradicted by a brochure from one of the wholesalers that connected the payments directly to the particular tissues and organs. The price list read like a menu (brains $999, livers $150, eyes $75, etc.), adding that each would be discounted by 30 percent if "significantly fragmented." Damning as this evidence appeared to be, no action was ever taken.

These body parts are presumably being used for medical experimentation, which is odious enough, considering that they cannot have been donated by their rightful owners. Only somebody as grossly unethical as an "ethicist" could endorse the killing of one human being in order to use its remains to treat others. Furthermore, it's a short distance from that point to the use of those remains for industrial purposes.

San Francisco-based Neocutis, Inc. started out using tissue derived from fetal stem cells for medical purposes, such as the treatment of burn victims. Before long, it discovered -- just as the Chinese had -- that the fetal tissue has anti-aging properties that can be used to help people look younger. Today, Neocutis boasts a number of cosmetic skin products containing an ingredient called Processed Skin Cell Proteins, which "uses cultured fetal skin cells to obtain an optimal, naturally balanced mixture of skin nutrients."

In this case, the product contains no part of the original dead baby, but only the tissue that has since been generated from it in the laboratory. Is that degree of separation sufficient to deny its barbarity? If Neocutis were to produce a similar product in pill form, would it be okay to take it?

We only know about Neocutis' use of fetal tissue because it actually brags about it on its website. We have no idea what's being done with the vast majority of what the abortion clinics have "donated" over the years. Not only should those 2000 hearings have been front page news, but they should have drawn investigative reporters to the abortion industry like starving piranhas. Instead, the media chose almost unanimously to become silently complicit in the atrocity.

Where's a South Korean documentarian when you really need one?

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