One of my favorite activists is Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life. Her organization alerted The Stream to the hideous implications of a little-noticed policy change regarding experiments on unborn babies, and body parts stolen from them after abortion. So I decided to ask her what she knew. Her answers were … chilling.

Experimenting on “Viable” Unborn Babies?

John Zmirak: First, could you please explain to our readers what just changed with regard to the exploitation of aborted babies in medical research?

Kristan Hawkins: The Biden Administration has prioritized fetal tissue experiments, moving quickly to allow the broader abuse of preborn babies remains. And things are about to get even worse.

An influential scientific society has given its approval for research on human embryos in ways that we can’t really fathom today. Up until now, experimenting on growing human embryos more than 14 days old was not permitted. Now some scientists want to go much further.

As reported by NPR:

The International Society for Stem Cell Research released new guidelines that say it could be permissible to study living human embryos in the lab for longer than two weeks.” They noted that dropping the 14-day end-point concerned some researchers: “If you don’t have any endpoint, could you take embryos to 20 weeks? To 24 weeks? Is viability the only endpoint,” asks Hank Greely, a Stanford University bioethicist who otherwise praises the new guidelines (to NRP). “Is viability even an endpoint?”

This all matters because it signals that the scientific world is preparing to turn a blind eye to what happens to human beings in a lab. We can expect more pre-born babies to suffer and die to satisfy someone’s curiosity.

Our Collapsing Ethics

But our secular “ethicists” will justify such experimentation on babies, eventually even up through birth. You can count on that happening soon. What is happening to us?

Humane societies reject human experiments. The ends do not justify the means. Abusing another’s body who has given no consent and has no power to object is wrong. When we find out that such research has taken place, morally sane people react with horror, call for justice and put a stop to it. Allowing them to continue as a matter of public policy marks a culture that is collapsing because of a failed moral framework. One that doesn’t knows when to say NO to planned and state-sanctioned atrocity.

Historically, human experimenters have exploited religious prisoners in China, Jewish children during the Holocaust, women of color in trials for birth control. Remember those black men allowed to suffer, and die untreated, in the Tuskegee syphilis trials? There are more stories than these, too many.

But as science has advanced, people have gotten insidiously creative in looking for new human subjects and have turned to preborn life.

The Ghost of Margaret Sanger

Is Planned Parenthood, the usual suspect, implicated here?

As the Center for Medical Progress has detailed, Planned Parenthood has created new income streams by providing human tissue, even dissecting children alive so that their organs can be harvested. Too little attention is being paid to how human lives are broken apart for research.

Rats with the Scalps of Unborn Babies

How is “virus czar” Dr. Anthony Fauci involved?

Students for Life is calling for his resignation or firing. A new video from the Center for Medical Progress detailed research in which infant remains are harvested from abortions at a Planned Parenthood. This happened at taxpayer expense, through funding from Fauci’s NIAID office at the National Institutes of Health.
 

 
Testifying before the Pennsylvania Health Committee on May 4, Center for Medical Progress founder David Daleiden said:

It’s a matter of public record that there are horrific abuses of aborted infants taking place [in] PA through the extensive fetal experimentation programs at the taxpayer-funded University of Pittsburgh.

In a recent study, Pitt scientists describe scalping 5-month-old aborted babies and grafting their scalps onto the backs of lab rats to keep them growing … in the study you can see the pictures of little baby scalps growing tiny baby hairs on the backs of lab rats and lab mice. Each one of those scalps… represents a little PA baby who would have grown those little hairs on their head if they had not been killed by abortion for experiments with rodents.

Starting in 2016, Pitt received a $1.4M grant from the NIH to become a distribution hub for aborted fetal kidneys and bladders and other organs in the NIH’s genitourinary development mapping atlas program. Pitt’s grant application for this grant from the NIH states that the university has a unique access to a large number of high-quality aborted fetuses and can “ramp up” delivery of abortion fetal body parts across the country.

A few members of Congress are calling for an end to animal-human hybrid (“chimera”) research, as they should.

One of those champions, Sen. Steve Daines, said in a recent news release,

In trying to compete with China, we shouldn’t become like them. It’s critical that we draw a bright line against unethical forms of research that fail to recognize the distinct value of humans over animals.
…

In 2016, the NIH considered lifting their moratorium on experimentation involving human stem cells in animal embryos. Though the NIH has not to date lifted that moratorium, chimeric research has continued to advance in private research settings with alarming results.

When we open the door to human experimentation, we risk all our lives because if life is only valuable when someone else with political power says so, any of us can be declared disposable and useful to the state for “science.”

Me Before You

Legal abortion says that we as a society give the sexual “freedom” of adults as a higher value than the lives of very young people. What does the promiscuous exploitation of unborn babies’ bodies for research on vaccines, food production, even cosmetics say about the status of younger, less powerful people compared to older, more powerful ones?

Corporate Abortion markets several powerful messages, including the lie that a “planned” baby is more valuable than a baby whose presence is a surprise. That elevates the message that I should have what I want, WHEN I want it, above the needs of others. And that somehow, people’s value is attached to the opinions of others. We don’t issue birth certificates with a ratings system so that you get an “A” rating if your parents were in a loving relationship, granting you more status. A birth certificate notes that a unique life has entered the world without any caveats.

But in our culture, many of our elites seem determined to forget what they learned in Sex Ed about how life is created and comes to be. They focus only on the act and not the possible consequences of that act. Rather than prioritizing skills for building safe, stable, loving relationships, the abortion culture pushes immediate gratification, and then justifies ending a life with all kinds of promises of better days ahead.

Turning those infants into research fodder to make something “good” out of a “bad” situation is just another dehumanizing effort. And justifying playing with life in a lab for better make up or even a therapeutic drug? That just enslaves a new generation of people to those more powerful.

Suppose there are poor, elderly people without families being cared for by taxpayer dollars in a nursing home who will not live long. Should we allow research on end-of-life drugs to make them more “useful” to drug manufacturers and the state? They are going to die anyway? Should the fact that they don’t have a family member to speak for them reduce their humanity? Of course not!

Researchers like to hide behind the word “fetal,” as though young life has less value. But again, when we draw an arbitrary line like age to determine worth, we endanger everyone.

The Old Cannibalizing the Young for Parts

As a society, we are turning away from the young and focusing on adults with money, power, and votes. The birth rate and even the marriage rate continue to plunge in the West, and even the Developing World. Do you see a coming backlash against a kind of gerontocracy, among the young people you work with in Students for Life?

Students for Life works with Millennials and Gen Z nationwide, and our passionate, educated, and empowered people know that there is a huge cost coming for them. I don’t know how the Biden Administration plans on paying for the billions in taxpayer spending they are announcing. But without a Pro-Life Generation having children and investing in their futures, we will feel the bite. We’ll start to experience the problems spreading all across the industrial world as populations of wealthy elderly draw from an ever-smaller pool of taxpayers. Those taxpayers will certainly get tired of carrying them

 

How does a decline in religious engagement and church-going in America connect to this forgetting of the future and privileging of the present? What impacts are you seeing among college students of growing up secularized?

More students today than in years past don’t have a personal faith. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have a moral code. For many new voters today, abortion is a human rights issue, treating innocent life as a commodity. Treating a human child worse than we would treat an animal is clearly wrong. It’s illogical to oppose the death penalty for people who have been convicted of a crime and embrace the death penalty for innocent preborn life. So, we are teaching different kinds of arguments and discussion skills as we grapple with moral issues outside of the context of faith.

As a person with a personal faith (I’m Catholic) I still see the role of the church as significant. Valuing the divine spark of life connects with something in my very soul. Many pro-life people have dedicated their lives’ work to the cause, motivated by faith. But we must be sure that we use the right language for each audience.

As the scripture says, we need to have an answer ready for every person. So Students for Life engages in all kinds of training. We provide people with what they need to talk with anyone about the need to protect the preborn and their mothers. You can learn more about that at our website.

The Strong Dissecting the Weak

The field of gynecology was pioneered by heartless experimentation on enslaved black women, without the use of available anesthetics. That’s because the white doctors believed that blacks didn’t FEEL PAIN the way whites do. Do you see a moral parallel here?

Yes. People in power all around the world, all through history, have fallen to the temptation to treat those who are weak as disposable. Experimenting on humans, no matter their age, race, sex, or disability, is a cruel and great evil. I had hoped our society had learned that already. But these efforts from the Biden Administration to open the door to more fetal experimentation prove me wrong. Some people still are willing to sacrifice those they don’t value.

 

When faced with the facts about the medical and commercial exploitation of unborn babies, how do younger people react? Have they been successfully numbed by the culture, or do they get outraged? Many of the labs doing this research sit on college campuses. Are students protesting these facilities? Do you have any such plans?

Our students are very engaged on this issue. Recently, we participated in a protest at the University of Pittsburgh. That’s where Dr. Fauci’s animal/pre-born baby hybrid research took place. We have plans in the works for an event at NIH in Maryland next week. The Pro-Life Generation will be active on this issue more in the days ahead. Please do follow us on social media and check out our website for news of ongoing events, and this issue will be a priority, sadly, during the tenure of this administration.

 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream, and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”