If This Is Hope, What Does Despair Look Like?

Infamously pro-abortion Catholic, and former New York govern Mario Cuomo, was quoted in Newsday this past week discussing the importance of President Obama’s success:

Obama's failure would heighten the threat of unprecedented global damage, but his success could help lead our great nation and this entire threatened world into a new period of enlightenment and progress. Obama's moment in history is a unique one.

There has never been more to worry about, but neither has there ever been more to hope for.

We should choose hope.

Cuomo’s “choose hope” tag isn’t a bad one. I can’t help but noticing its similar ring to the Right-to-Life motto (and biblical command in Deuteronomy 30.19) to “choose life.”

Which raises the question for me of why, if Obama is the very embodiment of all human hope, (or does that sell him short?), then why is he so closed to any possibility of hope for women who find themselves with problem or unwanted pregnancies--except the solution of homicide? Why can't he imagine hope for a world to solve its (real or imaginary) population problems or women's health problems without resorting to the mass homicide of abortion-as-population control?

Is there really so little hope for a good outcome for both mother and child that abortion has to predominate as the solution that represents hope, rather than despair?

If you want to read something really hopeless, read this portion of the dissenting opinion in a Supreme Court opinion from the late 1980s, Webster vs. Reproductive Health Services. The majority had found that a Missouri statute regulating the performance of abortions was Constitutional. Not outlawing, just regulating.

The dissenting opinion, written by Justice Blackmun, and joined by civil rights icon Justice Thurgood Marshall, includes one of the bleakest visions of women’s lives I have ever read. In their view, the only thing between American women and lives of poverty, social exclusion, illness, and death, is the saving “hope” of being able to terminate their unborn children. Reading it you'd think that education, nutrition, and health care are a distant second to the most necessary thing to lift a poor woman out of poverty--abortion-on-demand. If you want to know what the opposite of “choose hope” is, it will sound something like this:

The plurality [is] either oblivious or insensitive to the fact that millions of women, and their families, have ordered their lives around the right to reproductive choice, and that this right has become vital to the full participation of women in the economic and political walks of American life. The plurality would clear the way once again for government to force upon women the physical labor and specific and direct medical and psychological harms that may accompany carrying a fetus to term. The plurality would clear the way again for the State to conscript a woman's body and to force upon her a "distressful life and future."

The result, as we know from experience, would be that, every year, hundreds of thousands of women, in desperation, would defy the law and place their health and safety in the unclean and unsympathetic hands of back-alley abortionists, or they would attempt to perform abortions upon themselves, with disastrous results. Every year, many women, especially poor and minority women, would die or suffer debilitating physical trauma, all in the name of enforced morality or religious dictates or lack of compassion, as it may be.

Bill Clinton: 'It Depends on What the Definition of 'Pro-life' Is'

The claim that cloning, and the stem cells it might produce, is on the verge of bringing a cure to your sick father with Alzheimer's or your debilitated mother with Parkinson's is a scandal. It is a cruel deception perpetrated by cynical scientists and ignorant politicians. Its purpose is clear: to exploit the desperation of the sick to garner political support for ethically problematic biotechnology.
--Charles Krauthammer


Bill Clinton was in town Friday to stump for what he calls the “pro-life” position--or at least that misunderstood segment of the pro-life cause that wants to kill embryos to feed the biotech jackpot of embryonic stem-cell research. (“Clinton backs stem cell bill”).

Says Clinton about Proposal 2:

“This is the pro-life position, this is the pro-health position, this is the pro-science position and this is definitely the pro-Michigan position,” Clinton told more than 500 supporters at a fundraiser for MichiganCure, the group backing Proposal 2, which Michigan voters will consider on the Nov. 4 ballot.

The star of the fundraiser was Laura Jackson, 19, who has been paralyzed from the neck down for five years due to a cheerleading accident that broke her neck. She and her family claim “she has seen major improvements after a treatment based on stem cells she received in China.”

Borrowing a page from the Gospel According to John Edwards, Clinton promised the crowd that "Stem cell research will tell us how to give Laura a chance to walk again. And then we'll all be her cheerleaders."

Unfortunately, Ms. Jackson and her family have been claiming the controversial treatment led to improvements since at least December 2004, when her story was reported in The Guardian. ('I Don't Know How It Works'). In December 2004 they reported she could breathe off her ventilator for 15 minutes. A year later, they claimed she could breathe off her ventilator for 30 minutes. She is still confined to her wheelchair, four years after her "treatment."

Regardless, Ms. Jackson is not the beneficiary of embryonic stem cells of the type addressed in Proposal 2. Proposal 2 (for now) is limited to the use of frozen embryos that were not being used for implantation, and were to be discarded anyway. Laura, if she benefited at all, was "treated" with cells taken from the noses of aborted fetuses, fetuses at least 16 weeks along. The inventor of this technique, (which he practices in China almost exclusively on American patients with spinal cord injuries and money), is Dr. Hongyun Huang. As with all magic, he admits he doesn't know how it all works. ('I Don't Know How It Works').

The cells, harvested from the olfactory bulbs inside the noses of foetuses, seem to have unusual properties, which may include the ability to stimulate change in the nervous system. Ideally, says Huang, the foetuses should be 16 weeks old to achieve the best results. He says the mothers all give their consent for the embryos to be used in this way and do not receive payment. The Guardian asked to be shown where they come from, but was told this information was too sensitive.

The Guardian was unable to confirm whether or not the embryos give their consent along with their mothers, although Huang confirmed that the embryos definitely don't receive payment. Nor could the Guardian confirm reports that Huang came up with the idea for the whole thing while playing "got your nose" with his sole non-aborted three-year-old niece.

And I can tell you I'm personally creeped out, and apparently so is the Guardian writer, Jonathon Watts, with the whole Chinese "never-mind-where-we-get-all-the-aborted-fetuses" thing.

But lest anyone think I'm being unduly dismissive of Huang--even anti-science about it--you need to know that

None of [Huang's] claims has been proven to western scientific standards, but Huang's willingness to think the unthinkable in order to cure the incurable is inspiring hope; so much hope that patients are putting aside ethical qualms, paying tens of thousands of dollars and flying to Beijing to act as his guinea pigs.

And,

Complicating the debate is Huang's lack of statistical data and and his refusal to carry out the double-blind trials considered necessary in western circles to rule out the placebo effect. The Chinese neurosurgeon says such tests are unethical because they involve cutting someone open and only pretending to treat them. "This would not be legal in China," he says. "Even if it was, I wouldn't do it. Double-blind trials only harm the patient."

And they say we're anti-science.

Lastly, I should point out that Laura's father, Daryl, whom the Guardian quotes, obviously in error, as saying he doesn't "agree with abortion," is nowhere as staunchly "pro-life" as, say, Bill Clinton.

In 2004 Laura's father said:

"We need 100 more Dr Huangs. And we need more cells. It's a different government over here. They have to trim the population. There are 15 to 20 million abortions in China a year. If everyone who was aborted could save a life, there would be no sick people left in the world."

Other than that, he's personally opposed to abortion. I have no doubt that Daryl Jackson's badly distorted views are the result of the tragedy he has witnessed in his daughter's life. But distorted they are, as even Guardian reporter Jonathon Watts noticed. Watt's can't help commenting on this statement of Daryl's:

"I don't agree with abortion, but it will happen anyway. In the US, we do abortions but don't use the cells. In China, they don't just take life and destroy it - they give something back. It's like lemonade out of lemons. You take something bad and you make it good." Such reasoning requires a moral somersault, but it is one that can be done easily in China. That is enough to generate hope.

Hope of some sort, anyhow. But not, apparently, cures. Laura Jackson appeared at the fundraiser Friday night still paralyzed from the neck down, still in her wheelchair, four years after being Huang's guinea pig.

There is no doubt that Proposal 2 is going to lead to an increased demand for "more cells," more fetuses, more "lemons" to make lemonade, more sources of the magical organs of human beings to feed this ghastly science. There is no doubt that this industry will eventually start demanding both cloning, and then more aborted fetuses, whether for their noses, or some other part of their murdered corpses.

Detroit News, R.I.P.

The once staunchly pro-life Detroit News is now stumping for passage of Prop 2, a proposed amendment to Michigan’s constitution overturning the ban on fetal research. The News’s editorial perception has now degraded to the point of printing statements like the following: “Currently, it is against the law to destroy a human embryo in Michigan.” (“Vote yes on Prop 2 to overturn research ban”).

Far from it, of course, or Planned Parenthood wouldn’t be making such a nice income destroying human embryos in Michigan (26,269 in 2004). As long as it’s by abortion, we can destroy all the embryos we want in Michigan, just like in the other 49 states.

Anyone with a clue about what makes a pro-lifer pro-life (which is that we recognize the inalienable humanity of the unborn), would have known this. Which demonstrates, I suppose, that the barbarians are already well inside the gates at the once-great Detroit News.

Prop 2 is a disaster. It isn’t just that in a single stroke Prop 2 makes what is now a felony--destroying human embryos for research purposes--into a perfectly lawful act. It also replaces the ban on fetal destruction with a ban on future regulations of any kind on stem cell research. It will actually be against the law to pass laws to regulate stem-cell research:

(d) All stem cell research and all stem cell therapies and cures must be conducted and provided in accordance with state and local laws of general applicability, including but not limited to laws concerning scientific and medical practices and patient safety and privacy, to the extent that any such laws do not:

i. prevent, restrict, obstruct, or discourage any stem cell research or stem cell therapies and cures that are permitted by the provisions of this section; or

ii. create disincentives for any person to engage in or otherwise associate with such research or therapies or cures. (Emphasis added).

Oh, writes the editorialist at the News, we agree that part of the amendment's a problem, absolutely. “In a new area of research, regulation may be necessary. But if that necessity arises, a process is in place to revise the state Constitution.”

Revise the state Constitution just to get regulations in place? Seems like doing things the hard way. The last time we gave that kind of constitutional license to a homicidal medical procedure, we ended up with 45 million dead potential stem-cell donors.

This kind of nonsense we could always get in the Free Press. So now what's the difference?