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July 13, 2001
By
Jon Christian Ryter Copyright 2000 - All Rights Reserved
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Trouble is brewing when key pro-life conservatives in both the House and Senate decide it’s okay to sacrifice a few “naturally aborted” babies who would have died anyway in order to further stem-cell research. Each of these men has been on Capitol Hill long enough to know that when the “door” is open to allow research facilities to use aborted fetuses for stem-cell research, it will be only a matter of time before they are using fetuses from abortion clinics and worse...those who are aborted during partial abortions—but are kept alive to increase the viability of the stem-cells used in experimentation. MEET THE KEY MEMBERS OF THE NEW DONNER PARTY...Those who are not adverse to feeding off of other humans to save or prolong life.
AT WHAT POINT DOES A MORAL SOCIETY SAY “ENOUGH!”
Sen. Orrin Hatch [R-UT] • Sen. Gordon Smith [R-OR] • Sen. Strom Thurmond [R-SC] • Rep. “Duke” Cunningham [R-CA] • Sen. Zell Miller [D-GA] • Sen. Connie Mack [R-FL] represent the leadership of the NEW Donner Party—reminiscent of the Donner Party (a group of American emigrants to California in 1846-47) led by George Donner. The group was trapped by heavy snows in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The group was forced to “winter” near a small lake (now known as Donner Lake) where they endured unbelievable hardships, starvation being only one of them. Eighty-seven members of the Donner and Reed families started the trip. Forty-seven survived only because they resorted to cannibalism, consuming the dead bodies of their starved or frozen relatives.
Like the Donner Party, these purportedly pro-life conservatives, see a political blizzard ahead, and have convinced themselves out of political necessity that it is now moral for those starving for “miracle cures” that may or may not ever be found, to feed on the flesh of the unborn on the slim chance that the stem cells of unborn but nevertheless living babies, sold by abortion clinics to medical research facilities for a fee, may provide medical solutions to heart disease, Parkinson’s Disease, Muscular Dystrophy, cancer, diabetes, liver or kidney disease, or scores of other major illnesses and natural maladies such as normal aging. Stem cell research is without a doubt, the most phenomenal and promising medical breakthrough since the development of penicillin or the successful transplantation of human organs. There is no denying its potential value in the prolongation of human life. And, the promise to humanity is a curse to the unborn.
What makes this a curse for the unborn is that every person reading this article and quite possibly every human living on Earth today, may discover tomorrow, or next year, or sometime within the next decade, that the medical malady that has suddenly crippled their body, or the chronic disease that is slowly killing them, or the clogged arteries that caused their recent heart attack may yet be, or may have been, thwarted, with injections of human stem cells. At that point, the “right to life” takes on an entirely new meaning to those who have spent a lifetime advocating the protection the unborn. How many of us, faced with the medical decision to inject our own dying children, or perhaps a terminal wife or husband with stem cells taken from an aborted embryo (that was aborted alive for stem cell harvesting), would decline the lifesaving procedure because the stem cells that will save the life of our loved ones were extracted from an aborted fetus, or from a “farm-raised” human embryo specifically “cultured” for the purpose of harvesting? Can any of us say we would allow a loved-one to die under those circumstances? Or would we mitigate our decision to accept the lifesaving stem cell infusion by rationalizing that since the “donor” who contributed the stem cells our loved one so badly needs was already dead, allowing our own loved ones to die as a “protest” to embryonic harvesting would not only be stupid, but it would amount to adding tragedy to tragedy.
And There Is The Real Tragedy
As the world races at warp speed to the real life event called Armageddon I am reminded of Daniel 12:4 where the prophet reminds us that in the end time, knowledge will be greatly increased. Mankind will marvel at its scientific accomplishments, convincing him even more that he is the supreme being who has conquered not only life and death but the creation of life itself. Over the past 100 years knowledge of our planet, and of the universe in which we live, has increased a million-fold as the humanists among us search in futility for concrete evidence that God is not real, or that mankind is a product of a freakish event called evolution although not a single transitionary fossil exists anywhere on Earth—inside it, below it or in outer space—to support Darwin’s theories of gradual evolution; nor do any exist to support later theories of “spontaneous” evolution. Spontaneous, or generation evolution seeks to excuse the fact that there are no transitional fossils by suggesting Darwin was wrong to suppose that evolutionary phases were generational; implying it happened spontaneously within a single generation, with a fish suddenly becoming an amphibian, or an amphibian becoming a reptile; or a reptile becoming a bird. It goes without saying that both theories are wrong, since all life is a creation of God—whether the egg and the zygote meet inside the human womb or in a petrie dish. God, not the scientist, created the cells which—when merged—create human life. Life remains life whether created in the marriage bed or in the laboratory.
When Congress enacted legislation to prohibit human embryonic cloning experimentation it failed to grasp the significance of the bonanza which awaited the pharmaceutical industry. Initial newspaper headlines beginning with the first successful cloning of mammals from adult stem cells that took place in England on July 22, 1998, followed by a successful Japanese experiment to clone eight calves in December of that year, European scientists (and some in America as well) were eager to attempt a human clone, but those on both sides of the ocean knew they would have crossed a sacred line. But, since science had “reached the line,” Congress drew the line, sharply, with legislation than banned the use of federal funds in human embryonic experimentation. Congress was partially “overruled” by a Clinton Executive Order on January 19, 1999 as America’s largest pharmaceutical giants and medical research firms (and universities seeking both government and industrial grants) pressured Clinton to act because America's largest research institutions and pharmaceutical giants were being left behind in this ground-breaking research that promised to be the medical monetary bonanza of the 21st century. On April 27, 1998, scientists used stem cells to arrest Parkinson’s Disease in a male patient in the United States. Stem cells have been injected into the hearts of patients with massive blockages. New arteries grew. Immediate improvements were seen in most of the patients who received experimental stem cell injections for a variety of maladies. It was heralded as a medical breakthrough. However, to date, every patient who has received stem cell injections is now worse off medically than he was before the injections because once stem cells are injected, they do what God, not man, programmed them to do. While they may temporarily ease a medical dilemma in the patient, the stem cells continue to perform their life-creating tasks—even if those tasks are not needed—and may even prove detrimental to that body by continuing to work beyond what the body needed, producing excesses which the body cannot healthily support.
Stem cell injections are irreversible. They cannot be be “undone;” nor can they be “turned off.”
The Profit Center
The Clinton Daffy-Definitions which redefined words as simple as “is,” were applied to the language of the legislation which restricted human embryonic research, interpreting the intent of Congress not as an out-and-out ban on experimentation, but merely as a ban on using federal money for stem cell research from aborted fetuses. But the GOP-controlled House of Representatives, which controlled the purse strings of the Clinton Administration, was watching. Stem cell research in the United States has been done with adult stem cells (extracted from donors), from fetuses, from “naturally” aborted fetuses, and according to several ofthose involved in stem cell research, from frozen sperm and frozen embryonic matter from infertility clinics and sperm banks, but not from aborted fetuses.
The argument presented by scientists both in Europe and in the United States is that adult stem cells have inherent flaws that do not exist in embryonic stem cells. The problems resulting from the first cloned sheep and cows resulted, those researchers maintained, because the stem cells used came from adult stem cells. If you recall, during the 2000 Election Campaign, GOP presidential candidate George W. Bush, was pressured both by several “citizens groups” seeking the perpetual Fountain of Youth or Fountain of Good Health; and from pharmaceutical companies, research organizations and family “planning” organizations (i.e., abortion mills) which were all seeking the pot of gold at the end of the stem cell rainbow, on his views on stem cell research.
His dilemma at that time was that stem cell research was an issue that had captured the vote of “Gray America” since they recognized that they would most likely be the primary recipients of stem cell theory in treating age-related illnesses and diseases: cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, and a myriad of other age-related disorders and diseases. Added to that was Bush’s stance on protecting human life. Forced to straddle the fence, Bush agreed that he had no problem with stem cell research if it was not focused on “cloning” humans, and if it did not utilize stem cells taken from aborted babies.
Defining Human Life In New Terms
The dilemma faced by the researcher in the area of stem cell research is multifaceted. First, according to researchers, adult stem cells, while usable, aren’t the best stem cells to use since they will have taken on any flawed characteristics of the adult host. While scientists have cultured stem cells from embryos donated by an in vitro fertilization [IVF] clinic, and from fetal tissue donated by women having first trimester abortions, the reality is that non-living fetuses are not the best “donors.” The best donors are those who provide living stem cells. Two sources are, realistically, fetuses from late term partial birth abortions which are kept alive (without the mother’s knowledge or consent) and sold to a stem cell research facility, or more likely, from embryos “grown” in a petrie dish. In either event, from the moment the egg and the zygote merge, we are talking about a human life. Not a human life created by man, but a human life created by God. Just as we recognize a child conceived by copulation between a man and a woman is a life created by God, a child conceived in a petrie dish by a scientist who takes the egg of a woman created by God and merges it with the sperm of a man created by God, both are God’s creations.
The scientists, with the assistance of the National Institute of Health, which was given an extra $2 billion for stem cell research by the Bush Administration in its 2001-02 budget, have thus far been hamstrung on how they can spend that money since the NIH is forbidden to spend taxpayer dollars on stem cell research that utilizes aborted fetuses. Not only Clinton’s January 19, 1999 Executive Order could change that. What Bill Clinton did, however, was to define what was not human life. In Clinton’s Daffy-Definitions, lab-grown stem cells from lab-copulated embryos where not, and could not be, construed as “human embryos." They were lab experiments. Thus, by executive decree, William Jefferson Clinton redefined God’s role in the creation of life.
Government Funding of Stem Cell Research
Clinton’s redefinition of what constitutes a human life was greeted by John Hopkin’s University professor Dr. John Gearhart with ecstasy. Gearhart, whose wholly-owned research company, Geron, the actual recipient of the John Hopkins funds, owns the rights to the work done with taxpayer money. Gearhart confided to CNN that “...other researchers might have to pay to use the cells or the techniques he created to develop them.” When Clinton redefined what constituted a human being, the NIH was free to fund stem cell research with taxpayer dollars. The NIH’s decision—and grant—to fund John Hopkins’ stem cell research was greeted with adulation by Gearhart who felt the decision “...[was] terrific” because it “...will speed [stem cell] research absolutely by years.” Senator Arlen Spector [R-PA] who poses as a moderate conservative around election time [except when he’s catering to feminist groups and groupies] was elated, and publicly praised the decision of the NIH to fund stem cell research. Spector went on to say that “...we’ve got the potential for enormous advances in medical science, and we should utilize them. Even in instances where stem cells did come from live embryos, they were embryos destined to be discarded that could not be used to produce human life.”
Congressman Chris Smith [R-NJ] was angered by Clinton’s usurpation of his presidential prerogatives. “Today’s announcement,” he said on January 19, 1999, “is the latest step by the Clinton Administration to treat human beings as property to be manipulated and destroyed. [NIH money] will allow researchers to experiment with cells obtained from human beings ruthlessly killed in the first weeks of life.” But Smith, like the other pro-life Congressmen and Senators who could simply have invalidated Clinton’s edict with a Joint Resolution, did nothing.
From the moment that scientists at the University of Wisconsin and at John Hopkins University in Baltimore isolated and successfully cultured human pluripotent stem cells from samples donated from an IVF clinic, the scientific world opened the Pandora’s Box to life itself, speculating that the proper culturing of stem cells could give rise to almost all of the cell types found in the human body—muscle, nerve, heart, and even blood.
The Smoke and Mirrors
Listen to the researchers and they will tell you they have been using adult stem cells for some time although all of them question the usefulness of adult stem cells in either research or treatment. They will also tell you that adult stem cells may have limited potential, and that some adult stem cells have been isolated from tissues such as blood, brain, intestines, skin and muscle, and that adult stem cells have proven to be more “elastic” than first thought. What makes that statement so interesting is that “master cells” (pluripotent stem cells) are present only in early-stage human embryos. Furthermore, stem cells are not “magic” strands of cellular adhesive that can be used as a universal Band-Aid that can be applied to any organ of the body. While the “cell mass” can form virtually every type of cell found in the human body, and does—the stem cells that created your brain, your heart, your liver, your intestines, the blood that coursed through the veins created by stem cells—and even your eyes and the hair on your head, were specifically programmed to do a specific task. In other words, a stem cell whose function it is to create a hand will not create a foot. A stem cell whose job it is to create a brain will not create a heart. Each master cell has a prescribed task in assembling the structure of that human being within its mother’s womb.
Within four days of conception the master cell appears. Within that master cell is the key stem cell. As the cell mass divides, it gives rise to many different types of stem cells, each with a specific function. Some create red blood cells, some create white blood cells. Some create skin; others create the skeleton which that flesh will cover. But a stem cell programmed by the Creator to create skin will not create a liver or a kidney, or a heart.
What stem cells remain in the human adult are confined to a few definable areas where they can be “harvested.” The most common harvestable adult stem cell is the blood stem cell that resides in bone marrow. In adults, the stem cells are no longer pluripotent. They are termed to be multipotent.
Pluripotent stem have been developed from only two sources. First, pluripotent stem cells were isolated directly from the inner cell mass of a human embryo at the blastocyst stage. (The specimens for this experimentation came from an IVF clinic.) Second, Gearhart isolated pluripotent stem cells from aborted fetuses. Gearhart’s stem cells were extracted from the area of the fetus where the testes or ovaries would have developed.
The Problem
By this time, you should have sensed the problem. It is twofold. First, when you blow away the smoke and break the mirrors, you will realize that while adults can contribute bone marrow (if they are a blood match), and can donate a portion of their liver (if they are a blood match), doctors can’t retrieve a stem cell from their heart, their intestines, their kidney or their colon or the muscles in their arms or legs for a recipient with a heart, lung, liver or kidney disease.
Nor for that matter can they extract the master pluripotent cell from a petrie dish and fix any ill. The human embryo must be allowed to develop until the nature of the stem cells can be identified. Once the prescribed task of a particular stem cell can be identified, that stem cell can be used.
Whether developed in a mother’s womb or in a “test tube,” God’s handiwork remains God’s handiwork. It is a human being in the early stage of development. And, while God’s handiwork at that moment does not have a beating heart, a thumb to place inside its mouth to suck, or a vascular system pumping rich, pure blood through an innocent heart, as God’s handiwork, it already comes with a soul. And, that is the problem. This is a human life.
When the medical community learns how to breathe life into a clump of dirt or a bag of “turfbuilder,” and can extract stem cells from that mass of former earthen clay, then and only then can they say, “This is not human life.” To the new Donner Party I can say only this: the cries of anguish of children will always reach the throne of God.—even those children viewed as “nonhuman” because they were either conceived in a laboratory or were unwanted by their mother because they were conceived in lust and not in love—are nevertheless people. And, we are our brother’s keeper. We have empowered each of the new Donner Party not only with the authority to protect the Constitutional tenets of liberty and justice for all, but specifically we have entrusted them with safeguarding the rights of all of their constituents—especially those who cannot cry out in their own defense. The silent screams of the unborn are the loudest as they reach God’s ears.
Population Control and Profit
But let’s face it. This is not, nor has it ever been a debate about when life begins. It’s strictly a debate about population control—and profit. Since before Roe v Wade-Doe v Bolton, there has never been any question in the mind of the medical community when life begins. And, even when Associate Justice Harry Blackburn attempted to imply there was a medical uncertainty suggesting, in the majority opinion of Roe v Wade, that the medical community could not decide at what point life began, the medical community as a whole knew life began at conception. It was less repugnant for the profit-seekers and population control advocates to view the baby within the womb—and now the baby within the petrie dish—as fetal tissue or cell mass than as a baby.
Granting women the right to kill their unborn because having an unwanted baby is inconvenient or is just too expensive is allowed only because the utopians are convinced that people contribute substantially to global warming, or that they are consuming the world’s resources too quickly. But as the message of not only the pro-life community—fetuses are just helpless little babies waiting to be born and cradled in their mother’s arms—but testimony from guilt-ridden mothers who have watched as the body parts of their own children are withdrawn from their wombs and reassembled beside them to make certain that all of the “parts” were retrieved—has finally taken root.
While the number of abortions in the United States and the other industrialized nations have dropped over the last couple years, we are still killing the unborn at the 1990 level. And because more and more women are making the “choice” for life, we have affected the livelihood of those who have, since 1973, fed on the flesh and fetal tissue of the unborn. From the abortion clinics and the physicians who took an oath to “do no harm,” to the research scientists who are screaming for “tissue samples,” to the organ donor banks that are in the neonatal organ supply business, this is an industry which has made hundreds, if not thousands of Donner Party members—not just their shills, the politicians—rich. And now that pluripotent stem cells offer a myriad of cures to a myriad of diseases and disorders, the opportunity for even greater profit-taking exists.
And with that opportunity now comes the logic to silence, forever, the advocates of the unborn.
Old Morality v New
Humans are a strange breed. Only a few stalwarts have ever, at one time, stood in the gap. We all know right from wrong. We know when you insert a scalpel into a woman’s womb and slash her baby into fifty pieces so it can be more easily extracted from her body, you are killing a human being. Calling it fetal tissue does not change the fact that it was, before the blade struck, a living human being. Putting the political rhetoric aside, we all know deep down inside that life begins at conception. And we all know that when God breathes life into that embryo it is endowed with a soul—because that “soul” is the eternal person that would, if nurtured, be born nine months later. We likewise know that whether that embryo is created by sexual copulation between a man and a woman, or medical copulation by a scientist wedding an egg and a sperm in a petrie dish, a human life has resulted when that copulation is complete.
The utopians have learned one thing about people—even those with the largest soap boxes. We all have one thing in common, although some of us conceal it better than others. We all ask, “What’s in it for me?”
Humans are motivated by four emotions: Fear, Greed, Ego, Love.
Usually in that order.
Fear is the strongest emotion that governs our lives. Love is the least important. Always.
Greed and ego are interchangeable. Sometimes greed is more important than ego, sometimes ego overwhelms greed. But fear is always the strongest human emotion, and love—caring for what happens to others—is the weakest. That is why the utopians who have been attempting to control population growth have succeeded as well as they have. We, as a people, have been less concerned about protecting life than we have about protecting our own well being. Fear. The fear of being attacked by those more powerful than us. And, that “fear,” coupled with our own greed to keep what we have earned through our own sweat equity has kept us from providing the pro-life organizations with the multiple millions of dollars they could have used over the past 28 years to save at least some of the 40 million babies who have been butchered inside the womb.
Now, I fear, the battle to save the unborn may have been lost for all time.
Our lack of love—apathy—has allowed 40 million babies to die.
Now, fear, greed and ego will open the floodgates to what will amount to millions of unborn and nearly born babies to suffer an inconceivable fate as the profit-seekers of stem cell technology gain the laws they need to legalize a new form of abortion—petrie dish abortion. Because these embryos are created without sexual copulation between a man and a woman, they are not deemed to be human embryos, and thus, may be cultivated for tissue extraction.
Our fears, our greed for self-preservation, and our egos—our right to live at the expense of another—have already aided the profit-seekers; and will continue to do so.
Fear reigns supreme because our mortality is linked to fear.
None of us—not the unborn baby in the womb or the parentless baby in the petrie dish—want to die. When offered a lifeline—even a stem cell lifeline—that will add to the length of our lives, we will grab it. We may wonder about the life lost to provide that lifeline, but we will nevertheless grab that lifeline because our life is paramount to us. We fear death. Greed assures the profit-seekers that we will pay any price they ask for that lifeline. Ultimately, when we finally weigh the cost—after we have received the lifesaving technique that extended our life, our egos will justify what we did, weighing our value to our families, our friends, and our communities against the contribution of the nameless tissue in the petrie dish.
Like the 47 members of the Donner Party who survived by feeding on the flesh of 40 of their relatives in the stark cold winter of 1846-47, we will join the growing ranks of the Donner Party of 2001. We will have survived feeding on the flesh of the unborn.
But we probably won’t even think about it.
After all, this is the 21st century. A new morality has superseded the old morality.
Human life will be gauged on its value to the community as a whole.
We will understand that new morality even better as the New World Order becomes entrenched before the end of this decade, and the walls of sovereignty fall—and America becomes part of Antichrist’s one world government.
At that time, life will again be measured. But this time, it will be measured for its value to the community at both ends of the age spectrum. How many of us, at the wrong end of the age spectrum, will begin to envy the parentless babies in the petrie dish? When we open the door to killing those we do not want to admit at the beginning of the corridor to life how can we close it to killing those who are nearing the end of that corridor, but are not ready to depart?
