January 22, 2009 marked
the 36th Anniversary of the infamous Supreme Court decision, Roe v.
Wade. It seems
certain that Congress will soon enact the Freedom
of Choice Act.
That legislation will strip away all the protections of babies in the
womb that the Right to Life movement has laboriously built up over the
past 36 years.
President Obama has promised to sign the bill. So, after all
those years of struggle and after 50 million babies have been
slaughtered, we have lost.
What is impossible for man is not impossible to God. (Matt. 19:26) He
can change our hearts but ironically His agents for change can only
be us. We must keep the light alive.
When Jesus was asked which was the greatest commandment in the Law, He
replied,
"you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your
soul and with all your mind. This is the greatest and foremost
commandment. The second is like it, you shall love your neighbor
as yourself." (Matt. 22:36-39)
How do we love ourselves? By defending and protecting our
lives. Then how are we to love our neighbors? By defending
and protecting their lives.
We know that Jesus went on to reveal that the despised Samaritans were
the neighbors for the Jews of
the first century. Who are our neighbors today?
The babies in the Womb, even the despised embryoswhose slaughter was authorized by enlightened Michiganders in the
last election.
We , the pro-life movement, must be the light that enlightens our
brothers and sisters.
Yours for Life,
Harvey R. Dean
BIOETHICS,
STEM CELLS, AND THE ABOLITION OF MAN By Harvey Dean Former
president of Warren-Center Line Right to Life
"In the beginning, God created the
heavens
and the earth....... "and God saw everything that He had made, and
behold,
it was very good." Genesis, Chapter 1
What are bioethics? What assumptions
underlay it? What are bioethicists seeking to accomplish?
The word itself--bioethics--suggests
that its practitioners are involved in a high minded moral undertaking.
This tends to deflect a close examination of a movement that is
unraveling
reverence to God and respect for man. Springing from the seedbed of
Scientism,
that movement's central premise is that Nature is not good, it
postulates,
nor is it evil. It is simply accidental. It denies that the universe is
intelligently designed, and contends that whatever order may be
impressed
upon it comes only as a consequence of the efforts of man. In seeking
to
impress this metaphysical vision of reality on a world stumbling about
in confusion, the bioethicists follow the pattern marked out by Justice
Oliver Wendell Holmes and his cohorts when they dismissed the concept
of
natural law from our jurisprudential system and replaced it with the
concept
of "legal positivism." That concept, too, ousted God from the equation
and underpinned human rights on shifting sands of "positivism" - i.e. -
whatever those in power decreed from time to time as being law.
It is interesting to observe that the
bioethicists have chosen to use the same strategies that the
desecrators
of natural law utilized in their successful campaign. One of those
strategies,
a leading one, is a policy of incrementalism. If society is not ready
for
acceptance of cloning of human beings, for example, they satisfy
themselves
with extracting stem cells from living embryos, while all the while
campaigning
to widen the range of societally acceptable experiments upon human
beings.
They debate continuously, but the inevitable result of such debates is
ever more, never less, permissible experimentation.
Another strategy they employ is to
confound
the English language to further confuse the public. In this they are
like
the eugenicists of the 1920's who, when noting the antagonism their
endeavors
were sparking, stopped calling themselves "eugenicists" and substituted
words like "population control" and "family planning" to evade public
criticism.
Today, Planned Parenthood spokesmen hotly contest the clear fact that
its
founder, Margaret Sanger, called for the sterilization of black women.
Still another strategy employed by
the
bioethicists is to appeal to the "greater" good of the many at the
expense
of the individual. Using this strategy, they appeal to the general
public
to accept the killing of embryos and babies-in-utero so that their
fetal
tissues may be extracted to help Alzheimers' patients. The Christian
concept
of the Fundamental dignity of each human life is entirely foreign to
bioethicists.
In short, the very word
"bioethicists"
is an obscene oxymoron. One is tempted to wonder who is occupying the
Josef
Mengele chair in the Kennedy Institute of Bioethics.
The sad psuedo-science of bioethics
was anticipated by C. S. Lewis when he wrote in THE ABOLITION OF MAN,
"What
we call Man's power over nature turns out to be a power exercised by
some
men over other men with Nature as the instrument.....The man-molders of
the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and
an irresistible scientific technique. We shall get at last a race of
conditioners
who really can cut out posterity in what shape they please...... it is
not that they are bad men. They are not men at all.... They have
stepped
into the void. Nor are their subjects necessarily unhappy men. They are
not men at all. They are artifacts. Man's final conquest has proved to
be the abolition of man".
There is a practical reason for
putting
a spotlight on this movement today. Congress passed a law prohibiting
the
use of federal funds for stem-cell research. The National Institute of
Health, with ex-President Clinton's blessing, drafted guidelines that
interpreted
the law to allow such research, so long as the embryonic lives were
taken
in non-federally funded laboratories by privately funded scientists and
then transferred to government-run facilities. Review of those
guidelines
is now underway by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tommy
Thompson.
The final decision will come from the White House.
Write President Bush to ask him to
issue
an executive order banning federal funding of stem-cell research that
involves
the killing of embryonic human beings. Furthermore, ask him to send a
bill
to Congress that would criminalize such privately funded research. This
would not thwart the great good that is coming from stem-cell research.
Experiments using stem cells derived from umbilical cord blood and
adult
organs and tissue are extremely promising. Moreover, they do not
involve
killing anyone.
Michigan
Christians for Life