the new cannibalism

Thanks again to The Drudge Report for the links to this Daily Mail story entitled "A barbaric kind of beauty", although I kind of wish I never read it. Wealthy British and American women are spending thousands of dollars to allow themselves to be injected with fetal stem cells in the dubious hope that it will make their skin look younger. Where do those stem cells come from? The article tells us where one clinic in Moscow called The Cellulite Clinic gets them:

RUSSIA and the Ukraine currently top the world abortion league, with more of the operations carried out here than anywhere else on earth. Evidence gathered by the Moscow police department has shown a growing black market in aborted foetuses, which are smuggled into Russia from the Ukraine and Georgia.

Here, poverty-stricken young women are paid 200 U.S. dollars to carry babies up to the optimum eight to 12-week period - thought to be best for harvesting stem cells. They are then sold on to cosmetic clinics.

Here we have the truly hideous specter of widescale harvesting and slaughtering of the unborn so that some of their cells might be injected into other human beings...for vanity. This is truly a new cannibalism. Unlike the victims of the traditional variety of cannibalism, these victims don't scream, run or fight back.

Dr Stephen Minger, director of stem cell biology at King's College in London, doesn't like this development one bit:

"But what this clinic is doing raises serious issues. For a start, it is not regulated by any medical board and there is no documented evidence or controlled clinical trials to back up their claims. More worryingly, there is no proof that the tissue is obtained from truly elective abortions rather than financially induced ones.

"Research shows that they openly import foetuses from poverty-stricken provinces in Ukraine and Russia, preying on the financially desperate to treat vain Western women."

I'm glad Dr. Minger has a a problem with it, but isn't he being a bit hypocritical? He's allowed to destroy the unborn for research, because he's a member of the proper board and he fills out the proper forms. Well, these freelancers are just taking this whole business to its logical conclusion. And what's all this about "elective" abortions vs. "financially induced" ones? If a woman aborts a baby so that she and hubby can continue to make those payments on their two BMWs and their second home in Hawaii, doesn't that qualify as financial inducement? Are the stem cells from that fetus any more morally obtained that the stem cells from the Russian peasant girl who was paid $200? Sure, the BMW couple aren't being paid by the harvesters, but their abortion's payoff is much greater than that of the peasant girl.

There's a lot more in the article, so I recommend reading whole grisly thing.