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December 17, 2006

Stem Cell Nightmare in Ukraine

The BBC is reporting that many "healthy new-born babies may have been killed in Ukraine to feed a flourishing international trade in stem cells." While elsewhere in the world stem cell harvesting and research has been restricted or banned, Ukraine moving quickly to fill the gap, potentially utilizing practices that would never be allowed in an environment of proper certification and oversight. In other words, it may very well be that the lack of availability of stem cells from legitimate sources is allowing the development of an underground supply system that relies on the gruesome harvest of stem cells from murdered healthy newborns, stolen from their parents by the hospitals in which they are born.

It certainly seems that whenever a broad demand for something exists but that thing is banned due to questions of morality, the unscrupulous will seek to make their fortune by providing it illegally. We've seen it with alcohol and drugs, among other things. Sometimes banning a thing is the right thing to do, such as child pornography, because the price of the activity is unbearably high, whether legal or illegal. But often the result of the banning is even more immoral than the thing that was banned in the first place. I tend to think that is the case here.

It seems that many industries around the world that profit from the harvesting of any sort of material from living creatures, whether animal or human, whether legal or illegal, tend to succumb to cruel behavior in an effort to increase profit margins. China, for example, is known to harvest organs for transplant and collagen used to enhance the lips of European women from executed prisoners, as well as to skin animals alive for the worldwide fur industry. We even see cruelty in the commercial fur, meat and poultry industries within the United States. Those who benefit legally from such products are also culpable for the cruelty involved in bringing the products to them and must begin to demand humane and moral practices in all industries that rely on products derived from living creatures.

Posted by Becky at December 17, 2006 03:07 PM