Medical Cannibalism.

The quotes you are about to read are true. The circumstances have been changed in order to illustrate the fatally flawed moral reasoning behind President Bush's unconstitutional decision to subsidize experimentation on existing "lines" of stem cells extracted from human embryos:

WASHINGTON, D.C., August 9,2003: President George W. Bush announced today that he would allow federal funding for medical experiments using organs and tissues "harvested" from executed Chinese prisoners. In a live address to the nation, the President underscored the fact that he had invested four months of anguished reflection and prayer into the effort to reach this decision.

One key consideration, the President observed, was the fact that since the bodies of the executed prisoners are "going to be destroyed anyway," the organs that have been extracted from them should "be used for a greater good, for research that has the potential to save and improve other lives...." He also emphasized that the subsidies would be limited to the existing stock of "harvested" organs, "where the life and death decision has already been made." Because this medical research "offers both great promise and great peril," said Mr. Bush, "I have decided we must proceed with great care."

Referring to media reports that Red Chinese authorities had imprisoned some people "solely to experiment upon them," the President declared: "This is deeply troubling, and a warning sign that should prompt all of us to think through these issues very carefully.... We recoil at the idea of growing human beings for spare body parts, or creating life for our convenience."

One spokesman for the National Council of Catholic Bishops denounced the President's decision: "For the government to allow funding for this experiment makes the government complicit in what we consider to be wrongdoing." However, a spokesman for the United Methodist Church -- the President's denomination -- offered qualified approval for the decision, noting that "if you're going to do this research with federal funding, he narrowed it as much as he could." Similar ambivalent approval was given by Focus on the Family, a major "Christian Right" organization. "From our perspective he didn't call for federal funds to be expended to take human life," commented Focus on the Family President Dr. James Dobson. Although the group remains opposed to the use of organs harvested from Chinese prisoners, those who would be affected by the President's decision "are now gone," continued Dr. Dobson. Meanwhile, the harvested organs "are there and I think we can live with that."

None of the people mentioned in this fictional example support the harvesting of organs from Chinese prisoners. Our descent into the Culture of Death has not yet reached such a critical stage. Nevertheless -- and this is the point of our exercise in extrapolation -- there is nothing in President Bush's speech that would prevent us from getting there.

It's not difficult to recall how mainstream conservatives reacted to Bill Clinton's cagy equivocation about the meaning of the word "is." Many of those same conservatives have been curiously silent about George W. Bush's Clintonesque use of the expression "potential for life" to describe the status of the human embryos from which stem cells are cannibalized. If human embryos merely represent "potential" life, what is so scandalous about creating them "solely to experiment upon them"? But then again, Bush did not say that creating a human life -- or "potential" life -- for that purpose should be forbidden, but merely that it is something we should "think through ... very carefully."

In announcing that he was limiting federal subsidies to the "more than 60 genetically diverse stem cell lines" that already exist, Bush may actually have issued a mandate for further killing. A July study by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on stem cell research declared: "At the time of this report, there are approximately 30 cell lines of human pluripotent stem cells that have been derived from human blastocysts or fetal tissue." Assuming Bush offered an accurate figure, where did the other 30 stem cell lines come from? Was he authorizing the creation of additional lines beyond those that presently exist? And what is the origin of the "fetal tissue" referred to by the NIH?

Bush noted that fetal tissue research "has not lived up to its expectations." What he avoided mentioning is that there is no scientific justification for using embryonic rather than "adult" stem cells in medical research -- and that adult stem cells can be obtained without killing a developing human individual.

But the entire purpose of the embryonic stem cell controversy has been to advance a new collectivist medical ethic in which the rights of the individual can be violated in the name of society's greater good. Under the same principle, handicapped or elderly adults (or Chinese prisoners, for that matter) could someday be forced to serve as organ or tissue donors -- once again, in the name of the collective good of society.

For Vladimir Lenin, the key question of politics was "Kto kogo" -- "Who consumes whom?" By extending federal subsidy to a form of medical cannibalism in the name of the "greater good," Bush endorsed the application of Lenin's political ethics to medicine.