Do We Destroy Life to Enhance Life?

by Eileen F. Toplansky

Years before Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, German scholars were advocating the killing of “worthless” people under the protection of the state. On April 7, 1933 the Nazis eliminated “long established ethical and administrative public supervisory bodies” when they introduced the “law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring.” Euthanasia and experimentation on human subjects became the Nazi norm. The purveyors of Nazism saw their system as “applied biology.” 

Can one draw a parallel with the Nazi “applied biology” ideology and the recent revelations of Planned Parenthood’s selling of baby parts?  Is it “erroneous thinking” to show sympathy for “lives [deemed] devoid of value” but from which parts of those lives medical benefit can be derived?  And are any such “errors of judgment, diagnosis, and execution to be of concern when compared to the social benefits that might eventually accrue?” 

In a New York Times article by Isabel Wilkerson titled “Nazi Scientists and Ethics of Today” scientists discuss the ethical questions concerning the use of Nazi data. Dr. Benno Muller-Hill, a molecular biologist and director of the Institute for Genetics at the University of Cologne in West Germany maintains that people “should remember those who died. We should not try to squeeze profit out of it.” Others have “suggested that the use of the data would serve as a lesson to the world, that the victims did not die futilely, and that a post mortem use of the data would retroactively give ‘purpose’ to their otherwise meaningless deaths.” Yet, “Doctor Howard Spiro, of the Department of Internal Medicine at Yale University, insists that no one honors the memory of the dead victims by learning from experiments carried out on them. Instead, we make the Nazis…  retroactive partners in the victims’ torture and death.”

In his 1990 article titled “The Ethics of Using Medical Data from Nazi Experiments” Baruch C. Cohen writes that “[i]t is the grey areas between life-shattering and mundane benefits that continue to puzzle experts. Would the benefits of saving a life be the only acceptable scenario to justify the data’s use? Would benefits to the legal profession justify its use? Would the Supreme Court be justified in using… findings on the development of the human fetus in determining the Roe v. Wade abortion decision? Would the court’s opinion to use Nazi data benefit or harm the legal society?”

Since abortion is at the crux of the Planned Parenthood revelations, it is worth noting that “[t]he traditional Jewish view of abortion does not fit conveniently into any of the major ‘camps’ in the current American abortion debate. Jewish tradition neither bans abortion completely, nor does it allow indiscriminate abortion ‘on demand.’” But “[a] fetus may not be aborted to save the life of any other person whose life is not directly threatened by the fetus, such as use of fetal organs for transplant” [emphasis mine].

This medical minefield is made more tortuous by the issue of pre-embryonic stem cells. In his 2001 article entitled “Stem Cell Research in Jewish Law” Dr. Daniel Eisenberg asks whether “a very early embryo can be sacrificed for stem cells? In Judaism, pre-embryos are not covered by the prohibition of abortion, because they have never been implanted. The rationale for such a decision is based on the concept that a pre-embryo left in its petri dish will die. It is not even potential life until it is implanted in an environment in which it can mature.”

Thus, much hinges on the distinction between a pre-embryo and a fetus. Rabbi Moshe Dovid Tendler, in testimony for the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, “argued strongly in favor of the use of pre-embryos for stem cell research.” In a recent interview, Tendler explained that “abortion is prohibited under Jewish law unless it is carried out to save the life of the mother. However, if stem cells have already been harvested, he explained, the Orthodox Jewish position ‘is that if it leads to the saving of life or research that is of benefit to society it is allowed.’” 

Read more at American Thinker: 

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/08/do_we_destroy_life_to_enhance_life.html#ixzz3itpFKz00