An immodest proposal (with apologies to Jonathan Swift)

Editor’s note: The following was first published in the Aug. 4, 1991, issue of the Sacramento (Calif.) Union. Current debate over stem-cell research renders it relevant today – with very minor revisions.

We rarely chide politicians for being too conservative, but during the current presidential campaign, the Democrats have suffered such an egregious lapse of vision we must chastise them for the timid handling of a grand concept.

At issue is the medical use of fetal tissue – more precisely, fetal tissue obtained in abortions.

Their points:

• Limitations on such use hinder promising research on Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, paralysis, epilepsy, infertility and, ironically, a wide variety of genetic birth defects that now end in abortions and the early death of children.

• One scientific panel found “no reason to believe … such research, conducted with proper ethical safeguards, would result in a higher number of abortions …”

• Fetal tissue exploitation would be a victory for knowledge and free inquiry over ideology.

The editors of a newspaper that shares this view have said fetal tissue use would be “A Vote for Life,” but we must ask: Why are you satisfied to plod along a narrow byway when a broad avenue of possibility lies open before you? Why is your “vote” so limited, your imagination so pinched that it applies only to medicine?

We are not scientists, but from our reading we discern that the tissues required for medical research are both specific and limited – hardly more than a few cells in some cases, and in every case from a very few bodily organs.

(Not that we can make reference to “organs” in any definitive sense, because, after all, we are talking here of fetal tissue, and an organ really can’t be considered an organ when it is fetal. But let us not digress.)

The question is, if medical research can use only limited and specific parts of a fetus, what is to become of the rest?

Must it simply go to waste?

We think not.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman, D-Calif., once said House members couldn’t “look people in the eye who are suffering from … diseases and tell them it is better to take the fetal tissue that is dead and bury it, rather than let any of that tissue be used for a transplant that would save somebody’s life.”

Shouldn’t we also ask: How can we look the world’s starving millions in the face and tell them we are simply burying useful tissue that might preserve their lives?

In a world starved for protein, doesn’t mere burial border on sin?

It should be simple to turn fetal tissue, at the very least, into pet dinners.

But we are being facetious. Morally, we could not squander the resource so trivially – but it could become a valued extender of swine fodder.

Of course, some study would be required to determine whether it would be more efficacious to use fetal tissue as animal food or to convert it directly into meat products for the homeless.

If our will and common sense don’t fail, we may see the day when a soup kitchen we know of changes its name from Loaves and Fishes to Loaves and Fetuses.

Recognizing there are many whose vegetarian scruples would prevent their direct consumption of this new, animal protein, we should be sure a portion of fetal-use research is directed toward improved crop yields.

Imagine the benefit to the denizens of hungry, Third World nations from the use of processed fetal tissue, spread on the fields to double their harvests of millet.

The United States bears a moral duty to develop the technology to accomplish this and to share that technology with the world.

Once every reasonable restraint on the constructive, life-affirming use of fetal tissue has been removed, who knows what research breakthroughs might eventuate? There could be progress, for all we know, in everything from plastics to semiconductors, not to mention mundane applications such as, say, driving gloves or lamp shades.

And who is to say, given the need to feed the spirit as well as the body, that some portions of the fetus may not be turned to artistic or at least decorative uses?

Why, indeed, should free inquiry be limited by the strictures of political correctness?

Proponents of fetal tissue exploitation seem to agree, without giving the point great emphasis, that research following a “victory for knowledge over ideology” should be undertaken with proper ethical and moral safeguards. We concur entirely.

What kind of people would we be without ethics and morals?