Bob McCarty Writes

Providing what blogger Wesley J. Smith describes as “your 24/7 seminar on bioethics and the importance of being human,” the Secondhand Smoke blog covers a wide range of life-and-death topics.  Recently, he published two posts about proposals by people in the medical community that put young and old alike at risk.

In a post published today, Smith drew attention to the ghastly subject of “fetal farming” that was the focus of an article, Fetal Farming, Here We Come: UK Scientists Say to Use Aborted Fetuses as Sources of Organs, published in the UK’s Daily Times this morning.

Tell me we aren’t on the path to using human beings as mere produce, he writes, before offering the crux of the Daily Times article (i.e., a UK bioethicist has called for using fetal organs from abortions in transplantation) and pointing out that the practice would require later term abortions.

Scary stuff to be sure, but it’s not the only front on this battle for life.

In a post March 3, Smith highlighted an article, “Including Persons with Alzheimer’s Disease in Research on Comorbid Conditions,” which he “found both alarming and a sign of the increased desire among some in the bioethics and science communities to instrumentalize the most weak and vulnerable among us.”  About it, he wrote this:

The article by Anji Wall, a student at the Center for Healthcare Ethics, Saint Louis University, is not about using Alzheimer’s patients in experiments to understand the condition or find treatments for it. Rather, she wants to open up Alzheimer’s patients to the study of “comorbid” conditions–that is the presence of two or more diagnosable maladies at the same time–such as heart disease, arthritis, diminution of vision, etc. that are not directly related to Alzheimer’s.

At the breakneck speed with which President Barack Obama seems bent on redrawing ethical lines, I expect to be writing often about the battle for the dignity of human life — born and unborn.  When I do, I will likely turn to Secondhand Smoke for the latest news.