Little Book of Horrors
By Kim Moreland
8/16/2006

Tracing a Deadly Legacy

Commentators at the Chicago Tribune and NPR have pointedly questioned why President Bush signed into law S. 3504, the “Fetus Farming Prohibition Act of 2006,” saying that the law deals only with a hypothetical situation because “scientists say [it] is not happening.” Unfortunately, fetal farming, a la artificial wombs, is already underway in Tokyo and in the U.S. Furthermore, the press has failed to expound upon the problem scientists are having experimenting on one- or two-week-old embryos. These embryos fail to develop properly and become useful for embryonic stem cell therapies.

Of course, this isn’t the only instance where language and ideas have clashed. Last year, James Dobson stirred a hornet’s nest by using a Nazi analogy to compare Hitler and his minions’ horrific actions upon Jews and the disabled with today’s advocates of bioethical trends such as embryonic experimentation, abortion, and euthanasia. To understand current events, it is imperative to study the past to see what values and manners were bequeathed to the present. Does the rhetoric used during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by European biologists, doctors, and other intellectual proponents of Darwinian-inspired eugenics echo in today’s bioethical debates? the rest