When General Electric Co. subsidiary GE
Healthcare recently unveiled its plan
to use human embryonic stem cells in its drug trials, the company proudly
touted one of the plan's potential benefits: Using stem cells derived from
the
destruction of human embryos may make the experiments on rats unnecessary.
"This could replace, to a large extent, animal trials," Konstantin Fiedler
of
GE Healthcare told a reporter, according to Reuters news agency. "Once you
have
human cells and you can get them in a standardized way, like you get right
now
your lab rats in a standardized way, you can actually do those experiments
on
those cells."
Well, that's a relief. Researchers may need to kill a few million embryonic
human beings for the sake of scientific progress, but at least they will not
continue perpetuating a true atrocity — like the mass murder of mice. PETA
must
be proud.
Animal-rights activists also must be pleased by President Barack Obama's
recent
nomination of law professor Cass Sunstein to serve in the key administrative
role of "regulatory czar." Sunstein has argued for banning recreational
hunting
and giving animals legal standing to sue humans. In a 2007 speech in which
he
critiqued everything from factory farming and greyhound racing to the mere
act
of eating meat, Sunstein speculated that someday "our willingness to subject
animals to unjustified suffering" will be seen "as a form of unconscionable
barbarity, not the same as, but in many ways morally akin to, slavery and
mass
extermination of human beings."
That day already may have come. In America, the reasonable aims of the
animal-welfare establishment, which traditionally has upheld crucial
distinctions between humans and animals, increasingly are being supplanted
by
the irrational demands of animal-rights activists who recognize no such
distinctions.
One such activist is Princeton philosopher Peter Singer, who has argued that
the lives of chimpanzees deserve more protection than those of severely
disabled newborns and the demented. An apologist for infanticide and
euthanasia, Singer's newest cause is health care rationing — and his ideas
are
getting mainstream attention. In a recent New York Times Magazine article,
Singer said that using a mathematical formula to determine the value of a
given
human life — a formula that would score the value of the lives of
quadriplegics
and the elderly lower than those of able-bodied teenagers — makes more sense
than basing health care decisions on "feel-good claims" about "the infinite
value of every human life" that Singer considers bogus.
Singer's penchant for pairing animal-rights advocacy with disrespect for
human
rights is not uncommon. Nor is it historically unprecedented.
When they came to power, the Nazis passed sweeping animal-protection
measures
that prohibited vivisection and kosher butchering and prescribed everything
from the most painless way to cook a lobster to the most humane way to shoe
a
horse. Heinrich Himmler, overseer of the Nazi extermination camps, denounced
hunting as "pure murder" of the "innocent." Nazi commander Hermann Goring
threatened to send to concentration camps those who "continue to treat
animals
as inanimate property."
Blurring the moral distinction between animals and people did not make the
Nazis more compassionate to people. Instead, it contributed to some of the
greatest human-rights violations the world had ever seen, culminating in the
slaughter of six million Jews, whom the Nazis treated worse than animals.
It's easy to dismiss Nazi ideology as irrelevant to today's debates about
bioethics and health care, just as it's easy to dismiss the human-animal
equivalency theories embraced by Peter Singer and PETA as unworthy of
serious
concern. But if history teaches us anything, it is that ideas have
consequences. And the seemingly harmless idea that animals and people
possess
equal moral standing is anything but.
Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television and radio host and St.
Louis-based fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is
www.colleen-campbell.com.