By DEXTER DUGGAN
A recent court ruling in Hungary against using parts of aborted babies for cosmetic purposes should provide inspiration to those fighting to tighten restrictions against related unethical practices in the United States, a pro-life attorney told The Wanderer.
Steven Aden, a senior counsel with the Arizona-based Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), said the decision “reflects the consensus in both Europe and the West that human beings in the womb are just that, human beings, and not commodities. . . . Life begins at conception.”
Aden is director of the Center for Life Alliances at ADF, an organization that works across the U.S. and internationally to defend life, religious liberty, faith, and historic morality.
He added that international laws hold that human life in the womb is not to be trafficked or profited on because it’s precious and sacred.
A May 12 ADF news release said, “The City Court of Budapest has found eight people guilty of illegally harvesting embryonic stem cells and tissue from aborted babies and using them for profit in cosmetic procedures.”
The news release said that according to the brief filed in the case by ADF International, “the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that, in the context of European patent law, life begins from the moment of conception,” and that human embryos cannot be used for “industrial or commercial purposes.”
Aden told The Wanderer during a May 18 telephone interview that although abortion broadly is legal in the U.S. because of the Supreme Court rulings in Roe and Doe in 1973, there still are certain restrictions, such as a prohibition of federal funding of medical research whereby the unborn human being would be destroyed or subjected to harm.
Also, he said, President George W. Bush signed into law the criminalization “of becoming pregnant just for the purpose of aborting and selling the baby in the womb,” as well as signing the “Unborn Victims of Violence Act” for preborn babies injured or killed during specified criminal acts.
The ADF news release said: “In July 2009, [Hungarian] police arrested nine people for using embryonic stem cells and tissues from aborted children for commercial gain. At a Kaposvar clinic specializing in plastic surgery, hundreds of patients agreed to be injected with the cells and tissue for $25,000 per treatment. The procedure was not approved by medical authorities or the Ethics Committee of Hungary’s Scientific Advisory Board.
“The [Budapest] court rendered judgments ranging from large monetary fines to prison sentences depending on the person’s level of involvement in the crime. The receptionist of the clinic was the only defendant exempt from criminal charges since no proof existed that she was aware of the illegal activity taking place,” the news release said.
Aden told The Wanderer, “I think as an expression of European law,” the Hungarian ruling “should bolster lawmakers and enforcers” in this legal area, remembering “this is completely contrary to law and decency, and that would give them added motivation by passing stronger laws, and enforcing laws already on the books.”
The Wanderer recalled that the Texas-based pro-life organization Life Dynamics exposed a shocking industry in which abortionists supply requested body parts such as eyes, brains, and limbs of the infants, at specified points in gestation, to researchers.
This information is available by going to www.prolifeamerica.com/reports and scrolling to “The Marketing of Aborted Baby Parts.” Liberal media keep people in the dark on this.
People would “say that couldn’t be happening here, but it is,” Aden said, “. . . that certain abortionists have ways of profiting off it. We hope that when these situations come to light, as they did in Budapest, that U.S. authorities will prosecute them as vigorously and faithfully” as in Budapest.
Although there’s no prohibition on using the body parts in the U.S., “The bottom-line rule is that there has to be informed consent on the part of the person who is donating,” Aden said, suggesting this sort of consent could be lacking.
“. . . I would suppose it’s buried in some kind of waiver language in the fine print” for the abortion, he said. “. . . Typically a woman sees an abortionist for only five minutes before the abortion occurs.”
It also should be recalled, Aden said, that despite all the Obama administration and media have done to promote abortion, the U.S. abortion rate has been dropping steadily. “So there’s a lot of room for hope” while pushing forward with advocacy on various fronts, as well as prayer.
Even figures from the Guttmacher Institute — a research arm that was given birth by Planned Parenthood and is named for one of PP’s past presidents — show this decrease, Aden said. “The rate is dropping somewhere between 3 and 5 percent a year…a strong decline year by year.”
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