By SHERMAN FREDERICK By SHERMAN FREDERICK ADVERTISING Stephens Media Good news. There’s a new ancient Chinese medicine that will allow you to live forever. Bad news. It’s made by drying dead babies, pounding their flesh into dust and putting it
By SHERMAN FREDERICK
Stephens Media
Good news. There’s a new ancient Chinese medicine that will allow you to live forever.
Bad news. It’s made by drying dead babies, pounding their flesh into dust and putting it into a pill.
Sounds like the premise for a bad sci-fi horror flick. But it’s not. Baby pills — that is pills made from baby dust — are big business. And while living forever may be a stretch, people take the pills to feel fit, improve circulation and increase stamina. A “baby pill” a day keeps the doctor away.
The main source of the trade comes from China. Abortion clinics and hospitals there pass along aborted fetuses and stillborn babies to drug companies. About 13 million Chinese women a year have abortions. Many of those stem from the government limit of one child per family.
Some fetuses for the pills, according to news reports, come from “China’s notorious ‘dying rooms’ where youngsters are deliberately left to die because they were born into families that already had the limit of one child in country areas.”
Since last August authorities have noted an increasing number of “baby pills” coming in from China to South Korea. The practice stems from a superstitious belief that eating the body parts of young infants imparts special physical strength.
It’s tempting to lump this horrific business into the category of black market Chinese medicine — like, say, the powder from horns of the endangered black rhinos. But that would give the baby pill market too much protection.
The animal-rights and endangered-species communities fight tooth and nail to protect rhinos, wild horses, sage grouses and pupfish from predatory practices.
Babies, meanwhile, are not endangered. While reporting is not mandatory in most countries, worldwide about 40-50 million abortions are performed.
The “baby pill” story surfaced last August when a South Korean investigative television team filmed the practice from hospital to drug company. Reporters had the pills tested and confirmed they contained 97 percent human remains.
The Chinese government investigated and said it found no evidence of such pills in their country.
Then last Sunday South Korean custom authorities confiscated 17,000 “baby pills” coming into the country from China.
The advent of the “baby pill” trade, however, threatens to lift the veil of Western comfortableness with abortion. It’s one thing to pretend it isn’t what it is by using terms like “procedure” and “fetus” and relying on scientifically flawed legal opinions. It’s another thing entirely to then use the remains of those procedures to manufacture a pill to make us feel better.
In polite political society, no one really likes to talk about abortion. It makes bad cocktail and dinner party conversation. We’d rather talk line-by-line about the national debt than talk about the slippery slope of American abortion policy.
But if we’re going to get honest about it, medical advancements, not to mention those pesky routine ultra-sound pictures that shows a living human being in there, demand a rethink.
Is abortion in America really a matter of “choice” or is it simply a matter of convenience? And if it really is a choice, what’s wrong with choosing to sell the “material” it generates to make a “baby pill.” Who doesn’t want to feel better?
Intellectuals in America, who have marginalized the moral arguments, must admit that medical advancements have sided more with religious leaders than with liberal social thinkers in terms of what life is and when life begins.
Moral and religious thinkers staked out centuries ago the idea that all human life is sacred. All human beings have dignity.
If you disagree, then what say you about the “baby pill”?
Sherman Frederick, former publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, writes a column for Stephens Media.
