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.
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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.
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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.
Animal-rights extremism endangers human rights by Colleen Carroll Campbell, who is a fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which is “Washington, D.C.’s premier institute dedicated to applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy.”
