Posted on 08/18/2015 5:57:33 PM PDT by markomalley
For The Huffington Post, Steven Conn, W.E. Smith Professor of History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, penned a fierce defense of Planned Parenthood's selling of fetal tissue, claiming it as a mark of "compassion" that is worthy of praise and thanksgiving.
In the course of his meanderings, Conn harkened back to Ronald Reagan's presidency, attacking his ban on medical research involving fetal tissue -- research, he says, that could've offered the former president greater help as he suffered from Alzheimers.
Conn said that during "the fake exposé released by anti-abortion zealot David Daleiden" revealing that Planned Parenthood engaged in morally questionable practices regarding aborted fetal tissue, he was busy thinking about the Reagan administration:
Medical research involving fetal tissue has been going on at least since the 1930s, and like it or not it has contributed to important breakthroughs that have improved all of our lives. But it was President Ronald Reagan who first turned an important scientific pursuit into a political issue (masquerading as a moral crusade).
In his second term Reagan imposed a moratorium on federal funding for research that utilized fetal tissue because such tissue came from terminated fetuses. He, and others who supported his decision, made truly insulting assertions that medical research created a "market" for fetal tissue and thus would encourage women to 1) get pregnant in order to 2) have an abortion so that they could 3) sell the fetal tissue to make money. Revolting as such sentiments are, they are certainly revealing of the contempt Reagan and others had for women.
As Conn remembers Nancy Reagan lobbying in 2004 for stem cell research to help her ailing husband, he almost seemed to revel in the fact that Reagan was experiencing some "unintended consequences" of his earlier actions:
It's easy, and not incorrect, to see this as simple straightforward hypocrisy. Ban funding for the research! Except if I or a member of my family needs it! … Poor Nancy, she didn't seem to recognize that the husband she was now pleading for had created this problem in the first place by turning medical research into an arena for right-wing politics. The cure you are thwarting with your political pandering may someday be your own, or your child's or your husband's.
Conn hopes the undercover Planned Parenthood videos will usher in a new wave of unintended consequences that will draw attention to the "important" and "successful" research that is executed through fetal tissue. He stands alongside the New England Journal of Medicine who recently pledged its full support of Planned Parenthood and declared the use of fetal tissue as an ethical responsibility to use this "precious resource to find new preventive and therapeutic interventions for devastating diseases."
Conn concluded with why he believes this pursuit is, in the end, compassionate above all else:
It also reminds us of the deeply personal choice that is at the heart of reproductive freedom. The women who choose to donate fetal tissue to medical science are doing something benevolent, caring, and profound, in difficult circumstances. Far more than the shrill screamers rushing to defund Planned Parenthood, they understand what compassion means. And for that they deserve our thanks.
W.E. Smith Professor of History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio: from darkness to gross darkness.
I believe that's exactly what the Nazis said about the mass evacuation of non-Aryan populations "to the East."
See my tag...
So, if someone hacks him to death, it will be “compassionate” if they sell his liver?
Good to know whose “history” books I don’t need to waste my time on. What a terrible temperament for a historian to have! Conn has totally outed himself.
No Professor,
Compassion is the guy that gunned his engine just before he hit you crossing the street. Oh, wait a minute. Maybe the statement, Vehicular homicide is not a good thing, is more correct? (MORE correct? That can’t be right.)
Lets wait for his next piece praising mengele and all the research they gathered.
I can’t get past the outlandish assertion that the videos were “fake.” Hidden camera maybe, but real, soulless ghouls doing what they do all the time. “Fake”? And this from a “historian.” Unbelievable.
These are human organs, being sold as human organs to the highest bidder for profit to be shared amongst those who wish to keep the revenue stream from being disrupted in any manner
Some of the people teaching at our Universities are absolutely frightening individuals.
People need to think long and hard about the school they allow their children to attend.
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