Category: Pro-Life

Flip Benham with Operation Save America appears as enthusiastic as [Judie] Brown about the legislation. “[W]ithout a doubt, [this is] the very best bill that any state has brought before its legislative body yet,” he says in a press release. “It is truly an all-out declaration that human life begins at conception and therefore is due protection under […] law.”

A biotech start-up went out of business this fall, and it’s good news:

The company was launched by billionaire and University of Phoenix founder John Sperling, who had hoped to have his hunting dog, Missy, cloned — a feat that was never accomplished.

I don’t mean to be unsympathetic to a fellow missing his dear old dog, but trying to manufacture life really sounds too much like the mission of a comic-book villain. There’s already a stereotype that self-made billionaires are arrogant (cf. Turner, Soros; Gates sometimes); don’t these people have any self-awareness?
It’s not villainy in itself to clone cats and dogs, but the animal welfare people know that the effort is a cruel process:

“we’re very pleased that Genetics Savings & Clone’s attempt to run a cloning pet store was a spectacular flop,” said Wayne Pacelle, head of the Humane Society of the United States. “It’s not just a bad business venture, but also an operation grounded on the misuse of animals.”

Pacelle and other groups argue that cloning is still primitive and fails more often than it succeeds.

“For every successful clone, dozens fail and die prematurely, have physical abnormalities, and face chronic pain and suffering,” Pacelle said. “Cloning is at odds with basic animal welfare considerations.”

Treacherously, commercial success at cloning mammals would have given a boost to the fringe types who fantasize of cloning babies. Thank Heavens the message is getting across: even if it ended up working, the cruelty of the experiments to get there would be unimaginable.

Invest in us! Our stock price has been sagging, but we’ve got a new way to get into federally funded re$earch! We’ll be willing to use our new technique in the future and avoid killing any embryonic people. At least on federally funded projects.
Oh, sorry: was there some confusion? We haven’t really stopped killing embryonic human beings yet; not while we were trying out our new method, but we could! If there’s money in it! And we think it’ll be far less deadly than what we do now!
Oh, and: sorry if anyone lost money over that false impression people got from our publicity article. Oops!

The press has been buzzing for a few days over hyper-billionaire Warren Buffett’s arrangement to merge most of his money with Bill Gates’ foundation. To the extent that they do something good that benefits people, this is laudable.
On the other hand, I can’t get all sanguine about it, since Buffett, like Gates, has been a population-control zealot for years and, as Mary Meehan wrote in 2001, a big donor to abortionists in the US and overseas. He even bankrolled the liars of (well, really they’re ex-)Catholics for a Free Choice.
One commentator in the business press has the nerve to point out that this supposed Mr. Philanthropy earned his money the old-fashioned way: with ruthless amorality.
But that’s not a surprise, considering he wants to “help” the poor by seeing that fewer of them make it to birth.

When Planned Parenthood resorts to scare tactics against pro-life pregnancy aid services and tries to get their advertising banned by law, you know the good guys are having an effect!
By the way, notice the rhetoric in the piece: for PP, terms like “pregnancy help” don’t appear, but “crisis pregnancy” is the lede. When you hate birth, every pregnancy is a crisis.