PETA: Sacrifice Human, Not Animal Life for Medical Research
Thursday, July 20, 2006
By Steven MilloyExcerpt:
The animal rights activist group PETA seems to have its own “ethical” problem -- urging the sacrifice of human life rather than that of laboratory animals for medical research.
Amid this week's hullabaloo over embryonic stem cell (ESC) research, which culminated in President Bush's veto of a bill overriding his limitations on federal funding of such research, curiosity got the better of me and I wondered what PETA’s position, if any, might be regarding the controversy.
I assumed that PETA most likely opposed ESC research since it necessarily involves the sacrifice of animal lives as well as human embryos.
Au contraire.
As it turns out, PETA supports ESC research as a way to end animal research. While PETA acknowledges that “unfortunately, the majority of stem cell research is done on animals,” PETA sees the research as having “the potential to end the vast majority of animal testing.”
That seems to be quite a compromise from PETA’s usual extreme positioning with respect to so-called “animal rights” – PETA’s web site avers that “Animals are not ours to exploit” and “Animals are not ours to experiment on.”
PETA’s extremist campaign du jour is the group’s pummeling of the U.S. government for focusing on evacuating people rather than pets from war-torn Beirut.
Given that even the proponents of ESC research acknowledge that any potential success is likely decades away – meaning that uncountable numbers of animals will be sacrificed in the name of ESC research – PETA’s position on ESC research seems more an exercise in political posturing rather than a sincere and ideologically-consistent position.
The big problem with PETA’s support of ESC research, of course, is that it sanctions the notion that human embryos are expendable in the pursuit of medical research. Taking PETA’s own logic to its extreme, PETA apparently believes that it’s okay to sacrifice human life in order to save an animal life.
Not only is such a view inconsistent with the world-view of most reasonable folks, it’s also inconsistent with the publicly expressed views of PETA chief Ingrid Newkirk, who once equated humans and animals in her remarkable phrase, “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.”
In PETA-think, all species are equal – begging the question, can one animal species be preferentially sacrificed to save another?