Resources & Archives

Title

(Fall 2001)—The recent debate over stem cell research has engaged audiences throughout the world, stimulating thinking in many who seldom might otherwise consider how "Science" does science. The controversy focuses on the use of embryos as one source for harvesting stem cells. This heated debate is ignited by moral indignation and moral imperative – on opposing sides of the fence.

One of the main arguments from those opposed to the use of embryonic stem cells is that not only is a human life form, a blastocyst, being destroyed but equally or perhaps more importantly to some, that this method heralds the beginning of the "slippery slope" of moral transgressions. This angry and passionate outrage is expressed by those always thinking, those thinking about things for the first time, and those thinking about things solely from an anthropocentric bias.

My favorite button reads, "If you are not outraged, then you are not paying attention." Those of us immersed in the realities of vivisection and already paying attention to what is happening in science know full well that the slippery slope was descended more than a hundred years ago when the first vivisection labs were sanctified in the name of science.

Given what anti-vivisectionists know about the realities of animal experimentation, it is hard to imagine that there might be an even darker bottom. Take for example, the focus of this Fall UPDATE: primate research. We see every day, routinely accepted, little-thought-about atrocities happening everywhere to these our next of kin. If we permit – as we have time and again – such cruel, thoughtless and lethal research on other animals (even those so like us), then why are we only now turning our attention to how slippery this slope is – when, in fact, it has always been so? Already individuals just like us are held prisoner, against their will – poked, prodded, used and abused against their will in laboratories and classrooms everywhere.

Scientists have repeatedly failed to consider these already existing moral atrocities dragging us faster and further down the slope. In recent years, when NEAVS has demanded that scientists exercise ethical introspection and integrity, they fight us, stall us and give us the rhetoric that a particular atrocity is important and promising to people who differ from the victim of the atrocity – the chimpanzee, for example – by a mere 2% of our DNA.

NEAVS welcomes public debate and consideration of the morality of science. We urge those on the forefront of stem cell research to consider all the implications and possibilities that this research will bring to helping people and to alleviating the suffering and death of animals now needlessly sacrificed to science. We are saddened, though, when those pushing for scientific moral consideration fail to include in their arguments the reality that so many other animal species who think, feel, and have a will to live are not given this same moral consideration.

We ask those pondering the discussions of late to remember that there are already "other people" of other species who suffer horribly at the hands of scientists who have artificially drawn a line for where compassion "must" end.

We know and will continue to work to show that compassion has no such boundary. Truly ethical scientists already know this and are replacing the use of animals. The rest have already descended that slippery slope and are doing what the caring public is expressing such deep concerns about of late: they are already playing God, and at their hands millions of innocent victims already suffer and die.

Action Alert!
> Kraft Foods Commercials
> Help pass H.1252
> Chimps in Commercials

Your support saves animal and human lives.


The State of the Anti-Vivisection Movement in America