mercredi 15 décembre 2004

And yet more conservative hypocrisy


Yes, conservative Christians are against abortion -- unless it's their daughters who are knocked up or unless the aborted fetuses from OTHER people might help them:



They come to him in search of miracles. The lame, the sick and the dying; young and old; Christians from the US, Muslims from the Middle East, Buddhists from Japan, agnostics from Europe. Some have been in wheelchairs for years and believe he can help them walk; others are kept alive by respirators, yet hope he can make them breathe. The voiceless have heard he can bring them speech. The terminally ill seek nothing less than more life. In many cases doctors and friends advise them to stay at home, not to waste their money, and warn them of potential risks.

For they come in search of one of the most pioneering - and controversial - medical procedures on the planet: the injection of cells from aborted foetuses into the brains and spines of the sick. And the object of their faith is a Chinese surgeon who spent many of his university years labouring as a peasant and is now conducting trial-and-error experiments on live subjects despite his research being rejected by the western medical establishment.



Dr Huang Hongyun promises nothing. He claims no miracle cure. He admits he cannot fully explain his results. All he knows, and all he tells his patients, is that his method often works, that the results speak for themselves. "Our results change thousands of years of traditional concepts," he says.



The conventional wisdoms that he claims to have turned on their heads are that chronic spinal injuries - injuries that can cause paraplegia or tetraplegia - can never be treated; and that it is almost impossible to stabilise the condition of patients with the wasting disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease.



[snip]



None of these claims has been proven to western scientific standards, but Huang's willingness to think the unthinkable in order to cure the incurable is inspiring hope; so much hope that patients are putting aside ethical qualms, paying tens of thousands of dollars and flying to Beijing to act as his guinea pigs.



Among them is Van Golden, a Christian, anti-abortion Texan who has sold his house so that he can travel to communist, atheist China and have Huang inject a million cells from the nasal area of a foetus into his spine. According to Golden's doctors, his spine was damaged beyond repair in a car crash last Christmas. The damage to his nervous system was so bad that he has been in a wheelchair and racked by spasms ever since. But Golden refused to give up, even if it meant having to compromise his values. "This is the only place that offered us any hope," he says. "Everyone else offered only to help make me sufficient in that chair. But the chair is not my destiny. It is not ordained."





Typical. So, Mr. Golden, how do you figure those cells became available to inject into your spine? Or are you only opposed to CAUCASIAN women having abortions? Or do you think abortion is OK as long as YOU benefit?



(via Atrios)

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