Stem Cells and Babies

Today's Sun Times has a front page story on the healing properties of umbilical cord blood. With no harm to the infant or mother, cord blood stem cells can treat those suffering from leukemia or immune-system disorders. This is a welcome development.

Hopefully donations will become routine at birth. A Glenview based firm, ITxM Cord Blood Services has developed kits for expectant parents to take along to the hospital to designate their donation. It is a nonprofit group, and there is no charge or payment for the cord blood. Minority donors are especially needed. Most donations go to children suffering from leukemia.

This approach is in contrast to the shocking developments in the Ukraine, where healthy babies have been spirited away from their mothers and chopped up for sale. BBC:

Healthy new-born babies may have been killed in Ukraine to feed a flourishing international trade in stem cells, evidence obtained by the BBC suggests.

Disturbing video footage of post-mortem examinations on dismembered tiny bodies raises serious questions about what happened to them.

Ukraine has become the self-styled stem cell capital of the world.

There is a trade in stem cells from aborted foetuses, amid unproven claims they can help fight many diseases.

But now there are claims that stem cells are also being harvested from live babies.

Thanks to the Wilmette blog for drawing attention to this evil practice.

The Sun Times and state Sen. Schoenberg might want to rethink their open-ended support for government-sponsored embryonic stem cell research in Illinois, expressed in a recent editorial. Opportunities for corruption and coercion are implicit with government involvement. Hospital No. 6 comes to mind.

And last week FoxNews Special Report aired footage from their Sky News affiliate on people in China being used as guinea pigs for stem cell research without their knowledge. One woman who had merely complained of dizziness was told she would die within a year unless she had a heart and lung transplant. Now her body is rejecting the tissue and she is dying, leaving her husband and young children behind. There is also strong evidence that China is trafficking in human organs from Falun Gong political prisoners executed for profit.

This is what Hitler did, all in the name of scientific research. This was part of the Holocaust.

UPDATE: Promising discovery of stem cells in amniotic fluid, FoxNews:

Researchers at Wake Forest University and Harvard University reported Sunday that the stem cells they drew from amniotic fluid donated by pregnant women hold much the same promise as embryonic stem cells.

They reported they were able to extract the stem cells from the fluid, which cushions babies in the womb, without harm to mother or fetus and turn their discovery into several different tissue cell types, including brain, liver and bone.

Previous posts: Life on the Chopping Block, Snake Oil Stem Cells, Shameful Exploitation, Democrats Junk Science on Stem Cells, Stem Cell Rebuttal.