Few moral questions for the people in this thread that are opposed to these practices:
1) What moral difference is there between an abortion clinic selling the parts of dead babies for stem cell research, illegally on the black market, and a marijuana dealer selling dank weed illegally on the black market?
- In this context, let's assume that no women were solicited to abort a baby for the purpose of making money - they did so for personal reasons. Please justify your answer logically.
They're lying to the women (saying the parts are just tissue, yet believing them to be human organs). They're harming the women (more than necessary) to collect the tissues.
2) If no money is involved, apart from legitimate expenses (which I think is what PP is claiming), so the tissue is purely donated to stem cell research with no profit to PP, does this change your opinion? Why?
No, I think it's pretty obvious, they're still lying to the women and harming them more than necessary.
3) If the parts were being sold to other, less wholesome organisations (such as underground clubs where people eat fetal tissue), does this change your opinion? Why?
That would add
another moral objection. Some women may not like it if they found out their fetus was being eaten, or used in some religious practice.
There's also
this site. It does make me sick to think aborted fetuses are used in vaccines and may end up in food/drinks.
Obama agency rules Pepsi's use of aborted fetal cells in soft drinks constitutes 'ordinary business operations'
Human Fetal Cells Make Pepsi Sweeter Also Used in VaccinesI personally, stopped drinking pepsi after reading up and watching these videos. It's disgusting to me that they did this. I don't even know why they felt a need to do this, because over the 30 something years I've been drinking it, I've noticed the quality of Pepsi has gotten worse. (So it's not helping, and pretty disgusting!)
3) If it turns out that PP executives were (illegally I think?) exaggerating the expenses costs, and putting that extra money back into the organisation for care-related use (more clinics/better patient care/better clinicians etc.), would that be immoral? Would your opinion change for this question if the money went to more indirect activity, such as advertising and government lobbying for PP?
Yes, the lying, and tricking people and hurting them more than necessary is still there.
4) If it turns out that PP executives were funneling this expenses money corruptly into their own personal pockets (to buy Lambos etc, which is obviously fraud), do you think that this is worse than cases of fraud in other organisations, such as the recent LIBOR scandal, or ENRON scandal in 2001. Bear in mind that these scandals were orders of magnitude worse in terms of money lost by innocent people.
If you think that the (unproven) fraud in 4) is worse than the other scandals I mentioned, can you give some justification why, and who the victims are?
I suppose both had to do with lying to others, and putting them out and harming them (in different ways), so logically very similar....
However, I personally believe that killing a baby is a sin, so I think that lying to someone to get them to commit a sin is much worse. Because the women have to live with it, the fathers have to live with it, and it all might have been avoided if the PP employee had not lied to try to get an outcome.
I know some may say it's not a lie to call a baby a fetus, but here's the thing....
Killing babies was considered murder, that's why they had a court case about it. The only reason they allow the killing of tissue (babies) is because the law calls them fetuses and tissue, not babies. According to the law it is only murder when the intact baby is delivered. These PP employees are purposefully getting the intact babies, for one. But even in situations where they're not, they are calling them human organs etc. They know it's a human, and yet they just killed it to get it out. They're purposefully telling the women that it's just tissue, but they know better. That's a disgrace and immoral.