A Severe Mercy

My oldest daughter is due to deliver our first grand-baby in about seven weeks. The Sorensen household is quite excited about all this; “Future Grandma” is only on the ground because I’ve weighted her pockets with lead; otherwise, she floats about three to four feet above the ground with baby ideas and gifts and visits in her eyes. Rebecca called earlier this week to tell us of her latest doctor’s visit: “Baby” Soule is around 4′ 10″ and still growing. For this we are extremely grateful to God and His mercy.

Our culture gets excited about such things, only if it appears that the mother is white, middle-class and above, earning a good living alongside her partner and has plans to resume doing so as soon as humanly possible (or whatever is allowed by work place policies or government mandates). Otherwise, get rid of that “thing”! It’s obviously unwanted, unloved and unplanned. It will grow up with more needs and psychopathic tendencies than any of us are willing to commit to, and heavens knows our government doesn’t need any more mouths on the public dole. In fact, some bozos have come out (okay, granted, “bozo” is a strong and hostile term, but I think ethicist is just crazy considering what these clowns have come up with) and said that infanticide should now become a viable option for mothers in the United States.

What? Are you kidding me? I’m not sure what offended me more: that they argued for infanticide right alongside abortion (but when you truly think about it, the argument makes sense, in their sin-sick, illogical and teeny-tiny warped brains; it’s just tissue and placement of said tissue shouldn’t really be a prohibition against what we do with it); or, that these fools (and I mean that in the most vehemently Proverbs-like manner I can state) are actually called ethicists––they study and promote ethics. There’s absolutely nothing ethical about this.

And that doesn’t even get me started on abortion.

On the blessed side of reason, sanity and sanctity, comes this:

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

You really need to read this; please.

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Okay, so I wrote this post, was moving on and then “Lo! and Behold!” in my newsreader, up pops this (I’m copying this directly from Gene Veith’s blog, Cranach, because I don’t want anyone to think I’m making this up):

I had assumed this was just a wild rumor, but Pepsi really is using the bodies of aborted children to make its products–not for cannibalism but in product testing.   And the Obama administration has given its approval.   FromLifesite:

PepsiCo has come under fire from pro-life advocates because it has been contracting with a research firm that uses fetal cells from babies victimized by abortions to test and produce artificial flavor enhancers.

Now, the Obama administration is set to face more criticism because an agency has declared that Pepsi’s use of the company and its controversial flavor testing process constitutes “ordinary business.”

In a decision delivered February 28, the Security and Exchange Commission ruled that PepsiCo’s use of aborted fetal remains in their research and development agreement with Senomyx to produce flavor enhancers falls under “ordinary business operations.”

Debi Vinnedge, Executive Director of Children of God for Life, the organization that exposed the PepsiCo- Senomyx collaboration last year, informed LifeNews today that a letter signed by Attorney Brian Pitko of the SEC Office of Chief Counsel was sent in response to a 36-page document submitted by PepsiCo attorneys in January 2012. In that filing, PepsiCo pleaded with the SEC to reject a Shareholder’s Resolution filed in October 2011 that the company “adopt a corporate policy that recognizes human rights and employs ethical standards which do not involve using the remains of aborted human beings in both private and collaborative research and development agreements.”

PepsiCo lead attorney George A. Schieren noted that the resolution should be excluded because it “deals with matters related to the company’s ordinary business operations” and that “certain tasks are so fundamental to run a company on a day-to-day basis that they could not be subject to stockholder oversight.”

Vinnedge said she is appalled by the apathy and insensitivity of both PepsiCo executives and the Obama administration.

“We’re not talking about what kind of pencils PepsiCo wants to use – we are talking about exploiting the remains of an aborted child for profit,” she said. “Using human embryonic kidney (HEK-293) to produce flavor enhancers for their beverages is a far cry from routine operations.” . . . .

“The company’s key flavor programs focus on the discovery and development of savory, sweet and salt flavor ingredients that are intended to allow for the reduction of MSG, sugar and salt in food and beverage products,” the Senomyx web site says. “Using isolated human taste receptors, we created proprietary taste receptor-based assay systems that provide a biochemical or electronic readout when a flavor ingredient interacts with the receptor.”Vinnedge explained, “What they don’t tell the public is that they are using HEK 293 – human embryonic kidney cells taken from an electively aborted baby to produce those receptors. They could have easily chosen animal, insect, or other morally obtained human cells expressing the G protein for taste receptors.”

via Obama Agency: Pepsi Using Aborted Fetal Cells is Ordinary Business | LifeNews.com.

Comments from a source that isn’t pro-life, as such, focused instead on environmental and food issues:

To be clear, the aborted fetal tissue used to make Pepsi’s flavor chemicals does not end up in the final product sold to customers, according to reports — it is used, instead, to evaluate how actual human taste receptors respond to these chemical flavorings. But the fact that Pepsi uses them at all when viable, non-human alternatives are available illustrates the company’s blatant disregard for ethical and moral concerns in the matter.

Pepsi is not the only corporation doing this sort of thing.  Senomyx’s other customers include the pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Merck.

So it has come to this:  the commodification of aborted babies.

Will Republicans go along with this, since it’s a matter of corporate practice and they are committed to being pro-business?  Will Libertarians defend this practice, since it’s all free enterprise?  Will Democrats who are normally critical of big business support these corporations, with pro-choicers not seeing a problem since they think fetuses are not human beings and since using fetuses as commodities reinforces a woman’s right to choose?