Status of Humans 2024

The Alabama Supreme Court, pretty much without even trying, has greatly roiled the political waters of America with its decision concluding that human embryos are human embryos, eg, human beings.

They got the science right. But that is not allowed in America today. Science is what leftists say it is, nothing more and nothing less. So the unmitigated chutzpah of the Alabama SC is far beyond the pale for our modern/postmodern society.

The reaction of several IVF clinics, including the University of Alabama at Birmingham Heersink School of Medicine, an auspicious and pre-eminent medical training facility, was, to say the least, over the top, as they suspended their IVF treatments. Other fertility clinics, thinking more clearly, and less politically, haven't done so.

The case that was decided by the Alabama Supreme Court involved an unauthorized intrusion into an unsecured embryo storage facility in a fertility clinic in Mobile that resulted in stored frozen embryos being removed and dropped on the floor and thus destroyed.

Many people involved in fertility treatments panicked, thinking that if the unauthorized , unintended destruction of embryos was a violation of law, then many of the processes involved in fertility would be as well. Certainly there may be potential legal jeopardy, particularly if some pro life activists legally targeted those fertility treatment centers. Which would be a turnabout in lawfare that has been waged principally by the left, the woke.

Republicans were instantly accused of responsibility for this disastrous curtailment of humane infertility treatments. This assault on privacy rights. This attack on women. So of course the politicians had to make definitive statements about all of this. Nikki Haley supported the decision (as appropriately she should have) before affirming that she also supported IVF and fertility treatments (which are not contradictory positions). Trump came out guns blazing in support of IVF and fertility treatment. So of course the left would say this was only to produce more White babies. After all, if Trump supports it, it must be bad, or from an ulterior motive (and we Deplorables are accused of concocting conspiracy theories).

Democrats will be campaigning on the evil of Republicans depriving women of fertility treatment. Some wokesters (the spell checker keeps trying to change that to "Jokesters"--perhaps I shouldn't have corrected the corrector) accused Republicans of supporting IVF just to have more White babies. And the insanity plays on...

All of this of course completely misses the point. The question is:
What is the Status of Humans?

As regards Human embryos, per our current jurisprudence and policies, this particular cohort of humans, human embryos, are property. Commodities. Owned by someone. No legal rights. No status as anything that might be called a Human Being. A collection of cells. A fungible entity. To be discarded at convenience, on a whim, cavalierly, with no consideration of what an embryo is: an utterly unique human being, a DNA complement that has never before existed in the history of the Universe, and will never again exist in the history of the Universe. Something utterly unique and individual, of almost unlimited potential. An integral part of the future of humanity.

Once upon a time, America fought a war to establish the idea that no human being could be property. Yet almost from the moment that idea was established, the effort began to reverse it. Ultimately, that status of property was assigned to preborn humans. How else to allow abortion up to and beyond the moment of delivery, as Obama insisted? So, Roe v Wade established the human fetus, and thus the human embryo, as property. Not human. Bound for destruction at a whim, without consequences (at least legally). A constitutional right possessed exclusively by the prospective mother to destroy a human life at her discretion. That was called "privacy." "Reproductive rights." "Women's healthcare." Certainly not fetal healthcare.

Prior to Roe v Wade, in Texas a fetus was defined under law as a human being. After Roe, that was not the case. It was property.

The status of embryos as property was firmly re established in 2010 when Obama discarded George W Bush's limitations on embryonic stem cell research on human embryos. Obama allowed the use of embryos for stem cell research, which could only be done by destroying the embryo. Francis Collins, the NIH director at the time, foisted on the nation by George W. Bush as an Evangelical who would honor the nation's traditions of life. His prestige was enormous, as he had spearheaded the Human Genome Project (somewhat discombobulated by Craig Venter who with private drug company funded research was leaping ahead of the staid government funded HGP. So Collins had to accelerate his work to avoid the drug companies from patenting the human genome for proprietary purposes--which was a consideration, as the University of Utah had patented the BRCA1 gene discovered by Mark Skolnick's team at the U of U; Skolnik, with the patent licensed to his company, Myriad Genetics, made that into a multi hundred million dollar company on the revenues generated by that patent--which, fortunately, was ultimately invalidated by the Supreme Court, with the majority opinion written by Clarence Thomas 20 years after the fact).

Unbeknownst to most people, Collins selected as his second in command of the Human Genome project an avid Eugenicist, Alan Guttmacher, who continued to be a fan of the absolutely depraved ideas of Francis Galton, the British originator of a racist Eugenics that advocated the breeding of improved humans, as the breeding of so many sheep or dogs or horses, or cattle, or poultry, or plants, had been used to improve these organisms. Galton had an ecstatic view of the human race as a flock of prized sheep grazing peacefully on a well-tended moor. A sort of Utopia, or heaven, achieved by human means via selective breeding. Gottmacher of course was all in on abortion as part of that Eugenics effort; his name sake uncle, Alan F. Guttmacher, an official of both the American Eugenics society and Planned Parenthood, had formed the Guttmacher Institute to promote and track abortion.

So much for Collins as an Evangelical defender of human life and freedom. Raising many questions about the whole purpose of the Human Genome Project, that greatest of scientific triumphs of our time. Certainly Yuval Harari ("Homo Deus") is not the voice we should be listening to on these ideas.

To sort of (but not really) allay the opposition of us deplorables to such an extension of research using human embryos, Obama had the NIH director write a set of ethical guidelines for the donation of embryos for research purposes. The donors could not be solicited by the doctors creating the embryos for IVF treatments, rather, the persons owning the embryos (mother, parents, interested party, whoever) had to voluntarily donate the embryos for no pecuniary reason or receive any financial incentive (researchers got them for free) or coercive pressure. And etc. The problem, of course was that all of those "ethical" guidelines firmly established the embryo as property. Which is why I characterize "Medical Ethics" as the foremost oxymoron of our time.

We now know that Francis Colins is one of the great dissemblers of modern science. He was last seen colluding with Fauci to purposely smear the top three epidemiologists in the world (Batacharya at Stanford, Kuldorf at Harvard, Gupta at Oxford) as fringe incompetents because they authored a set of principles (the Great Barrington Declaration) to deal with COVID that differed radically from the government edicts and asinine policies imposed by Fauci, Birx, and Redfield. The exposure of that depraved collision resulted in Collins' retirement as the head of NIH. Never before has a director of the NIH committed such an atrocity as did Collins. His name will live in infamy.

Subsequently, partly because of the controversy of embryonic stem cell research, science moved on--to even greater depravity. Instead of obtaining embryos from fertility centers, and harvesting stem cells from them, researches began obtaining fetal tissue from abortion clinics. The money (research and otherwise) went to tissue culture of embryonic and fetal tissues. Which more or less obviated the need for embryonic stem cells. There is a reason that Deleiden has been prosecuted so vigorously; it is because he exposed the truth of the morbid but lucrative fetal tissue collection process, for fun and profit, by Planned Parenthood. All under the rubrical umbrella of Women's Healthcare.

The NIH under Collins also had "ethical" guidelines for procuring fetal tissues from aborted infants, that involved arms length processes and no financial gain to the clinics or the researchers, with "informed consent" of the donors of the tissue. Those NIH guidelines were being violated egregiously. No one at the NIH cared. Or did anything about it. Instead Deleiden was prosecuted.

At the time, I wrote an email to the president of my professional association, the Endocrine Society, Dr. Henry Kronenberg, head of Endocrinology at Harvard (yes, that Harvard, until recently presided over by the august scholar Claudine Gay) enquiring about any Endocrine Society efforts to assure that "ethical" guidelines were being followed by members of the Endocrine Society. He did not deign to respond to my email. When he had assumed the Presidency of that august body, he had given a speech in which he promised to always be available to members, and always answer emails from members. Not exactly true to his word.

I enquired of the Endocrine Society directly and got a pro forma response that the Endocrine Society encouraged its members to follow NIH guidelines. Since the NIH wasn't concerned about its own guidelines, this was obviously a meaningless response.

With the overturning of Roe (although Buck v. Bell remains in place, allowing at a federal level the forced sterilization of the 'unfit"), states can again redefine the status of humans, rather than have it forced on them from above. And Alabama has done just that, in full accord with Science. Rarely in the last century or more has any court so correctly and precisely grounded an opinion on the most advanced of our Science, no matter how hard the left screams, and no matter how hard Republicans try to avoid blame for political survival.

Trump and Haley and all Republicans should be hailing the fact that the Alabama court decided that humans are humans and have human rights, including those enumerated in the Bill of Rights, and particularly the great right enunciated in the Declaration of Independence: the Right to Life. Embryos are Human! Who would have guessed in this late age of depravity, unseriousness, and pseudoscience, that a court of law in the United States would announce a decision based so firmly in reality. I suspect the Supreme Court of Alabama can even tell us what a woman is, a feat that the most elevated of our jurists otherwise cannot do.

The hard part follows that pronouncement. That hard part does not mean jettisoning IVF or fertility treatments. It means defining and delimiting what is acceptable and what is not, once the most important grounding decisions have been made correctly: That Human Embryos are Human.

Now we can argue about how careful fertility centers have to be with creating and implanting embryos. About who should qualify for treatment. Society has an interest in the circumstances of its most vulnerable citizens and it is not unreasonable for society to have a say in the utilization of advanced technology that is at the beating heart of life, of human life. What is ethically acceptable? Those decisions are not necessarily the prerogative of the doctors alone. Otherwise you wind up with Mengeles. Or Gosnells. The decision of the University of Alabama to pause IVF is an admission that they may not be exercising sufficient caution with embryos, with due respect for those embryos and their rights. The Alabama Supreme Court decision may prompt them to achieve a higher level of care for those embryos. They are, indeed, handling something truly transcendent. The statement of the University to me reeks of an arrogance that says, we are the ones with the knowledge and expertise, which you, the Court, should not be questioning. Their position is, it is our ball, so we make the rules, and if we are not allowed to make the rules, we are going to take our ball and go home. About as childish as it is possible to be. Obviously, the physicians and administrators don't like being in a position of having to respond to another authority. They believe themselves to be an authority unto themselves, rather than the broader society. That is not a reasonable position for a public university to assume. It is like Terry McAuliffe insisting that the schools alone decide what is best for the children and the parents can butt out. It's the tail wagging the dog.

And what to do with all those excess embryos? I would modestly propose an embryo bank, or banks, and the preservation of those excess embryos. Successful pregnancies with normal children have resulted from embryos frozen for 25 years or more. Preserving those embryos may be a hedge against some nightmarish nuclear holocaust in which most of the race has been rendered sterile from radiation exposure, and those embryos may be a bridge to a preserved humanity.

Or one could advocate for improved methods that reduce the number of embryos implanted at an IVF attempt. Methods may improve. Success may require fewer embryos. What about genetic disease, like Huntington's Chorea? Preimplantation screening can distinguish affected from unaffected embryos, allowing the implantation of unaffected embryos. Then what to do with the affected embryos? Some societal decisions on such circumstances are not untoward. Can such affected embryos be allowed to be used for research purposes? Like all those Catholic urchins in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, sold off for medical experiments? Say, experiments with CRISPR methods on correcting genetic disorders? Such as the recently approved Casgevy for Sickle Cell Disease, using CRISPR technology.

But assigning Human Status to embryos in itself is not sufficient to transform the moral degradation of the modern world. Understanding the nature of Human Beings will also be necessary. So long have we endured under a dark cloud of diminution of the Status of Humans that we are hardly able to understand our own nature.

Humans are Transcendent beings. This fact is utterly denied by modernity. The reason why Allan Bloom said that Martin Heiddeger was the most influential human being of the 20th Century is because Heiddeger was the most successful in demanding that Human Transcendence be denied. That any discussion of Human Transcendence not be allowed. When Husserl, his teacher, seemed to consider again an interest in human transcendence, Heiddeger blocked him, not least by personally signing Husserl's removal from the University as a Jew (Heiddeger was the philosopher to the Nazi regime).

Richard Rorty in America, the late 20th Century dean of so-called American Pragmatist Philosophers, was the foremost acolyte of Heidegger in America and established his influence here. And the Left has completely bought into the idea of the non-transcendence of Humans.

With the removal of Roe, at least some states are starting to return to the ancient faith of the transcendence of Humans.

The foremost of modern thinkers have demonstrated human transcendence (Kurt Godel mathematically proved human transcendence, and Schrödinger showed that Humans consciousness was integral to Quantum processes in the physical world, eg, that Mind, Human Consciousness, directly interacts with Quantum physical events). These discoveries and insights have been suppressed by scientists and philosophers alike, to our severe detriment, while base ideas of human fungibility and incapacity have dominated in all areas.

The Alabama Court is on the cusp of a revolution in our concept of what is human. Or more of a return to a reality that has been intentionally suppressed by materialist delusions that have been imposed upon us. May their effort prosper and grow.