The cells of aborted babies are being treated like a fountain of youth at unregulated clinics outside the United States.
Thousands of women have been injected with stem cells from aborted babies with the hope that they will look and feel younger and have greater energy and an increased sex drive, according to a British online newspaper.
A report by the Daily Mail found clinics in the Caribbean island countries of Barbados and the Dominican Republic, as well as Moscow, Russia, that use stem cells from babies aborted between six and 12 weeks of gestation for the promised anti-aging treatments. Stem cells are the body’s master cells that can develop into tissues and other cells.
“The results are incredible. You’ll feel and look different after a month because these cells help the body to regenerate itself,” a consultant named Jenny at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Barbados told a Daily Mail reporter. “The effects last for approximately a year.'”
Bioethicist Ben Mitchell decried the treatments.
“Barbaric is too kind a word for such a revolting practice,” said Mitchell, an associate professor of bioethics at the Chicago-area Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and a consultant to the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. “Sacrificing the unborn on the altar of beauty is detestable and sickening.”
The ethics violations and health dangers go beyond the destruction of embryos.
“The Barbados clinic is not regulated by any medical board, and there is no documented evidence or controlled clinical trials to back up their claims,” Stephen Minger, director of stem cell biology at King’s College in London, told the Daily Mail.
“More worryingly, there is no proof that the tissue is obtained from truly elective abortions rather than financially induced ones. Research shows that they openly import fetuses from poverty-stricken provinces in Ukraine and Russia, preying on the financially desperate to treat vain Western women.”
Moscow police have found an expanding black market in aborted babies smuggled in from Georgia and Ukraine, according to the Daily Mail. Poor women receive $200 each to carry babies for eight to 12 weeks before they are aborted and sold to anti-aging clinics, the newspaper reported.