by John Klar
Given its vague language, why wouldn’t Vermont’s Constitutional Amendment 22 ensconce a right to fetal tissue research?
Amendment 22, like Lady McBeth’s hell, is murky: “An individual’s right to personal reproductive autonomy is central to the liberty and dignity to determine one’s own life course.”
One insidious purpose of Vermont’s late-term-abortion-affirming constitutional amendment passed last November might be to guarantee “gender-affirming” experimental hormone therapies for children as “reproductive liberty,” and guarantee a steady supply of fetal tissue for dubious stem-cell research connected to evolving mRNA technologies.
Clues to this prospect abound. In his recent Executive Order advancing a “National Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Initiative,” President Biden pulled out all stops to secure these evolving technologies as paramount to (yawn) protect national security and “equity”:
Biotechnology harnesses the power of biology to create new services and products, which provide opportunities to grow the United States economy and workforce and improve the quality of our lives and the environment. The economic activity derived from biotechnology and biomanufacturing is referred to as “the bioeconomy.” ….For biotechnology and biomanufacturing to help us achieve our societal goals, the United States needs to invest in foundational scientific capabilities. We need to develop genetic engineering technologies and techniques to be able to write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers; unlock the power of biological data, including through computing tools and artificial intelligence; and advance the science of scale‑up production while reducing the obstacles for commercialization so that innovative technologies and products can reach markets faster.
My previous commentary documented the spike in recent years of NIH research expenditures supporting experimental niche biotechnologies while investment in research for the diseases that most sicken and kill Americans declined, and how there are ethical (profit-driven) threats posed by the pharmaceutical and research “industries.” I cautioned that these Big Money fantasies are dependent not just on a robust stream of printed dollars, but a reliable supply of raw materials – fetal tissues, to be more exact.
President Biden has elevated this technological direction to the highest of priorities:
To achieve these objectives, it is the policy of my Administration to:
(c) improve and expand domestic biomanufacturing production capacity and processes, while also increasing piloting and prototyping efforts in biotechnology and biomanufacturing to accelerate the translation of basic research results into practice;
Some commentators equate this EO to “the threshold of a technocratic one-world beast system” that advances “the World Economic Forum/United Nations agenda of biomedical tyranny and transhumanism”:
….this E.O. is proof that the executive branch is now owned lock, stock and barrel by the biomedical/pharmaceutical industry. It will be Katy bar the door from here on out.
Alarmism aside, one need not be a rocket scientist (or gene-splicer) to recognize the clear and present danger of ethical compromise by these industries. This is a major investment of many billions of dollars, including for Vermont:
In 2020, the National Institutes of Health awarded $71.6 million in grants and contracts to Vermont research institutions, supporting job creation and economic vitality in the Green Mountain State. ….The University of Vermont, the state’s largest employer, led the list of recipients,
Vermont is an “IDeA state,” meaning it gets priority NIH funding “….for the purpose of broadening the geographic distribution of National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for biomedical and behavioral research by enhancing the competitiveness for research funding of institutions located in states in which the aggregate success rate for grant applications to the NIH has historically been low.”
In a move that has allowed Vermont and UVM to join the vanguard of money-attracting experimental gender hormones on prepubescent children, a 2015 “initiative” pushed that envelope deep into the Green Mountain State:
The goal of this initiative is to further expand research capacity within IDeA-eligible states by establishing the IDeA States Pediatric Clinical Trials Network.
UVM boasts of its “Children’s Health Clinical Trials and Research”:
As a university hospital, The University of Vermont Medical Center continually pursues better ways to [sic] children’s health issues.
Patients at The UVM Medical Center benefit from the knowledge that comes from an active research program. Our researchers are committed to facilitating the translation of research from the laboratory, to the patient’s bedside, to the community, in order to make a difference in the lives of our patients. And these discoveries not only improve care for people here at The UVM Medical Center, but across the country and around the world.
These NIH-prioritized projects include gender hormone “therapies” for young transitioning children that have never been subject to long-term evaluation: Vermont’s UVM kids are the test subjects. This despite growing evidence these “therapies” can be very harmful, and include a laundry list of potential (but as yet unknown) side effects in addition to guaranteed lifetime infertility.
I have been attacked viciously as “anti-trans” for challenging the safety of these pharmaceutical concoctions, whereas logic and facts demonstrate the exact opposite. Trans-lives do matter, and I am an advocate for the protection of these trans-children against potentially harmful, profit-driven drug therapies (and surgeries) administered by a one-sided rush to “liberate” them at any ethical or “wellness” cost.
In this assessment of potential abuses from the nebulous-and-dubious language of Amendment 22’s undefined “protections of reproductive liberty,” I’m not talking about experimental trans-gender pharmaceutical puberty blockers on young children presented as “save the world” innovations. Instead, I am leading to an even more vulnerable – and younger – stage of child development. Life in the womb also merits protections and advocates against a one-sided, techno-delusional cult-sect.
I will address the ugly possibilities of Amendment 22’s free-for-all relating to fetal tissue research and supply-line guarantees in the next segment of this discussion.