Last month we wrote about how National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins, the acclaimed scientist, geneticist, and professing Christian, released a statement for PRIDE month where he publically revealed himself to be thoroughly compromised on the Christian’s view of LGBTQ issues and the scriptures, offering them his personal support as an “ally” and regurgitating all the progressive talking points he could muster.
Coupled with him being the founder of BioLogos, the self-described “Christian organization” that seeks to bridge the bible and evolution while insisting that humans evolved from apes 200,000 years ago and that Adam and Eve never actually existed, along with his low view of Church where he made the case that in-person public schooling is a higher priority than in-person church, openly supporting doing experiments on fetal tissue on account that he doesn’t believe human embryos to be life, but only ‘potential life” and refusing to condemn “pregnant people” language, we have no reason to suppose that this man is a brother.
Now, in his first public interview since announcing he was stepping down from his position as the Director of NIH, Collins again defended his position on using the bodies of aborted babies for scientific experimentation.
“When you get into the details of a particular issue, it often turns out that the conflict that people would assume to be insurmountable can be put into a place where it makes sense; both as a person of faith who believes in the sanctity of human life and the person of science who’s trying to come up with ways that science can save lives. Human fetal tissue is just one of those examples.”
Collins goes on to argue that experimenting on discarded baby parts makes the most sense, and that critics must “recognize, after all, that people have elective terminations of pregnancy every day, and those materials are being discarded.”
“Suppose it was possible on a rare instance for something that’s about to be discarded with full consent after the decision by the mother to be used to develop something that might save somebody’s life. In that case, I think even God could look at that and go, ‘OK, it’s not the thing that I would have wanted to see happening. Still, as an ethical choice between discarding or using for some benevolent purpose, maybe that’s defensible.’ Now that will make some people uneasy.”
Collins has previously defended the use of fetal cell tissue experimentations, telling CNA in a May 2020 interview.
“I would be the first to say we should not be creating or destroying embryos- human embryos- for research, and we should not be terminating pregnancies for research.
But if there are embryos that are left over after in vitro fertilization- and the hundreds of thousands that are never going to be used for anything, they’ll be discarded- I think it is ethical to consider ways in which research might make it possible to utilize that information to help somebody.”
“And likewise, if there are hundreds of thousands of fetuses that are otherwise being discarded through what is a legal process in this country, we ought to think about whether it is more ethical to throw them away, or in some rare instance to use them for research that might be life saving.”
