Repost from the Gospel Coalition
JOE CARTER|2:28 AM CT
South Korea Finds Smuggled Capsules Contain Human Baby Flesh
The Story: South Korean customs officials seized thousands of smuggled drug capsulesfilled with powdered human flesh.
The Background: According to the Associated Press report, the capsules were made in northeastern China from dead babies whose bodies were chopped into small pieces and dried on stoves before being turned into powder, a statement from the Korea Customs Service said.
Customs officials refused to disclose where the babies came from or who made the capsules, citing possible diplomatic friction with Beijing. Chinese officials have been cracking down on the production of such capsules since last year.
The grim trade is being run from China, notes the Daily Mail, where corrupt medical staff are said to be tipping off medical companies when babies are aborted or delivered stillborn.
The tiny corpses are then bought, stored in household refrigerators in homes of those involved in the trade before they are removed and taken to clinics where they are placed in medical drying microwaves.
Once the skin is tinder dry, it is pummeled into powder and then processed into capsules along with herbs to disguise the true ingredients from health investigators and customs officers.
According to customs agents, 35 smuggling attempts have been made since August last year involving more than 17,000 capsules disguised as ‘stamina boosters’.
The San Francisco Times reported that tests carried out on the pills confirmed they were made up of 99.7 per cent human remains.
What It Means: Why exactly should anyone have a problem with eating powdered fetus?
While the question is macabre, the answer is not as obvious as it might appear. Sadly, for too many people—including some Christians—their revulsion is aesthetic rather than moral: they are more disturbed by the consumption than they are in how the human being died. In fact, the Chinese using powered remains of babies for health benefits is considerably more moral than some similar practices supported by Christians in America.
In the case mentioned above, the human beings were already dead when their remains were used to make pharmaceuticals of questionable valuable. We rightly find that disturbing, yet almost a third of evangelicals support a procedure in which a human being is actively killed in order to use their remains for medical research of questionable utility.
Polls taken in the mid-2000s found that almost 40% of evangelicals supported harvesting the cells of embryos for medical research—even though the procedure ended a human life. Fortunately, the debate about embryonic stem cell research has largely subsided since the lies, exaggerations, and wishful thinking proffered by the research’s supporters has been proven to be—as the critics always claimed—nothing more than lies, exaggerations, and wishful thinking.
Similarly, some of the same Christians who recoil in horror at the idea of a dead fetus being microwaved in a clinic in China show no concern for the “spare” embryos they created being left to thaw in an IVF clinic in America.
Our moral intuitions are justified—we should be disgusted by the cannibalistic customs of our pagan neighbors in the East. But we should wonder why our discernment fails us when, in the name of advancing science, curing disease, or alleviating infertility, we turn a blind eye to the Satanic practices supported by our Christian neighbors in the West.
We’re like vegetarian butchers at Moloch’s feast. We think we are somehow morally superior because we draw the line at eating the children we kill. But whether the blood is on our mouths or only on our hands, the stain of the slaughter seeps into our souls.
Joe Carter is an editor for The Gospel Coalition and the co-author of How to Argue Like Jesus: Learning Persuasion from History’s Greatest Communicator.