I don’t agree with Joseph Sobran about abortion or stem cell research, but I think he’s got a valid point here about Newsweek‘s recent cover story on the stem cell controversy,
The cover featured a color photo of a cluster of human stem cells, hugely magnified. The point was obviously that these things don’t look like what we think of as a human being, so what’s the harm of killing them?
Mind you, Newsweek doesn’t always make use of audio-visual aids in discussing embryonic and fetal human life. In its coverage of late-term abortion, it has never used a color picture of a dismembered human fetus in the ninth month to shape public opinion.
By the ninth month, those little things do look pretty human, after all, and such a picture might, from Newsweek’s point of view, backfire. You don’t have to be a religious fanatic to recoil from seeing a baby torn to pieces.