CULTURE OF DEATH BUILDS A BRIDGE TO “THE ISLAND” 

By Don Feder

           On leaving a theater, have you ever been tempted to yell at the other moviegoers, “Hey, guys: Do ya get it? Do you know what this is about?

          That’s what I wanted to do when the lights came up and the credits started to roll for Michael Bay’s just-released sci-fi block-buster “The Island.”  “Cloning! Embryonic stem cell research! Abortion! Euthanasia!” I wanted to shout.

          Still, “The Island’s” pro-life message is unmistakable. Liberal critics are grumbling about it. Writing in the Hollywood Reporter, Kirk Honeycutt complains that “These filmmakers have, perhaps unwittingly, delivered a film certain to give succor to the religious right.” Oh, no!

          It’s intriguing to speculate on whether Bay or DreamWorks actually knew what they were doing. Is Bay – best known for action films like “Pearl Harbor” and “Armageddon”  -- a deep-cover agent for Pope Benedict XVI? Doubtful. It’s more likely the film’s message is inadvertent.  Unless it’s delivering the standard PC pabulum, there isn’t much forethought in Hollywood.

          Intentionally or not, “The Island” is “Schindler’s List” for the biotech Holocaust underway. The film is set in a not-too-distant future where human cloning has been perfected. Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson play human clones – Lincoln Six Echo and Jordan Two Delta – raised in an underground desert facility, called “The Institute.”

          They’ve been conditioned to believe they’re survivors of a worldwide “contamination,” waiting to be sent to an island paradise (the last uncontaminated place on earth) to begin the process of rebuilding. In reality, they’re walking organ farms – created to replenish the kidneys, hearts, skin and other vitals of wealthy sponsors. The Institute’s staff refer to them as “the product” – you know, like “products of conception,” in abortion-ese.

          When it’s harvest-time, instead of being sent to the island, unlucky winners of the not-so-random lottery go to an operating room where their organs are removed and the product is terminated. Clones are even impregnated. After giving birth, the clone-mother is given a lethal injection on the delivery table (in a sort of reverse abortion), and the baby delivered to its sponsor family.

          Sponsors who “buy insurance” -- against accidents, disease, or just the normal effects of aging -- are told their clones will never achieve consciousness or feel pain. However, as the scientist who runs the facility explains (in one of those here’s-why moments needed to unravel complicated plots), the cloners discovered that without clone-consciousness, their organs would never function properly.

          The abortion movement also peddles soothing lies – that the unborn child isn’t human, isn’t conscious and doesn’t experience pain. Opponents of a ban on partial-birth abortion dogmatically insist that even in this horrific procedure, performed in the third trimester, victims feel nothing as a scalpel is jammed in their skulls and their brains are suctioned out.

          In “The Island,” McGregor and Johansson discover the ghastly truth and escape. The rest of the movie is devoted to action-sequence attempts to capture and return the runaway clones.

          Still, as if to drive home the point, when Dr. Merrick (a Mengele clone who runs The Institute) discovers that McGregor’s product line is defective (they’re beginning to replicate the memories of their sponsors), he orders a mass “recall.” In one chilling scene, clones are herded into a room, the door is sealed and poison gas released. As I was saying -- Auschwitz for the Double Helix generation.

          In another scene, which reverberates with echoes of a contemporary political debate, Merrick is challenged on the morality of his death factory. The good doctor contemptuously replies that in two years he’ll be able to “cure childhood leukemia.” The unasked question: At what cost? Modern medicine is dominated by Deity-wannabes, scientific power-freaks who think the Hippocratic Oath is a fraternity pledge.

          When they feign compassion, they’re at their most dangerous. With embryonic stem cell research, they’ve found a way to give abortion a promotion from necessary evil to advancing the frontiers of medicine.

          The July 23rd  New York Times ran one of its classic commentaries posing as a news story (also known as front-page pleading) – headlined “Stem Cell Bill, Once Seen as a Sure Thing, Is Now Mired in Uncertainty,” which bemoans the difficulty of passing a bill to provide expanded federal funding of  stem cell colonies from embryos in storage.

          The article urges that embryonic stem cells “are considered by scientists to be the building blocks of the new field of regenerative medicine.” The paper breathlessly discloses that unnamed “advocates for patients say the cells hold hope for treatments and cures for a variety of diseases, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and diabetes.”

          The paper then makes a weak attempt at balance, “But because human embryos are destroyed by the research, the studies draw intense moral objections from religious conservatives and opponents of abortion, who regard human embryos as nascent human beings.” In other words, the Times informs us, only the religious right (which, according to its worldview, is composed of vicious, ignorant fanatics) and equally irrational abortion opponents see these products as human.

          If not human, what then? They were conceived using a human sperm and ovum. They have the genetic code of humans. If implanted in a womb and allowed to gestate, in a matter of months a human baby will emerge. Still, abortion proponents, including the mainstream media, treat the idea that these embryos are nascent (“coming into existence, beginning to emerge”) human beings as an exotic theory – like a meteor causing the extinction of the dinosaurs.

          They’re not human, because I created them, Dr. Merrick says of his walking, talking, breathing, smiling, funny, sexy, clones. How much easier to deny the humanity of a child in utero, or a frozen embryo, or a group of cells. “The Island” shows us the cannibal’s cauldron at the bottom of the slippery slope.

          Increasingly, America embraces an ethic of death. An unborn child isn’t human – because, at the earliest stages of development, it doesn’t look like a person. The comatose patient isn’t human; he/she just lies there. The brain-damaged woman isn’t human; she can’t communicate. The clone isn’t human; it was created in a laboratory to fulfill a specific purpose. Besides, as Merrick explains, his creations “have no souls.”

          Which raises the crucial question: Who is human – and on what basis? If the definition is fluid (as moral relativists of the scientific community would have it), will you always make the cut?

          Last year, California (on the cutting edge of Brave New World), passed a $7-billion bond issue to subsidize cloning research. New Jersey has become the first state to legalize human cloning. An American company created a cloned cow embryo, which was implanted, developed, aborted and then had its kidney tissue grafted onto the kidneys of an adult cow, to see if the recipient’s body would accept the cloned tissue. It did.

          Thanks to a principle established by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade (humanity is expendable) – which polls say the public is eager to maintain – “The Island” is much closer than moviegoers imagine. We’re building an expansion bridge to this particularly grisly aspect of the 21st century, even as you read these words.

This GrassTopsUSA Exclusive Commentary is reprinted with the permission of the author.