Question your donations to March of Dimes!

[veganred]

The Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) created a flash video that asks viewers to question what they know about the March of Dimes and animal experimentsand asks them to choose another charity to help fight birth defectsone that doesnt fund millions of dollars worth of animal experiments each year.

What you can do:

Please watch the video (at www.ReformTheMarchofDimes.org), and pass it on to your friends and neighbors. We want as many people as possible to see this videoand help reform the March of Dimes!

Learn more about PCRM: http://www.pcrm.org/index.html

[laheina]

1. Hi veganred!!

Welcome to DU! :hi:

And you should cross post this in the Veg forum:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topics&forum=231

[Ravenseye]

2. I don't know. I respect their opinion, though I don't think I agree.

I'm not familiar enough with each and every specific piece of research that the MoD does, but at the same time I'm not opposed to animal research.

There are many things you can do on animals that need to be done, that you just can't do on humans. Particularly things involving pregnancy, and many of the experiments they were mentioning in that video were involved in that. It's about preventing birth defects in children, particularly spina bifida which is far more common than most people want to admit to themselves.

I can't speak for everyone, but we just had a close brush with our baby on the way. We got a diagnosis, which later turned out to be incorrect, that the baby had anencephaly. Basically an extreme form of Spina Bifida where most of the brain never migrated up to the correct area. Diagnoisis, either stillbirth or dead within hours, very rarely days. That's it.

The March of Dimes can't do experiments on pregnant human mothers to see what they can do to help prevent these birth defects from happening, so animal research is a very viable way. We hopefully have lucked out with our current bun in the oven, but thousands upon thousands each year do not. Much of the improvement in other countries infant mortality rates stems directly from the research done by the MoD. The reason the U.S. is slipping behind has nothign to do with the MoD doing unnecessary animal torture experiments as the video implies.

I understand where my vegan friends come from on this, but I just can't agree. If they have to kill 1000 pregnant sheep in order to save my child, or someone elses, well...I just have no problem with that math.