Most people's support of the anti-vivisection movement is motivated by compassion for animals. The definition of vivisection in four commonly-used dictionaries is as follows:

"To operate or experiment on living animals for scientific purpose."
- Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English.

"Dissection of, or inoculation etc, tried upon living animals."
- The Concise Oxford Dictionary.

"The term is now being used to apply to all experiments on living animals whether or not cutting is done."
- The Merriam-Webster 1963.

They are all incorrect!

No amount of camouflage or reluctance to publish the truth can hide the fact that vivisection is now a fully-fledged industry carrying out experiments on animals and human beings.

"We are now at the top of the mountain. The ascent began with Galvani using a frog, through a series of mammals, monkeys and apes has taken us to the summit with experimentation on man."
- Prof. Pietro Croce, Vivisection or Science - a choice to make.

Six years ago in January 1987, Mobilise! No. 17 printed an article titled "Vivisection kills animals and people" . It gave evidence of experiments on living aborted fetuses, abandoned and retarded children, prisoners of war and others during the preceding 25 years. In Vivisection or Science - a choice to make, Prof. Croce expresses concern about the increasing incidence of experiments on human beings including the growing trade in mature living human fetuses. The enormity of this industry has reached staggering proportions as the grisly cargos concealed within the metal walls of transporters, unrecognised by other unsuspecting road-users with whom they rub shoulders, silently, without advertising or publicity, supply this "experimental material" to the laboratories of the pharmaceutical and cosmetic companies.

"One morning four of them were born, one after another. They cried, but I didn't have time to kill them at once because I had too much to do that morning. I am not a hard man but a realist. You need to be a man of science and unemotional if you want to avoid having your judgement clouded by sentiment."
- An account by two journalists of an interview with an English gynaecologist who procured fetuses... source detailed on page 102, Vivisection or Science - a choice to make.

"The child's head is cut off. the blood is collected, treated with anticoagulants and put into a pump which functions like a 'heart'.... the pump, connected to the aforementioned system of tubes and cannulas, makes the blood circulate in the baby's head..."
- Prof. Pietro Croce, Vivisection or Science - a choice to make.

These are not experiments on rats, mice, rabbits or apes, but on living human infants. They are carried out without anaesthesia to study the metabolism of glucose in the human brain.

The idea for this article was sparked by a documentary screened on Foreign Correspondent, Thursday 23 July 1992. It concerned a proposed controversial trial on healthy women of a breast cancer drug Tamoxifen (ICI), which regardless of its dangers has been prescribed for years to women recovering from breast cancer surgery. Dr Craig Henderson, Chief of Medical Oncology at the University of California, San Francisco claimed that the trial

"is in response to public demand for a drug to prevent breast cancer"!

Opposing the trials, Dr Adrienne Fugh-Berman, head of the U.S. National Women's Health network, with the support of 25 scientists, organised a protest to be submitted to the US Food and Drug Administration on the grounds that the proposed experiments of drugs on healthy women cannot be compared "with surveys of diet, fluoride in the water and other factors". Further they claim that studies of the drug reveal that it has caused serious health problems as follows:

• Known increased risk of blood-clots.
• Known increased risk of cancer of the lining of the uterus.
• Suspected increases in the risk of liver cancer and abdominal tumours.
• Suspected promotion of new cancers.

The programme went on to say that whilst the U.S. debates the issue, doctors in the United Kingdom

"are conducting experiments with Tamoxifen using healthy (ie those not suffering from cancer) older women as guinea-pigs".

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