A medical student tweeted a picture last week of a slide from a University of California San Diego School of Medicine class that compared the “parallels between fetuses and cancers.”
No joke, a friend just sent me this slide from her upper-level biology course.
I’m speechless. Create your own caption. pic.twitter.com/4sS6AvdRV1
— Dylan Griswold (@DylanPGriswold) April 25, 2019
In the slide, it’s shown that a fetus is labeled a “legitimate parasite” as it “rapidly grows, invades, manipulates.”
The slide is a part of a course titled, “Evolution of Human Disease,” which, according to the course description: “explores the major epidemiological transitions from ape-like ancestors to foraging tribes, farmers, and pastoralists, to the global metropolitan primate we now are. We will focus on how diseases have shaped humans and how humans have shaped disease over time.”
Campus Reform obtained the full slide deck and verified the image from student Dylan Griswold’s tweet.
Griswold also tweeted about the slide, “as all ‘woke’ medical students know, pregnancy is a disease. Abortion is the remedy … Ironically, it is you whose language espouses vitriol, division, and bigotry.”
According to the university, “the slide presents common, widely accepted scientific concepts and in no way represents a political statement,” Fox News reports.
The professor also addressed the slide in an email to his class that Griswold (who is actually a medical student at Stanford) got a hold of and tweeted.
“Most of you probably realize that my point was to show that mammals are especially prone to invasive cancers because mammals evolved invasive placentation,” the professor wrote, according Griswold’s tweet. “My point was not to indoctrinate you with the notion that fetuses are cancers, as insinuated in the article.”
Here is the explanation of the slide, provided by the presenting professor, who emailed this to his class. Granting for the sake of argument that this was his intention, the framing of content on the slide nonetheless dehumanizes prenatal human life. I invite your comments. pic.twitter.com/6Q8adPiMxT
— Dylan Griswold (@DylanPGriswold) April 27, 2019
Not everyone is accepting the professor’s explanation. Lila Rose, the founder and president of Live Action, criticized the professor in a statement: “Amid scrutiny, UC San Diego professor says he didn’t intend to say ‘fetuses and cancers’,” Rose said. “How about backtracking the term ‘parasite’? These are medically inaccurate and offensive terms, ones that abortion advocates have used for dozens of years to dehumanize children.”
Alexander James is a contributor to Red Alert Politics and a freelance journalist.
