Meatless Mondays, Oprah Winfrey, and the Humane Society of the United States

by David Balashinsky

Wayne Pacelle, the CEO of the Humane Society of the United States, recently announced on his organization's Facebook page that Oprah Winfrey has endorsed the Meatless Mondays movement.  In a post that also links to his appearance with Winfrey on SuperSoul Sunday, Pacelle writes, 

The big news coming out of my appearance with Oprah Winfrey on SuperSoul Sunday today is that she took the “Meatless Mondays” pledge and asked her 33.5 million Twitter followers to follow suit. Incredible, high impact, game-changing stuff. On today’s show, she showed such facility for the cause and a great shared passion for fighting for animals, in ways large and small. It’s great to have this amazing woman on our side. 

I write as a long-time supporter of the HSUS when I say that I am deeply disappointed to see it compromise its principles by associating itself with Oprah Winfrey.  Yes, Winfrey - to her credit - now endorses the Meatless Mondays movement.  I applaud her for that.  But this is the same Oprah Winfrey who has gone on national television and shilled for SkinMedica, a company that manufactures anti-wrinkle face cream that is made from a line of fibroblasts harvested from the prepuce of an infant who, in all likelihood, was subjected to a non-therapeutic circumcision - a totally unnecessary genital-modification surgery that permanently removes a normal, sensitive and functional body part, causes infants excruciating pain, violates their right of bodily integrity, kills over 100 of them and leaves over one million more scarred for life in the United States every year.  Of course, its use in the "beauty cream" industry may be only one of a number of uses to which the genetic material obtained from severed infant prepuces are put but it is easily the most ethically egregious.  It strikes me as morally inconsistent to oppose an industry that exploits animals and causes them needless suffering while, at the same time, supporting an industry that exploits human infants and causes them needless suffering.  Likewise, to refrain from meat consumption on ethical grounds while applying to one's own skin a "beauty cream" that has been manufactured from skin that was stolen from another person.  Yet this is what Oprah Winfrey is now doing.

Winfrey's hypocrisy (a strong but entirely apt word to use in this context) - has been noted by human rights advocates who have rhetorically questioned whether she would similarly endorse beauty products manufactured with the excised genital tissue of girls, given Winfrey's opposition to the practice of FGM.  (I applaud her for that, too.)  Win- frey's double standard regarding the right to bodily integrity of children with penises is thrown into relief more generally by her robust advocacy on behalf of protecting children.  (And I applaud her for that, too.)  But perhaps it is thrown into sharpest relief by her involvement in bringing the tragic story of Henrietta Lacks and the so-called HeLa cell line to the attention of a wide television audience.  Reporting for the Times on Winfrey's movie adaptation of Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Salamishah Tillet writes, 

HeLa emerged as one of the most widely used lines in medical research and helped establish the multibillion-dollar vaccine industry, cancer treatment and in vitro fertilization industry.  This was all done without the knowledge of, consent from or any compensation paid to Lacks's family as it struggled with racism and poverty in Baltimore. 

Winfrey not only stars in this adaptation but served as an executive producer.  What is striking here is that the ethical dimension of the misappropriation of Lacks's cells - that is, harvesting them and profiting from them without her consent - is identical to that of SkinMedica's use of fibroblasts obtained from a neonate's amputated prepuce without his consent and without any compensation to him.  In response to the controversy regarding the source of fibroblasts for its "beauty products," the founder of SkinMedica, Dr. Richard Fitzpatrick, has pointed out (as paraphrased by Bruce Demara in The Star) that "the cells are grown from a single foreskin obtained more than 20 years ago."  This makes the theft of that individual's cellular material certainly no better ethically than the theft of Lacks's cellular material, a theft that occurred more than 70 years ago.  In fact, it was almost certainly much worse.  Lack's cells were harvested while she underwent potentially life-saving surgery (to remove her cervical cancer) and she consented to the surgery itself, if not to the harvesting and use of her tissue sample for biomedical research.  In contrast, the infant from whom the tissue sample was harvested - and that ultimately was used to make SkinMedica's beauty cream - never consented to the surgical amputation of his prepuce, nor was the surgery, in all probability, medically indicated (since neonatal circumcision is virtually never medically indicated).

The HSUS, as well as many other animal-welfare and animal-rights organizations, has long deplored the use of animals in cosmetics testing not merely because the animals subjected to these tests experience horrific pain but because the tests themselves are absolutely unnecessary.  As unethical as such testing is to begin with, this routine exploitation of animals becomes even more conspicuously unethical when it is done for no more noble a purpose than to gratify human vanity (at best) and to profit from the reinforcement of gender stereotypes (at worst).  Yet how is using part of an infant's penis for essentially the same purpose and without the infant's consent ethically any better?

As Pacelle himself has written, 

As harsh as nature is for animals, cruelty comes only from human hands.  We are the creature of conscience, aware of the wrongs we do and fully capable of making things right.  Our best instincts will always tend in that direction. . . . [The Bond: Our Kinship With Animals, Our Call to Defend Them by Wayne Pacelle; published by William-Morrow/Harper-Collins; 2011; the quotations included here are all taken from excerpts from Pacelle's book that appear on the HSUS website.]

As I understand him, Pacelle is arguing here from the morally unambiguous (if overly optimistic) position that, because human beings have the capacity to entertain the notion of ethics, we have not only a duty but even an innate impulse to act ethically.  The focus of Pacelle's mission is to call humanity to a better version of itself and to be guided in our treatment of animals by the same standards of rectitude and compassion that we would like to believe guide us in our treatment of our fellow human beings.  This moral imperative is especially compelling when, as Pacelle puts it, it obliges us to uphold "the decent and honorable code that makes us care for creatures who are entirely at our mercy."  

I would argue that the phrase "creatures who are entirely at our mercy" also describes, at least insofar as how we should treat them, infants who are both incapable of giving consent to and physically unable to defend themselves against cosmetic genital surgery.   Pacelle continues:

Especially within the last 200 years, we've come to apply an industrial mindset to the use of animals, too often viewing them as if they were nothing but articles of commerce, the raw material of science, or mere obstacles in the path of our own progress.  Here, as in other pursuits, human ingenuity has a way of outrunning human conscience, and some things we do only because we can - forgetting to ask whether we should.

Observations, criticisms, and questions that in many ways parallel Pacelle's with respect to the industrialized exploitation of animals are at the very heart of the genital autonomy movement: a movement that seeks to end the medically unwarranted but culturally normalized practices of involuntary penile circumcision, female genital mutilation and the non-therapeutic binary sex-assignment surgery to which intersex children routinely have been subjected.  Particularly with respect to non-consensual penile circumcision and the use for financial gain of the genital tissue obtained from it, I can think of no more fitting a description than Pacelle's trenchant observation that "as in other pursuits, human ingenuity has a way of outrunning human conscience, and some things we do only because we can - forgetting to ask whether we should." 

Subjecting an infant to a medically unnecessary and irreversible amputation of part of his genitals is unethical.  To then profit from the use of that infant's stolen body part in the manufacture of "beauty cream" as SkinMedica does is, by orders of magnitude, even more unethical: it is a moral abomination.  And because Oprah Winfrey has enthusiastically promoted this practice and this product, I cannot think of a poorer choice as a spokesperson for the Meatless Mondays movement.

Postscripts: When this essay was originally published, Wayne Pacelle was the CEO of the Humane Society of the United States.  He has since resigned from that position.  After initially voting to retain Pacelle - a vote that prompted seven of its members to resign in protest - the HSUS's board of directors issued a statement implicitly condemning Pacelle for having violated the organization's sexual harassment policy and naming Kitty Block, a longtime HSUS staff attorney, as acting President and CEO.

Note also that this essay has been revised (on 6 May 2018) in order to address the circumstance of Winfrey's subsequent involvement in bringing the saga of Henrietta Lacks's stolen genetic material to the screen.  It was further revised on 5 December 2022.