Question: I understand that stem-cell research is not accepted by the church if a baby is aborted. However, my question is why if a baby is aborted by someone who doesn't want him/her can it not be donated to science instead of getting rid of it?

Once again, thank you for another thought-provoking question. Basically the answer to this question is found in the question itself: “…why can’t it be donated to science instead of getting rid of it.” Our culture has slowly but surely created a society where people are not seen with human dignity, but as tools to be used for the advancement of any cause or for the selfish purposes of any whim. This would be heinous for quite a few reasons: 1) when people donate their bodies for scientific research, or even donate their organs (which is very noble), that person has had the free-will choice to do so. An aborted (READ: murdered) baby does not have the choice. That little baby wasn’t even given the choice to live or die. 2) That baby, even once killed, is not an “it”, but a human child worthy of a proper burial and respect for it’s remains, not to be used as some sort of experiment. 3) The remains would not simply be “donated”, but they would be sold. If you don’t believe me then face reality: it already happens. There are numerous documented cases where aborted babies bodies were sold by abortion clinics to research facilities for a variety of reasons. So not only does the abortionist make money for murdering a child, he/she then turns another profit on the dead remains (are you sick yet?). 4) And finally, (for our purposes here at least), allowing this to happen would dramatically increase the number of abortions because the women who are pressured to kill their own child in the womb (or desperate enough to) would be offered a way to diminish the guilt they feel in their hearts (“and in addition to not being pregnant and ruining your life, you’d have the comfort of knowing that you have possibly helped others at some point in the distant future”, said the “compassionate” clinic worker—yeah, but not the baby). This is just one more instance that shows the depths to which our society has sunk in its disrespect to the human person that John Paul the Great was constantly challenging us about. As Catholic Christians, we must fight against this type of slippery-slope mentality that seeks to keep our society immersed in a culture of death. Let’s not allow that to happen.