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Robert
P. George, Yuval Levin, and Matthew J. Franck, explain the recent
judicial rebuke of the Obama administration’s policy on taxpayer funding of
embryonic stem cell research. Excerpt:
The Obama administration had claimed that
the destruction of the embryos and the research using stem cells derived from
them could be “separated,” so that the latter was publicly funded but the
former (to honor the Dickey-Wicker Amendment) was not. In other words, the
administration interpreted the law as saying: “Go ahead and kill the embryos
using non-governmental funds; then you can use the stem-cell lines produced by
killing the embryos for research using taxpayer money without restriction.” Of
course, this interpretation would essentially nullify the amendment, treating
its command as if it were a meaningless bookkeeping procedure. Judge Lamberth
had no difficulty seeing through this shoddy reasoning: “To conduct ESC
research, ESCs must be derived from an embryo. The process of deriving ESCs
from an embryo results in the destruction of the embryo. Thus, ESC research
necessarily depends upon the destruction of a human embryo.”
Meanwhile,
Congress is planning to vote on
a stem cell funding bill later this month.
A
federal judge has allowed
a preliminary injunction against the taxpayer funding of embryonic stem
cell research while the case is being decided.
The judge indicated that the plaintiffs had made a strong case that NIH
policies approved by President Obama violate the Dickey Wicker provisions of
federal law which “unambiguously prohibits the use of federal funds for all research
in which a human embryo is destroyed.”
NRO explains the significance
and background of this case. Steve
Chapman exposes some “inconvenient
truths” about stem cell research.
While
pro-lifers are cheering the
decision, the Obama administration has indicated it will
appeal. Also, a Democrat
Congresswoman who frequently champions the taxpayer funding of embryonic stem
cell research has proposed
legislation to overturn the decision of the federal court.
Check
out AdvanceUSA’s resources on stem
cells and cloning and adult stem cells.
Kathryn
Jean Lopez reports on a group of pro-life champions in Congress who want to
permanently prevent our tax dollars from supporting abortion.
According
to news
reports, two new
studies indicate that stem cells created from reprogrammed body cells may
not be as pluripotent as embryonic stem cells.
Even if it is proven one day that iPSC (induced pluripotent stem cells)
will never be as malleable as stem cells obtained from destroyed human embryos,
it doesn’t make embryonic stem cell research any less unethical. Feeling somewhat skeptical about the spin
generated by the media over these studies, AdvanceUSA contacted Dr. David
Prentice to get a better perspective on the implications of these studies. Here’s what he told us by email:
The data show that with current techniques,
some iPS cells may not be completely reprogrammed to be identical to embryonic
stem cells. But the results also show
that in some cases this made it easier to change the iPS cells into specialized
tissues, such as blood cells. Both
papers also showed that subsequent manipulation could further reprogram iPS
cells to a more embryonic-like state.
Several leading embryonic stem cell scientists have also noted that the
techniques are still being improved, and it is simply a matter of time until
these hurdles are overcome.
Regardless, this is still no justification
for further destruction of embryos, nor especially to justify cloning of human
embryos for experiments, which is what one paper seems to imply. While this is interesting in terms of basic
science, embryonic stem cells are poor substitutes for adult stem cells and the
current successful treatments that they are already delivering to thousands of
patients.
Dr.
Prentice explains even more in a recent
blog post at FRC Blog.
ABC
News reports that a new stem cell “homing” technique cured rabbits of joint
problems by causing stem cells in their body to move to problem areas and
replace damaged tissues. This suggests
that similar techniques could probably be used in humans without the need to
destroy human embryos. Dr. Prentice adds
more helpful
expert commentary at FRC Blog.
In
Terry Jeffrey’s insightful
article on why liberalism is really all about “control” he comments on
President Obama’s decision to force taxpayers to fund unethical forms of stem
cell research that require the destruction of human embryos. Excerpt:
President Barack Obama played perhaps the
perfect role of the Control Freak last year when he issued an executive order
directing that federal tax dollars be used to fund stem cell research that
kills human embryos. Under Obama's program, the government will take money from
Americans who profoundly -- and correctly -- object to the deliberate killing
of any innocent human being because it is a violation of the inalienable
God-given right to life and gives that money to scientists who will use it to
assume God-like authority over the lives of others, reducing them to mere
instruments of their research.
The federally funded embryonic stem cell
researcher takes absolute government-approved control of the embryo surrendered
to his custody. The only difference between that embryonic human being and the
human beings reading this column is age. And the only reason a government that
uses tax dollars to kill human embryos would not use tax dollars to kill human
grandmothers and grandfathers is if the people running the government concede
there is a moment in time between when a human is an embryo and when a human is
a grandparent that they attain human rights the government has a duty to
protect.
Ken
Blackwell explains how Western liberals force abortion onto developing
nations. Excerpt:
Did you know that Warren Buffett has given
$3 billion—yes, three billion dollars—to promote abortion here in the U.S. and
around the world? Often, government officials in developing countries are under
pressure to control population in order to qualify for international aid. So
they pressure women in the villages to get abortions. Western Europe is
especially strong in pushing for abortion in these developing countries.
Heart
wrenching paragraphs like this reflect the “new colonialism” of spreading the
religion of secularism and its sacrament of abortion around the world. Apparently President Obama supports this
brand of colonialism because he strongly promotes a pro-abortion constitution
for the East African nation of Kenya.
Rep.
Chris Smith (R-NJ) is set to propose the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act”
which would provide permanent statutory prohibitions on the taxpayer funding of
abortions. LifeNews reports.
Live
Action Films is again exposing
the deception being peddled by nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned
Parenthood. LifeNews reports that Lila
Rose’s organization of plucky youths has exposed the staff at an Indianapolis-area
Planned Parenthood providing false or misleading information to a girl posing
as seeking an abortion.
Senators
on the Judiciary Committee are raising
concerns that Kagan might have been misleading on her involvement with
partial birth abortion during her time in the Clinton administration. Americans United for Life chronicles this issue thoroughly
while Bill Saunders encourages the American people to “wake up” on the
Kagan nomination.
LifeSiteNews
reports. AdvanceUSA joined in a
letter to members of Congress opposing abortions on military bases.
AUL
reports. Hopefully, more states will
follow Louisiana and Governor Bobby Jindal’s lead.
ABC News reports. Excerpt:
Frozen blood from stored samples can be
used to make cells resembling stem cells, researchers said on Thursday --
opening a potential new and easier source for the valued cells.
They used cells from blood to make induced
pluripotent stem cells or iPS cells -- lab-made cells that closely resemble
human embryonic stem cells but are made from ordinary tissue.
These iPS cells have in the past been made
from plugs of skin, but blood is much easier to take from people and to store,
the researchers reported in the journal Cell Stem Cell.
The
Telegraph reports. As does the NY
Daily News. Ethical adult stem cell
treatments continue to outperform unethical embryonic stem cell research, which
has yet to produce successful treatments or therapies. Unfortunately, many media sources unnecessarily
distort the issue by refusing to distinguish ethical ADULT stem cell research
from unethical EMBRYONIC stem cell research which destroys an innocent human
life.
Find
out more at our stem cell
page.
Patrick
Lee and Robert P. George have a great article at NRO explaining how the
moment of fertilization is the only rational point at which human life can
be said to begin. Excerpt:
Fertilization in humans and other mammals
produces a new member of the species in the embryonic stage of its natural
development. That is to say, the entity produced by the union of spermatozoon
and oocyte is a complete, though developmentally immature, organism. Unlike the
gametes — the sperm and egg cells independent of each other — it is no mere
part of another organism, nor is it merely something that can be used to
produce a complete organism. At fertilization, the ovum and the sperm cease to
be and something new comes to be — an organism (the embryo) whose genetic
constitution and epigenetic state orient and dispose it to develop in the
direction of maturity as a member of the species.
Economist
Thomas Sowell explains how Obamacare could affect end-of-life decisions for
the elderly. Excerpt:
Make no mistake about it, letting old
people die is a lot cheaper than spending the kind of money required to keep
them alive and well. If a government-run medical system is going to save any
serious amount of money, it is almost certain to do so by sacrificing the
elderly.
LifeNews reports on a “sordid
tale” of forced abortion without parental consent. A girl in foster care became pregnant and was
taken to New Jersey by Philadelphia’s Department of Human Services to get an
abortion against her foster mother’s wishes.
A city employee was fired for not going along with the plan. Philly.com
also reports.
The Florida Family
Policy Council is urging Floridians to ask Governor Crist to sign a
pro-life bill that would prevent the taxpayer funding of abortion and require
women seeking an abortion to view an ultrasound image of their unborn
child. Crist recently abandoned the GOP
primary race for US Senate after upstart conservative Florida Speaker of the
House Marco Rubio opened a double-digit lead over Crist. With Crist’s party switch and recent veto of
a conservative education reform bill, Florida conservatives are concerned Crist
could torpedo what some activists are calling the most important pro-life bill
in Florida history.
Star
Parker explains. Excerpt:
Why would a bill that criminalizes abortion
motivated by race not have the support of the NAACP? Or, even more perplexing,
why would the NAACP endorse such a bill and then rescind its endorsement?
This is exactly what just happened in
Georgia.
The Georgia Senate passed a bill that would
make it a crime to abort a child because of its race or gender.
On
Sunday evening the House of Representatives passed the much-discussed health
care bill that will require your tax dollars to fund abortions. See how your representative
voted here. Hold your elected
officials accountable for how they voted on this radical legislation.
Dr.
David Prentice reports that, despite all the problems with unethical
embryo-destroying research and human cloning, liberals in Congress still want
to fund human cloning with your tax dollars.
If
members of Congress really want to promote treatments and prevent human cloning
they should support legislation like the Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2009
(H.R. 1050) which is a total ban on human cloning and the Patients First Act of
2009 (H.R. 877) which prioritizes ethical forms of stem cell research which
have the most potential for actual treatments and cures.
Charmaine
Yoest explains in the Wall Street Journal.
Excerpt:
It's now becoming clear that Barack Obama
is willing to put everything on the table in order to be the president who
passes health-care reform. Everything, that is, except a ban on federal funding
for abortion.
David
Prentice reports on the efforts of the NIH to allow more forms of unethical
embryonic stem cell research to receive taxpayer funding.
Ashley
Herzog explains. Excerpt:
Yesterday marked the opening of the Susan
B. Anthony museum in Rochester, New York—and instead of celebrating, a lot of
feminists are miffed. The museum was purchased by a member of Feminists
Choosing Life of New York, and pro-choice groups are accusing her of “hijacking
Susan.”
Apparently, they want the famous
suffragist’s views on abortion scrubbed from the historical record.
Daniel
Foster explains the irony of a high-ranking Canadian official fleeing to
America for medical treatment. If government-run
health care is so great, how come you don’t read about Americans going to
Canada for medical procedures? Jeffrey
H. Anderson also comments on this news.
The
Financial Times reports on another exciting discovery demonstrating how
unethical embryonic stem cell research and human cloning are totally
unnecessary for treating disease and making medical breakthroughs.
Ken
Blackwell explains the problems with President Obama’s nominee to lead the U.S.
Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel.
Excerpt:
When not serving in government, Dawn
Johnsen has spent her career promoting abortion-on-demand. She denies there is
even such a thing as Partial-Birth Abortion. Even the term, she maintains, is
“intentionally provocative.” She does not think that “progressives”—that’s
PC-speak for liberal—should suggest that abortion is ever a tragedy.
Reuters reports
that some people are outraged that Tim Tebow would record a commercial with
Focus on the Family encouraging women to choose life rather than abortion. ABC
News also reports.
Scott
Brown pulled off an amazing
upset victory last night becoming Massachusetts’ first Republican Senator
in decades. His victory is widely seen
as an insurmountable hurdle to the current health care bill that will force
Congress to “return to the drawing board.”
The
editors at NRO weigh in on the significance of this race. As does the
New York Times.
Star
Parker assesses the pro-life movement on the eve of the 35th
anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision on January, 22.
 Every year on the anniversary of the
dreaded Roe v. Wade decision
(legalizing abortion across the nation by judicial fiat); thousands of
dedicated pro-lifers gather in the cold January weather on the National Mall to
show their support for protecting innocent human life. Check out the March for Life website and consider
attending the marching our nation’s capital or at a rally near your home.
Our
sources in Congress have assured us that the health care ‘reform’ battle is far
from over. Members of both houses will
meet together to reconcile the House and Senate versions of the health care
bill. The House of Representatives will
come back from the holiday recess on January 12 and the Senate will reconvene sometime
in late January.
NOW
IS THE TIME to contact your representative
and both
your senators to voice your opposition to this bill. Tell them that you don’t want your tax dollars
to support abortion, that you won’t accept a phony pro-life compromise, and
that you don’t want the federal government to micromanage the huge segment of
our economy that is the health care system.
Townhall
examines recent successes from ethical adult stem cell therapy while NRP only looks
at unethical embryo-destroying forms of stem cell research.
The AP reports
the Senate passed the massive and controversial health care bill this morning. Meanwhile, the AP also reports
that abortion funding could still pose a problem for final passage by both
houses of Congress. Bloomberg
reports that the Congressional Budget Office is contradicting
Democrat claims that the health bill would save the Medicare system.
The
final vote is unavailable but will eventually be posted
here. The bill passed on a straight
party-line vote (60-39).
NRO’s
Ramesh
Ponnuru and Jeffrey
Anderson explain that there still is hope that the abortion-funding health
care ‘reform’ bandwagon can be stopped.
Sen.
Brownback (R-KS) explains
in Politico what is at stake for the pro-life movement in the health care
bill. Excerpt:
For over 30 years, the Hyde amendment has
prevented the expenditure of federal funds on abortion, which so many regard as
the taking of an innocent human life. Named after the late Henry Hyde, longtime
member of Congress from Illinois and pro-life hero, the Hyde amendment
established the principle that taxpayers should not be required to pay for
abortions, even if the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade had effectively
overturned 50 state laws to legalize the procedure across the nation.
Today, with the health care reform bill
emerging from the U.S. Senate, that principle is being thrown to the winds and,
with it, the hard-fought efforts of Henry Hyde and the pro-life movement to
maintain this basic protection for the unborn.
At
1:00am Monday morning the Senate voted to proceed with consideration of the
health care ‘reform’ bill that busts budgets, micromanages the private health
care system, and requires taxpayer dollars to fund abortions. LifeNews
explained why the bill still funds abortions, while FRC
and National
Right to Life spoke out against the bill.
The Minority Leader’s office released a statement alleging that the bill
requires a “monthly
abortion fee.”
If
the Senate is able to pass the bill before Christmas, the House will
next consider the topic. The bill
will either be reconciled with the House-passed version and then reconsidered
by both houses or sent straight to the House to consider without
amendment. Pro-Life Democrat Part Stupak
(D-MI) said the Senate-passed
bill is unacceptable, but it has yet to be seen if Pro-Life Democrats in
the House will stay true to their principles.
Senator
Nelson (D-NE) was responsible for the compromise that allowed the bill to pass
its first hurdle in the wee hours of this morning, and has been receiving vocal
criticism from pro-lifers and other conservatives in his home state of
Nebraska.
See
how BOTH
YOUR SENATORS VOTED on the health care bill.
USA
Today and the
AP report that Sen. Nelson (D-NE) has rejected a supposed pro-life
compromise amendment authored by
Sen. Casey (D-PA). Meanwhile, House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) expressed
relief that the Senate health care bill still requires the taxpayer funding
of abortion.
Dr.
Miriam Grossman exposes the problems with Planned Parenthood’s sex
education programs. Excerpt:
As a physician who has spent hundreds of
hours with young people with sexually transmitted infections, I’m on a
one-woman mission to expose the falsehood of those claims. Planned Parenthood’s
sexual health education is not comprehensive or medically accurate; to the
contrary, this eminent, federally funded organization endangers lives by
withholding critical biological truths.
LifeNews reports.
Word
had leaked that high level Congressional Democrats are predicting that the
health care bill will not pass this year.
While this sounds like encouraging
news, concerned citizens still need to maintain pressure on their elected
officials to make sure that the health care industry is not socialized, that
health care is not rationed, and that tax dollars aren’t spent on abortion.
LifeNews reports (scroll down) on
the vast difference between a justice who respects the integrity of the
Constitution and one who does not.
Excerpt:
“The fight is about the Supreme Court
inventing new rights nobody ever thought existed,” Justice Antonin Scalia said
in an appearance at the University of Arizona College of Law. “Right to
abortion?” he asked. “Come on. Nobody thought it violated anything in the
Constitution for 200 years. It was criminal.” “They may be bad ideas,” Scalia
said. “But don't tell me it’s unconstitutional.” But Justice Stephen Breyer,
who shared the stage with Scalia, said his colleague was taking an overly
literalistic approach to the 18th century document. He said that the changing
nature of society, by necessity, requires more than looking at what Scalia
called “originalism.” “You don't look to the details,” Breyer said. “You look
to the value.” Scalia specifically warned that those who approach the
Constitution as Breyer suggests will not always find courts expanding the
definition of individual liberties. “It goes both ways,” he said. “The only thing
you can be sure of is the Constitution will mean whatever the American people
want it to mean today,” Scalia continued. “And that’s not what a constitution
is for,” he said. “The whole purpose of a constitution is to constrain the
desires of the current society.”
The
AP reports. Excerpt:
After months of struggle, House Democrats
rolled out sweeping legislation Thursday to extend health care coverage to
millions who lack it and create a new option of government-run insurance. A
vote is likely next week on the plan largely tailored to President Barack
Obama's liking.
House
Minority Leader Boehner called
the bill “1,990 Pages Of Bureaucracy.”
Read the entire text of this massive
bill here.
This
bill would allow your tax dollars to be spent on abortions.
The
Politico reports on the Senate Majority Leader’s renewed push for the “public
option” while the
AP reports that the Speaker of the House just wants to rename the public
option something more palatable.
Even
the paid researchers of the abortion industry have to admit that pushing
contraceptives does not reduce abortion rates.
LifeNews reports.
The BBC reports that
techniques for obtaining donor-specific pluripotent stem cells from ordinary
skin cells are becoming more efficient.
Once again, science shows that unethical embryonic stem cell research is
totally unnecessary.
Charmaine
Yoest explains. Excerpt:
A Rasmussen poll released last month showed
that only 13% of Americans want the health-care reform bill to use tax dollars
to fund abortions. A Pew Research Center poll two weeks ago showed that support
for legalized abortion has dropped to its lowest level in years to 47%, down
from 54% last year.
If Democrats really want to maintain the
abortion status quo, they would drop the Capps Amendment and add a Hyde
Amendment to explicitly exclude funding abortion. The Capps Amendment takes us
toward a new era of unprecedented federal abortion funding.
Her
subtitle reads “Every Democratic health bill so far on offer would change 30
years of federal practice.”
The
AP reports that the fears of pro-lifers that the proposed health care “reform”
would permit taxpayer support of abortion are well founded. Excerpt:
…taxpayer funds [would] mingle with some
insurance plans that, one way or another, pay for abortions.
LifeNews reports.
It also reports on recent
comments by the President’s press secretary that highlight how the proposed health
care “reform” would allow taxpayer funding of abortion.
LifeNews reports. As does the
AP and the Wall
Street Journal.
National
Right to Life also
weighed in:
Events this week in Congress provide fresh
proof that top Democratic leaders in Congress are pushing forward with plans to
establish massive new programs that would pay for elective abortions and
subsidize insurance coverage of abortions -- which, if achieved, would break
from decades of federal policy.
FRC
has created a new website dedicated to highlighting and promoting the great
work being done by pregnancy resource centers to provide real alternatives to
abortion. Check it out.
LifeNews reports. Excerpt:
In an effort to gain more support from
members of the Senate Finance Committee who do not support his bill, Sen. Max
Baucus unveiled a modification of the legislation on Tuesday. The modified bill
reduces -- but doesn't come anywhere close to eliminating -- the abortion
concerns pro-life groups have.
LifeNews also reports on
concerns that pro-lifers in the House will not be allowed to offer amendments
on mandated taxpayer funding of abortion.
Find
out about the upcoming movie called Blood
Money. Watch the trailer here.
The
Weekly Standard reports. It is
becoming increasingly clear that someone is lying about abortion funding in the
health care overhaul plan, and it doesn’t appear to be pro-lifers.
The
Hill reports how President Obama and his accomplices in the Senate could
use underhanded tactics to force socialized medicine and taxpayer funded abortion
on the American people.
Michigan
Live reports. President Obama issued
a statement in response to the murder of late-term abortion doctor George
Tiller recently but has not yet responded to the murder of this peaceful
pro-life activist.
Looking
for a practical way that you can stand up for the pro-life movement? Find out more about the Wash for Life and see how you can
support pregnancy resource centers in your community while getting your car
washed in the process.
Star
Parker explains the importance of state laws that require children seeking
an abortion to consult their parents (except in cases of abuse).
FactCheck.org
reports. Excerpt:
Despite what Obama said, the House bill
would allow abortions to be covered by a federal plan and by federally
subsidized private plans.
HT:
National Right to Life
LifeNews reports. Excerpt:
Scientists and pro-life advocates say human
embryonic stem cells are not ready for trial because problems associated with
the cells in animals haven't been solved. The embryonic stem cells still cause
tumors and have issues with the immune system rejecting the injection of the
cells.
Geron had planned to begin the trials this
summer but said it will halt that pending the FDA review and did not know how
long it would take the regulatory agency to conduct its evaluation.
The FDA initially cleared the trials in
January, which would involve 8 to 10 patients.
Embryonic stem cell research has never
cured or helped any patients to this point. Only the use of adult stem cells
and treatments derived from them have cured or reduced the effects of any
diseases or conditions afflicting patients.
FRC
provides helpful information about health care town halls being held across the
country. Click here to find a town hall
near you. Click here to read FRC’s
document “20 Questions to Ask Your Legislator About Health Care Overhaul.”
John
McCormack explains at the Weekly Standard.
This article also exposes recent gimmicks by some members of Congress to
pretend that they oppose abortion funding in the health care bill when they
actually support forcing us to subsidize abortions with our tax dollars.
In
the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Friday, an amendment mandating
abortion funding in the health care overhaul was passed and an amendment prohibiting
taxpayer funding of abortion was defeated.
LifeNews and RedState
report. Also, Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) decried
the votes in a press release.
Excerpt:
Last night's vote demonstrates just how far
Democrats are willing to go to force taxpayers to fund abortion. A week ago, the Democrat-controlled Congress
voted down my proposal to block federal funding for the nation's largest
abortion provider, Planned Parenthood.
Now Chairman Waxman has employed a procedural gimmick to defeat an
amendment that would have prevented federal funding of abortion under the
Democrats' health care plan. This same
amendment had been approved earlier in the evening by the Chairman's very own
committee.
An overwhelming majority of Americans,
including advocates of abortion, oppose using taxpayer dollars to fund
abortion. Across the country American
families are rejecting the Democrats' plan for a government takeover of health care. The recent action taken by Democrats on the
Energy and Commerce Committee will give Americans no comfort as this debate
moves forward.
Watch
the Family Research Council’s hard-hitting
ad on the dangers of socialized medicine and the abortion funding contained
the proposed health care ‘reform’ bill.
As
LifeNews reports, the House
of Representatives voted down an amendment by Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) which
would have prevented Planned Parenthood from receiving taxpayer dollars. Excerpt:
“It is morally wrong to destroy innocent
human life through abortion, but it is also morally wrong to take the tax
dollars of millions of pro-life Americans and use them to promote or perform
abortions at home or abroad. The largest abortion provider in America should
not also be the largest recipient of federal funds under Title X," Pence
said during the debate.
See
how your representative
voted on the Pence amendment to defund this notorious abortion provider (sexual
abuse concealing).
FRC
released a
statement. As did
Congressman Pence who said, “You can't reduce abortions by funding abortion
providers with taxpayer dollars.”
ADF reports. News like this shows why conscience
protections for doctors and other medical personnel are so necessary.
The
AP reports. Excerpt:
. . . lawmakers opposed to federal funding
for abortions said Tuesday the House leadership's health care bill contains a
"hidden mandate" that would allow taxpayer dollars to be used to end
pregnancies.
Call
your representative and both your senators today and urge them to oppose the
massive health care “reform” bill! Tell
them you don’t want your tax dollars supporting abortion!
Also,
on Thursday night (July 23) at 9:00pm Eastern Time a coalition of pro-life
groups will host an urgent
nationwide webcast. Find out more
about the pro-abortion funding provisions in the health care bill and find out what you can do.
Fox
News reports. Excerpt:
A government-funded, public health
insurance plan may allow taxpayer money to go to pay for abortions, the White
House budget chief said Sunday.
Office of Budget and Management Chief Peter
Orszag told "FOX News Sunday" he is not ready to say whether abortion
services would be part of a final package Congress is considering to provide
taxpayer-funded health care to about a third of the nation's 50 million
uninsured. Lawmakers are considering a package that could cost as much as $1.5
trillion over 10 years for health care.
"I think that that will wind up being
part of the debate. I am not prepared to say explicitly that right now. It's
obviously a controversial issue, and it's one of the questions that is playing
out in this debate," Orszag told "FOX News Sunday." "I'm
not prepared to rule it out."
Already, the Obama administration has
demonstrated its support for federal funding of abortion. The president
rescinded the Mexico City Policy on Jan. 23, the day after the 36th anniversary
of the Roe v. Wade decision. The policy had been in place to prevent U.S.
funding being used for abortion services in clinics abroad.
The
New York Times and LifeNews
also report. National Right to Life
also examines this
problem.
Pro-life
Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ) wrote a letter to his colleagues
warning them of the abortion funding provisions in this bill.
National
Right to Life explains. Excerpt:
Congressional Democratic leaders are aiming
to bring massive "health care reform" bills to the floor of the U.S.
Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives during the last week in July --
bills that National Right to Life says "would result in the greatest
expansion of abortion since Roe v. Wade."
LifeNews also reports.
Jonah
Goldberg examines Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s recent words alleging that
one of the motivations behind Roe vs. Wade was to keep undesirable populations
from procreating. Her comments are a
disturbing reminder of the racist, eugenicist roots of the pro-abortion modern movement
and they are also a sobering reminder of the importance of Supreme Court
nominations.
CitizenLink reports
on the death of an important and historical provision which had prevented
taxpayer dollars from supporting overseas organizations that provide or promote
abortion.
OneNewsNow
reports. Excerpt:
"This is a clear affront and a
violation of the fundamental religious convictions of the owners of
pharmacies," he contends. "No pharmacist owner should ever have to
choose between saving a human life and keeping their shop and business."
Many consider the Ninth Circuit to be the
most liberal court in the U.S.
Brad
Dacus PJI
"This radical decision by the Ninth
Circuit gives the green light to liberal state legislators and regulators to be
able to clamp down on medical and other professionals with sincere religious
convictions against supporting abortions," Dacus adds.
If the decision is upheld, pharmacists and
owners with a conscience will have to choose between violating the law or going
out of business. Dacus hopes the case will be accepted by the U.S. Supreme
Court.
Douglas
Johnson of National Right to Life explains how ObamaCare could require your
tax dollars to support abortion.
FRC’s
Tony Perkins also explains the abortion-funding problems with the proposed “health
care reform” bill in a special
video report. The video shows Sen.
Orrin Hatch (R-UT) exposing the bill’s abortion-funding agenda in Senate
hearings.
As
the AP reports, a Senate panel voted to overturn a policy which has
prevented taxpayer dollars from supporting overseas organizations that provide
or promote abortion as a method of “family planning.” Excerpt:
The policy in effect under President George
W. Bush had banned U.S. taxpayer money, usually in the form of Agency for
International Development funds, from going to international family planning
groups that either offer abortions or provide information, counseling or
referrals about abortion as a family planning method.
The ban was first put in place by President
Ronald Reagan and has been known as the "Mexico City policy" for the
city a U.S. delegation first announced it at a U.N. International Conference on
Population.
The Milwaukee Journal
Sentinel reports on an exciting new way to obtain pluripotent stem cells
(cells that can transform into any tissue type) from an ethical and abundant
source, human blood. Excerpts:
Cellular Dynamics is the first company to
say it can make stem cells from something as readily available, and so
representative of human diversity, as blood.
. . .
The stem cells, which scientists refer to
as induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, have all the characteristics of
embryonic stem cells [except they don’t involve destroying human embryos]. They
can turn into beating heart cells, liver cells or any other tissue cells in the
body.
Tony
Perkins lays out the dangers of tax payer funding of abortion in the
so-called health care “reform” legislation now being considered in Congress.
LifeNews reports. Excerpt:
While the Bush Administration withheld
funding from UNFPA over the agency's support of China's population program,
which includes forced abortions and sterilizations, the agency can look forward
to a cash injection from the Obama administration in 2009. Earlier this year,
the United States announced it would reinstate UNFPA funding and pledged $50
million dollars for 2009 – a figure that would put the US in the agency's top
five donor countries alongside the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Norway.
LifeNews reports.
Perhaps
the reason YouTube has so much trouble keeping pornography off its website is
that it’s spending too much time removing “dangerous” pro-life content.
The
Washington Post reports. The article’s
sub headline (Critics Fear That Women Will Be Exploited) says it all about the
ethical concerns over the exploitation of women that is inherent to this kind
of policy and to what is required to conduct forms of human cloning.
LifeNews reports. Apparently President Obama finds no use for
ethical considerations when it comes to controversial issues like human cloning
and embryo-destroying stem cell research.
The Culture of Life Foundation offers a “Requiem for the
President’s Council on Bioethics.”
Excerpt:
Two weeks ago President Obama sent a memo
to the members of the President’s Council on Bioethics (PCB) [1] informing them
that their appointments were being prematurely terminated.
The
DC Examiner reports. Excerpt:
Researchers at the Children's Hospital
& Research Center in Oakland, California have discovered a new way to
harvest stem cells from the placenta.
This technique is a good use of the placenta which at the moment serves
no medicinal purpose after birth and thus is discarded. What is more, the study
“finds there are far more stem cells in placentas than in umbilical cord blood,
and they can be safely extracted for transplantation.”
Charmaine
Yoest explains how Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s position on abortion could be
considered worse than David Souter, whom President Obama has chosen to replace
with Sotomayor.
CitizenLink reports. Besides the obvious ethical and right to life
issues involved with human cloning, grave health concerns and women’s rights
issues are also raised because of the huge demand for human ovum involved with
human cloning and in the serious health risks associated with human egg
donation.
WCCO reports. Excerpt:
Desperate to help her daughter, Radde
surfed the Internet for answers. That's how she found out what a doctor at
Northwestern Memorial in Chicago was doing.
Dr. Richard Burt is using patients' own
stem cells to fight MS.
"This therapy's designed to reset your
immune system," said Burt.
"He's been doing these stem cell
transplants and every single person that has been in this program has halted
their disease," said Radde.
"Eighty-one percent of them are
actually healing and regenerating their myelin, and that's the covering on the
nerves that every MS patient wants to keep," said Jung.
CitizenLink reports. Also, National Right to Life has encouraged
members of Congress to oppose H.R. 2410 and is calling
on pro-lifers to call their Congressional representatives to urge them to
oppose this bill.
LifeNews also reports. Excerpt:
The House of Representatives is slated
to consider a bill today to fund the State Department, but House Democrats
wielded their control over the chamber by preventing a pro-life amendment. Rep.
Chris Smith had hoped to offer an amendment to limit President Barack Obama's
international abortion agenda.
Several pro-life groups are urging opposition to the
State Department funding bill (HR 2410) unless an amendment is adopted making
sure the new Office for Global
Women’s Issues, which the bill authorizes, will not promote abortion.
The pro-life organizations are worried
that Obama, who appointed a longtime abortion advocate to head up the office,
will use the ambassador post to promote an international right to abortion.
Our
friends at NRLC have warned
members of Congress of the dangers of the State Department Funding Bill,
H.R. 2410, which would seek to overturn abortion restrictions in other nations
as a matter of official U.S. policy.
As
we’ve reported in the past, this bill also raises concerns over the promotion
of the homosexual agenda overseas.
LifeNews reports. Excerpt:
Gibbs largely ducked questions about
Sotomayor's abortion views or her position on a so-called "right to
privacy" that has been used to validate abortion. He retreated to his
boilerplate language saying that Obama and Sotomayor have essentially the same
outlook on the Constitution.
"He felt comfortable that they shared
a philosophy on that interpretation ... [of] the living document of the
Constitution of the United States of America," he added.
With Obama taking a clear pro-abortion view
that a "right" to abortion is somehow found in the Constitution, that
should send a signal to the pro-life movement that Sotomayor is prepared to
vote to uphold Roe v. Wade if confirmed to the Supreme Court.
Congressman
Mike Pence (R-IN) proposed an amendment to the Foreign Service reauthorization
bill which would have eliminated mandates that require the State Department to
promote the radical homosexual agenda overseas.
Unfortunately the amendment was defeated. Congressional
Quarterly reports (article for subscribers only). Excerpt:
Mike Pence, R-Ind., who said that the
language would prioritize gay rights over other issues, offered an amendment to
strike the language and replace it with a broad statement of support for
universal human rights that did not mention sexual orientation.
“I oppose mandating that our secretary of
State, diplomatic and consular staff promote a gay-rights agenda around the
globe, over and above other issues,” Pence said.
The amendment fell on a voice vote.
Congressman
Chris Smith (R-NJ) also proposed a pro-life amendment which would have ensured
that the innocuous-sounding
“Office for Global Women’s Issues” contained in the bill would not have
promoted abortion. His amendment
was also defeated.
There
is grave concern over how proposed legislation designed to reauthorize funding
for the State Department would promote the homosexual agenda on marriage and hate
crimes and could lead to promoting abortion world-wide. The bill would mandate special benefits for
homosexual members of the Foreign Service and Peace Corps and for their “domestic
partners.” It would also establish other
pro-homosexual policies, and could even lead to the promotion of abortion as a “woman’s
right” as part of American foreign policy.
CitizenLink also
reports.
LifeNews reports on this
positive news for the pro-life movement.
Pro-lifers must continue the work to expand the “culture of life” so
that we can see real protections for the unborn in our laws and courts. Don’t let elitist media coverage discourage
you. Pro-lifers are not a political
liability and the “rights of the unborn” is still an important issue.
The
Reuters blog also reports.
LifeNews reports. While Curt
Levey explains what the failure of Dawn Johnsen’s nomination means for the
kinds of judges Obama will or will not be able to get confirmed. Excerpt:
Dawn Johnsen’s troubled nomination is
emblematic of at least three obstacles that Obama’s High Court nominee will
encounter if she is as unabashedly supportive of judicial activism and liberal
causes as Johnsen…
Click
here to read Levey’s three reasons.
Jill Stanek
catalogues President Obama’s bad positions on pro-life issues, but also finds
encouragement from the fact that the President might be making pro-abortion
policies less popular with the American people.
NewsOn6 reports. While this potentially life-saving form of
ethical stem cell treatment is still rather expensive, couples can still choose
to donate their left-over umbilical cord stem cells for the benefit of others.
Our
friends at FRC have released
a video grading President Obama on his first one hundred days in
office. The president doesn’t make high
grades on pro-life and family issues. LifeNews also reviews Obama’s
100 days on pro-life issues.
Neal
McCluskey grades the president on education reform. Excerpt:
If you look just at dollar signs or
rhetoric to measure the education success of Barack Obama’s first one-hundred
days, then the President should get an A. Base it on meaningful reform,
however, and he’d be lucky to get a passing grade.
Mona
Charen explains. Excerpt:
Rep. Smith asked Clinton to respond to
Sanger's views about the "deterioration in the human stock" and
"the perpetuation of defectives, delinquents and dependents." As
Goldberg has observed, conservatives are always asked to "own" their
intellectual forebears and to disavow that which requires disavowal. Yet
liberals skate by without having to distance themselves from the dreadful
opinions and writings of their heroes and heroines.
Congressman
Mike Pence (R-IN) speaks
out against the recent FDA ruling on the “morning after” abortion pill.
Congressional
Quarterly gives us a “heads up” on how the upcoming stem cell battle will
focus on human embryo cloning. Excerpt:
As the Obama administration prepares to
greatly expand the government’s investments in embryonic stem cell research,
the next big biomedical research debate in Congress is shaping up: whether to
allow government funding of experiments using cloned human embryos.
As
the Independent
and the Mail
Online report, a fertility expert is claiming he will be able to clone
human beings and bring them to birth.
While most people agree that reproductive cloning is wrong, but many
seem to think that cloning human embryos for the purposes of stem cell research
is okay as long as the cloned embryos are killed and not implanted into the
mother’s womb. Really, they’re both just
as wrong.
The
AP reports that the FDA is planning to loosen restrictions on the “morning
after” pill which often acts as an abortifacient and is suspected of causing
severe health problems. Allowing
under-age girls to obtain this drug without consulting a physician (let alone
her parents) is disturbing.
LifeNews reports. The courageous student activists at
LiveActionFilms have done it again, exposing the radical and often illegal
pro-abortion, pro-promiscuity agenda of Planned Parenthood. The newly released undercover footage shows
Planned Parenthood staff in Tennessee trying to cover up what they believe is a
sexual abuse situation. Hopefully,
thanks to the great work of Lila Rose and her partners at LiveAction, people across
the country will start to see a pattern of behavior at Planned Parenthood. Maybe then they will start to ask questions
about how many of their tax dollars support this kind of activity.
Read
our past interview
with Lila Rose here.
See
the video here:
In
an
article for Nature, FRC’s David Christensen provided his expert opinion on
the recently drafted stem cell research funding guidelines for the National
Institute of Health. Excerpt:
Those who oppose the research because
deriving stem cell lines requires the destruction of days-old embryos say that
the guidelines would vastly expand an enterprise they deplore. "It's forcing
American taxpayers to spend their money creating essentially an incentive to
create and destroy more human embryos," says David Christensen, senior
director of Congressional affairs at the Family Research Council in Washington
DC.
Christensen noted that the guidelines don't
require the fertility doctor and the researcher to be different people, but say
only that that this should be the case "whenever it [is]
practicable". "This is really crafted with huge loopholes," he
says.
Reuters
reports. Excerpt:
Patients will receive injections containing
millions of their own stem cells, which have been extracted and multiplied up
in a laboratory, and can regenerate new tissue to repair damaged regions.
More than 1,500 race horses have been
treated using the same process and follow-up data suggests a 50 percent
reduction in re-injury over a three year period, compared with conventional
treatment.
Kathryn
Jean Lopez explains at NRO. Excerpt:
"We want fewer and better children . . . and
we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make,
with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict on
us.”
That ghastly message appeared in the
introduction to Margaret Sanger’s 1922 book, The Pivot of Civilization.
In a little-noticed incident, Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton recently announced that she is “really in awe” of Sanger.
“The 20th-century reproductive-rights movement, really embodied in the life and
leadership of Margaret Sanger, was one of the most transformational in the
entire history of the human race,” Clinton declaimed upon receiving an award
from the organization that Sanger founded, Planned Parenthood.
Find
out more about how the rights of doctors and other medical workers to refuse to
participate in unethical procedures (such as abortion) are being threatened,
and find out how you can help defend “a doctor’s right” at ADoctorsRight.com.
FoxNews
reports on the growing opposition to Obama’s nominee Dawn Johnson, the
president’s radical pro-abortion nominee for the Office of Legal Counsel at the
Justice Department.
OneNewsNow
reports on the potential “bait and switch” in embryonic stem cell language
claiming to allow research only on “leftover” IVF embryos. First, there is no such thing as a “leftover”
human life. But second, if this research
door is opened it is very unlikely it will stop at IVF embryos, but also
include embryos created for the sole purpose of experimentation and death. Excerpt:
"We believe now that the bill that is
likely to come before the House will be even much more expansive than that and
will open the door to federal funding that uses human embryos who are
deliberately created for the purpose of using them in research that will kill
them, including the use of human cloning to create large numbers of human
embryos to be used in research," he [Douglas Johnson of National Right to
Life] says.
CitizenLink reports. Unfortunately, it appears that President
Obama’s State Department will push its abortion agenda overseas, while
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton heaped praise on Planned Parenthood founder
Margaret Sanger. Excerpt:
After being honored by Planned Parenthood
with the Margaret Sanger award, Clinton said: “I have to tell you that it was a
great privilege when I was told that I would receive this award. I admire
Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision.”
Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood,
was openly sympathetic to Nazi Germany’s eugenic practices and was strongly
committed to preventing black people and the poor from reproducing.
Sanger once said: "Many of this group
are diseased, feeble-minded, and are of the pauper element dependent upon the
normal and fit members of society for their support. There is no doubt in the
minds of all thinking people that the procreation of this group should be
stopped."
Alan
Sears explains why the conscience rights of medical personnel to refuse to
perform abortions or other unethical procedures must be protected. Excerpt:
“Always let your conscience be your guide,”
Jiminy Cricket used to sing to Pinocchio. Sounds like good advice, but
then…Jiminy had his ulterior motives. To his mind, he was the voice of that
puppet boy’s conscience – so he himself would be doing the guiding.
That’s pretty much seems to be the
philosophy of the Obama administration when it comes to the “rights of
conscience” of medical professionals. The team now pulling the strings at the
Department of Health and Human Services has decided that preserving religious
liberty – much less life in the womb – is a luxury the nation can’t afford.
And they expect health care providers to
take their moral cues from the government…not their own convictions.
The
Scotsman reports on some exciting developments in ethical adult stem cell
research. Hopefully, human cartilage
will be produced using adult stem cells from patients’ own bodies.
LifeNews reports. Looks like the efforts of our friend Lila
Rose are paying off in Arizona.
Now
that a federal judge has determined (CitizenLink reports)
that underage girls must be allowed easy access to the “morning after pill,”
this information from FRC on
the health dangers of Plan B, is very relevant.
Dr.
David Prentice and Clarke Forsythe have written a helpful
opinion piece on President Obama’s push to invest our tax dollars on
unethical stem cell research with very little prospect of success. Excerpt:
Despite his talk of economic hardship,
President Obama has been on an ideological spending spree -- expanding
government, increasing taxes, and doubling the national debt. New money pits
are dug daily. Consider Obama's commitment to government controlled health care
and the possible nationalization of banks. But little discussed has been the
financial ramifications of taxpayer-funded human embryonic stem cell research.
The morality of such life-destroying
science aside, it is a prime example of pork barrel spending as it funds the
kind of stem cell research that has the least chance of leading to real
therapies for real patients. While it's "only" a billion dollars so
far -- chump change, perhaps, out of a $3 trillion budget -- at a time of fiscal
crisis, it's an "investment" in failure.
The
American Thinker reports. Excerpt:
President Obama's statement that human
cloning is "dangerous and wrong" is a non sequitur in its context,
because there is no material difference between abortion, embryonic stem cell
research, and cloning. They differ in appearance, they sometimes differ in
ends, but they differ not one whit in essence. Each is an instance of
deliberately destroying an innocent human being at a certain stage of
development. If the first two are OK, then the third is OK as well. Let's see
why.
LifeNews reports. Excerpt:
The American economy is in turmoil but the
Obama administration sent a $50 million check yesterday to the United Nations
Population Fund. That's the pro-abortion group that has been accused of
supporting and working in concert with Chinese family planning officials.
There, the Chinese population control
program has relied on forced abortions, involuntary sterilizations and other
human rights abuses to enforce its rule that most couples may have no more than
one child.
Lila
Rose has done it again. Live Action Films, the organization of
pro-life students headed by Rose, has released undercover footage of a Planned
Parenthood facility in Phoenix, Arizona attempting to cover-up illegal sexual
abuse.
Check
out the Violations
Map to find out about other cases of Planned Parenthood scandals and of
other sting operations by Live Action Films.
Planned
Parenthood receives millions of dollars from taxpayers every year. Is this how you want your tax dollars spent?
Here’s
the video of the Phoenix case:
Daniel Herbster reporting
We again have the privilege to hear from Dr. David Prentice about important bioethical issues. Dr. Prentice has years of teaching and research experience, and he now works for the illustrious Family Research Council in Washington, DC. With President Obama’s recent actions on taxpayer funding of embryo-destroying research, I thought it would be good to hear from our friend and my former teacher.
DH: Dr. Prentice, what exactly did President Obama do in his recent executive order? How will it affect the sanctity of life in this country?
DP: President Obama has removed any restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. The previous Bush policy restricted federal funds for those lines (dishes) of human embryonic stem cells that were already in existence on Aug 9, 2001; this allowed funding for the research to proceed, but did not provide any incentive for more embryo destruction. Now, any lines can receive federal funding, no matter when the embryo was destroyed, and no matter how the embryo was produced. This would mean even for cases in the future, and for embryos created by cloning, or for human-animal hybrid embryos.
DH: It seems ironic that the President would chose to announce his new policy on embryonic stem cell research a matter of weeks after a major breakthrough in ethically produced induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC). Could you tell us what exactly these researchers accomplished and how does it relate to the push for more embryonic stem cell research?
DP: Recently scientists at MIT showed that they could produce these induced stem cells (iPS cells) directly from a Parkinson’s patient, and make the type of neurons in the lab that are missing in the patient. They are still years or decades away from ever using these cells in a patient, but it illustrates the ease with which these iPS cells can be produced, producing cells for study in the laboratory, and all without the use of embryos, eggs, or cloning.
DH: In his remarks President Obama claimed to oppose “human cloning.” What do you think he meant by this statement and do you believe he is being completely accurate?
As
if forcing Americans to support embryo-destroying research with their tax
dollars wasn’t enough, President Barack Obama has also overturned Bush guidelines
which sent research money to ethically obtained adult stem cells which, unlike
embryonic stem cells, are actually producing real results and treatments. LifeNews
reports. Excerpt:
President Barack Obama did more on Monday
than just force taxpayers to fund embryonic stem cell research that requires
the destruction of human life. He also rescinded an executive order President
Bush put into place funding adult stem cells and new research with iPS cells.
LifeNews reports. Just the fact that Snowflake Babies exist
belies to oft-repeated notion that there is such a thing as “leftover” human
beings (human embryos).
 President Obama announced today that
he was signing an executive order overturning President Bush’s restrictions on
embryonic stem cell research. Formerly,
researchers were prohibited from using tax dollars on research which destroyed
human embryos. At the signing ceremony,
Obama pledged his opposition to “human cloning,” but it is most likely that he
means only cloning human beings for the purposes of bringing the cloned human
to birth (so-called reproductive cloning).
However, liberals often approve of the cloning of human embryos for
research purposes as long as the cloned embryos are killed at some early stage
of development, denying that this is in fact human cloning.
This is another sad chapter in the annals of the Obama administration,
especially in its lack of respect for innocent human life.
The
Weekly Standard Blog reports.
Excerpt:
President Obama today fulfilled his
campaign promise to lift federal-funding restrictions on research involving the
destruction of human embryos. He couldn't have done so at a more inappropriate
time, for just last week scientists made headlines again announcing yet another
breakthrough in what is known as "induced pluripotent stem-cell"
technology.
ABC
News also reports. Congressman Mike
Pence (R-IN) responded today.
Read
the executive
order here and read President Obama’s statements
today here.
For
more information check the AdvanceUSA
stem cell page.
 Ethical stem cell research has made another dramatic advance as researchers in Great Britain and Canada successfully created pluripotent (regenerative cells which can transform into any cell type) stem cells from ordinary skin cells using a new method far more efficient than what was previously known. This means that induced pluripotent stem cell research (iPSC) could soon be tested in humans, without the risks of tissue rejections and tumor formation associated with unethical embryo-destructive research.
LifeNews reports. Excerpt:
Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (iPS cells) have made yet another advance as they continue to become a second alternative to embryonic stem cell research. Yesterday, scientists in Canada and England published a paper showing they had turned skin cells into iPS cells.
The article, in the prestigious scientific journal Nature saw the research teams announce how they had successfully reprogrammed ordinary skin cells into iPS cells without the use of viruses to transmit the reprogramming genes to the cell.
The Medical Research Council also reports. Excerpt:
Scientists have paved the way for stem cells made from skin cells to be safely transplanted into humans – by overcoming one of the main health risks associated with previous techniques.
The team of researchers from the UK and Canada say their discovery could ultimately spell an end to the need for human embryos as a source of stem cells. Their findings are published today in two papers in Nature online.
Click here and here for the original articles published in Nature. Also, The Washington Post and the BBC also report on this astounding discovery.
Unfortunately, despite these and other astounding advances in ethical stem cell research (not to mention the practical treatments already being offered by adult stem cell research), Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) is pushing to have our tax dollars spent on research which destroys innocent human embryos. The Express-Times also reports. Excerpt:
U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., is taking the lead on Capitol Hill in calling for expanded embryonic stem cell research.
A bill he introduced last week would overturn a Bush policy that restricts federal funding for such studies. The legislation is expected to complement action by President Obama.
For a wealth of information and resources on this important issue, check out AdvanceUSA’s stem cell page and adult stem cell page.
The
Washington Post reports that President Obama is planning to overturn
important conscience protections which allow medical personnel to refuse to
perform operations or dispense drugs which they find unethical (such as
abortions and abortion drugs). The
New York Times also reports.
Excerpt:
The Obama administration moved Friday to
undo a last-minute Bush administration rule granting broad protections to
health workers who refuse to take part in abortions or provide other health
care that goes against their consciences.
Our
friend Tom McClusky at FRC has a helpful
blog post explaining what “pro-life riders” are and how we need to be
watchful over every piece of legislation (especially the massive omnibus
spending bill Congress is now considering) to ensure that each of these
important pro-life provisions are preserved.
 Unfortunately the massive Omnibus spending bill also contains language which undermines the Kemp-Kasten provision. Kemp-Kasten prevents taxpayer dollars from supporting organization which support brutal one-child-only forced abortion policies overseas. One such organization is the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) which will receive funding if the Omnibus bill is passed in its current form.
LifeNews reports on UNFPA funding and also debunks the myth of overpopulation which is the rationale behind such radical abortion policies.
 CBS News and the AP report. Both articles explain how fetal stem cells caused tumors because of their hard-to-control nature. The same problems happen with embryonic stem cells. Unfortunately, these articles might cause someone to think that all areas of stem cell research are problematic, but adult stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells have not shown tumor causing tendencies and these forms do not involve destroying human life.
Star
Park reports on this
troubling story. Excerpt:
A black pastor awaits sentencing, which
could amount to two years in prison and $4,000 in fines, for standing outside
an inner city abortion clinic holding a sign saying "Jesus Loves You &
Your Baby, Let Us Help You," and offering pro-life literature.
Live
Action Films has done it again. This
intrepid pro-life organization has released more outrageous undercover video
showing Planned Parenthood staff knowingly participating in the cover-up of
statutory rape in Tuscon, Arizona. Read
LAF’s official
press release here. LifeNews also reports. Is this activity (covering up statutory rape
and promoting abortion) something you want your hard-earned tax dollars to
support?
Check
out AdvanceUSA’s
interview with Lila Rose, the president of Live Action Films and one of the
undercover participants in the videos.
Here’s
the YouTube version of the Arizona video:
Daniel
Herbster reporting
 Few
organizations are as supportive of the radical pro-abortion agenda as Planned
Parenthood. Millions of dollars pass
through this institution every year (much of it from taxpayers) which means it
has a huge financial incentive to promote abortion and promiscuity. There have been many reports of Planned
Parenthood violating reporting laws in order to circumvent state parental
consent laws and statutory rape laws.
Lila Rose, president of Live Action Films,
decided to help expose the corruption of Planned Parenthood through a series of
undercover videos. Lila posed as an
under-age girl (who had been impregnated by a much older man) seeking an abortion
at two PP clinics in Indiana. The
videos show three PP staffers attempting to cover-up what would have
constituted statutory rape and encouraging Lila to get an abortion in Illinois
so she could avoid Indiana’s parental consent laws and keep the abortion and
rape hidden from her parents. Lila was
kind enough to allow us to interview her about her recent project.
DH: I know it’s not quite as prestigious at being
interviewed on Fox News, but we’re very grateful that you were willing to be
interviewed for AdvanceUSA Blog. First
of all, what made you decide to do undercover videos of Planned
Parenthood? Where did you get the idea?
LR: Well
first of all, our team at Live Action rely on blogs like yours to get the truth
out, so thank you for the interview!
The public deserves to know if Planned Parenthood, a
recipient of huge government grants, complies with all state and federal
regulations.
Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion provider,
and an aggressive political force for abortion on demand. In their active
killing of defenseless children, they routinely break state laws and manipulate
and misinform women. Abortion works in secret; once people learn how it is
done, who it is killing, and all the abuses that accompany it, I believe the
majority of Americans can no longer stand by and allow the great injustice and
violence to continue in our great nation.
DH: Did you ever feel nervous or fearful about
going “undercover?”
LR: Nervous,
yes. But that feeling was largely part of my character, as I tried to
accurately portray a very young girl, confused, frightened, pregnant by a
sexual predator, and in great need of help.
DH: What kind of preparation and planning went
into these videos?
LR: Our
Mona Lisa Team, both on the road and with the support team back home, spent a
lot of time preparing for the multi-state investigation. We have a very talented
and dedicated team of young people: we did extensive research and preparation,
used the best equipment, and took our role as investigative journalists
seriously.
Once the national tour was over, the work had just
begun! It was now our task at Live Action to plan, produce and release the
videos.
DH: What do you feel you accomplished with this
project? Are you experiencing any
negative push-back?
LR: The
first two videos (Bloomington and Indianapolis) alone well exceeded our
expectations by garnering national, mainstream media coverage, and for weeks on
end. Local groups in Indiana, already hard at work, were able to use the
evidence to make the case against Planned Parenthood. We at Live Action sent
the District Attorneys and the Attorney General full copies of the footage, to
work with them so they could conduct a thorough investigation of Planned
Parenthood Indiana. And the shock waves of the videos, which proved the blatant
disregard of Planned Parenthood for Indiana state statute, parent's
right-to-involvement, and the safety of young girls, is still ongoing.
DH: What actions or policies would you like to
see come about as a result of your efforts?
Gallop
has released a poll showing that only 35% of Americans approve of President
Obama’s decision to allow groups that promote abortion as a means of “family
planning” to receive taxpayer dollars. LifeNews also reports.
We
encourage the president to take note that sometimes doing the right thing is also
politically expedient and do the right thing when it comes to making sure
taxpayer dollars (many of whom oppose abortion) don’t support abortion or
unethical research.
LifeNews reports. It should be remembered that the so-called “Freedom
of Choice Act” (FOCA) would enshrine the Roe
vs. Wade decision into federal law and would overturn every (federal,
state, or local) limitation on abortion in America.
AdvanceUSA
will be joining other groups to keep pro-lifers updated on the stealth strategy
to whittle away at abortion restrictions.
Be sure to regularly check AdvanceUSA
Blog and subscribe to our free
weekly email newsletter so you know the latest on the attempt to impose
FOCA piece-by-piece.
On Thursday Senator Orin Hatch (R-UT) offered an amendment to the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) Reauthorization Act which would have allowed unborn children to receive health insurance. It was a small, common sense effort to promote the humanity of the unborn but was defeated by a vote of 39 – 59. Click here to see how your senators voted on this amendment and hold them accountable.
Note: Many conservatives are concerned that the recent SCHIP reauthorization will increase the role of government in the lives of middle-class Americans and will constitute a dangerous step toward government controlled (i.e. “universal”) health care.
Senate Vote on the Hatch Amendment (S.A. 80) to allow unborn children to receive health coverage under SCHIP
January 29, 2009
Full Results
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|
|
Yeas |
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Nays |
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PRES |
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NV |
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Republican |
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37 |
|
4 |
|
— |
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— |
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Democratic |
|
2 |
|
54 |
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— |
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1 |
|
Independent |
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— |
|
1 |
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— |
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— |
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TOTALS |
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39 |
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59 |
|
— |
|
1 |
LifeNews reports. Unfortunately, it appears that President
Obama and many in Congress would like to give your hard-earned tax dollars to
organizations like this.
Unfortunately the Senate defeated a motion today to reinstate the Mexico City Policy prohibiting the use of taxpayer funds to support overseas organization which provide or promote abortions. Members of the House are likely to try as well, with little chance of success. Click here to see how both your Senators voted on this important pro-life policy. Be sure to hold your elected officials accountable!
Senate Vote on the Martinez Amendment (S.A. 65) to restore the prohibition on funding of nongovernmental organizations that promote abortion as a method of birth control (the "Mexico City Policy")
January 28, 2009
Full Results | News Story
|
|
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Yeas |
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Nays |
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PRES |
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NV |
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Republican |
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36 |
|
4 |
|
— |
|
1 |
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Democratic |
|
1 |
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55 |
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— |
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1 |
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Independent |
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— |
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1 |
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— |
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— |
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TOTALS |
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37 |
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60 |
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— |
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2 |
Simply
put, this policy (Mexico City Policy) is important because it prevented your
tax dollars from supporting organizations that promote abortion as a method of “family
planning” in overseas countries. Our
friend Tom McClusky at FRC gives
a thorough explanation at FRC’s blog.
President
Obama released a statement on the issue explaining his rationale for
overturning this common-sense, pro-life provision. LifeNews
reports. Excerpt:
Obama also cast his decision to fund
international abortions and abortion efforts as a way to find common ground in
the abortion debate.
"For too long, international family
planning assistance has been used as a political wedge issue, the subject of a
back and forth debate that has served only to divide us," Obama said.
"I have no desire to continue this stale and fruitless debate."
"It is time that we end the politicization
of this issue. In the coming weeks, my Administration will initiate a fresh
conversation on family planning, working to find areas of common ground to best
meet the needs of women and families at home and around the world," he
said.
But for the majority of Americans who take
a pro-life position on abortion and oppose funding abortion efforts with public
money, the debate will continue.
Pray
that President Obama would reconsider this move, and that he would seek to
protect the inalienable right to life of the unborn in his administration.
Yesterday President Obama signed
an executive order overturning the Mexico City Policy which had prevented
American tax dollars from supporting organizations that provide or promote
abortion overseas (especially organizations which participate in brutal
one-child-only forced abortion programs).
This action is a slap in the face to pro-lifers everywhere.
National Right
to Life responded immediately.
We
urge President Obama to reconsider this decision and to remember that he is
being watched by a holy God before whom he will one day give an account of how
he used the enormous power given to him.
President Obama should also remember the words of our third president
Thomas Jefferson.
Indeed, I tremble
for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep
forever.
Thomas
Jefferson
On
the 36th anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade decision pro-life members
of Congress spoke out for the rights of the unborn on the floor of the House of
Representatives. CitizenLink and
the Miami
Herald report.
Watch
Congressman Mike Pence (R-IN) speak here.
As LifeNews reports, many
members urged President Obama to oppose the so-called Freedom of Choice Act
which would enshrine Roe vs. Wade
into Federal law and would overturn every limitation on abortion in our
nation. Obama has indicated in the past
that passing the FOCA would be a top priority.
ABC News reports
on this first FDA authorized TRIAL using unethical embryonic stem cells. It should be noted that this trial does not
involve treatment but is only a test to see if health dangers occur or if there
is any real potential for success. Even
in the likely event that some sort of benefit is claimed from these studies,
that would not overrule the non-negotiable ethical problems with destroying one
human life for the benefit of another.
Daniel
Herbster reporting
 Wesley
J. Smith is an influential writer and commentator who has dedicated his career
to preserving human dignity and educating his fellow man on the principles of
bioethics and justice. He is a senior
fellow at the Discovery Institute and a
special consultant to the Center for Bioethics
and Culture. He has also written a
number of books, and he blogs at Secondhand
Smoke. Smith was kind enough to
share with AdvanceUSA’s readers about important bioethics issues facing our society
today and about his work.
DH: Why are bioethics issues so important?
WJS: Bioethics is a contraction for “biomedical
ethics.” It is a field that has profound influence over core areas of human
endeavor that help establish and define the morality of society, and indeed,
the meaning of human life itself. Should elderly people have their health care
rationed? Is assisted suicide a proper
medical service? Is it right to create
cloned human embryos for use in research or to bring to birth? Is it wrong to abort fetuses because they
test positive for Down syndrome? Should parents be able to genetically enhance
their children? Are there morally relevant differences between humans and
animals? What should happen if a nurse
refuses to participate in an abortion or a physician wants to cut off wanted
life-sustaining medical treatment because the patient has a poor “quality of
life?” These and other equally important
bioethical issues are much larger than the sum of their parts because they
establish philosophical norms that exert tremendous influence upon society
beyond the policies themselves. Indeed,
I can think of few fields more important than bioethics in determining the kind
of society we shall become in the 21st century.
DH: What is “human exceptionalism” and how does
it relate to issues of life and justice?
WJS: Human exceptionalism refers to the sheer
moral importance and unique value of being human. I believe strongly that adhering to human
exceptionalism is the predicate to defending universal human rights. Indeed,
whether we accept or reject human exceptionalism may be the most important
issue we face as a culture. For if we say that simply being human is not what gives value to life, we have to
ask a second question: What does? That
second question leads directly to a system wherein those with power decide
which of us has greater--and which lesser—value, and who decides those who
don’t make muster. Thus, many in bioethics support “personhood theory,” which
denies the objective moral value of being human and claims that what matters morally
is being a “person,” a status earned
by possessing minimal cognitive capacities. In this view, there is such a thing
as a human “non person,” such as fetuses, newborns, and people who have lost
these capacities, such as Terri Schiavo.
Worse, because the human non person is defined as having lesser value,
they lose the right to life and, can be used instrumentally such as in medical
experimentation or as sources of organs.
Indeed, there is much agitation in bioethics and within the organ
transplant community to redefine death to include a diagnosis of persistent
vegetative state—meaning that if this view prevails, severely compromised
people could essentially be killed for their organs. This isn’t happening—yet—but the only way to
make sure that such policies are never instituted is to adhere to human
exceptionalism.
The Star Tribune
reports. Only time will tell what
will happen to Bush’s important pro-life regulations after the Obama
administration “reviews” them.
 New White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel
AdvanceUSA has learned from friends
on Capitol Hill that the Obama administration is expected to quickly overturn
Bush policies limiting taxpayer funding of unethical embryonic stem cell
research and taxpayer funding of overseas abortions (ex: Mexico City Policy) soon
after the inauguration. Please contact President-elect Barack
Obama through his transition website to tell him you want him to preserve
these important, common sense pro-life policies.
We
must preserve the executive branch restrictions on taxpayer funding of
embryo-destroying research and overseas abortions.
The
Heritage Foundation has prepared this helpful paper warning
of the serious dangers posed by the CEDAW treaty which unfortunately has
strong supporters in Congress.
The
treaty poses serious threats to morality, family health, and the pro-life cause
in any nation which ratifies it. Here is
an excerpt explaining the pro-life threat:
CEDAW is a much-debated and carefully
negotiated document, and access to abortion is not required, nor even
mentioned. But the committee's actions are an entirely different matter. In its
discussion of women's health, the committee focuses almost exclusively on
contraception and abortion, referencing its own General Recommendation No. 24
to require countries to liberalize their laws regarding abortion.[34] The
committee called on Nigeria "to assess the impact of its abortion law on
the maternal mortality rate and to give consideration to its reform or
modification."[35] Yemen was reminded that "contraceptives should be
free or affordable."[36] One committee member wanted to know whether women
in Lithuania had access to affordable contraceptives, including emergency
contraceptives, and was particularly concerned about a proposalunder
consideration in Lithuania to restrict legal abortion. She warned that,
"If the Government [intends] to restrict abortion, the consequences would
be disastrous for women."[37]
Apparently
the Big Abortion industry is looking for a bailout now. As CitizenLink and Planned
Parenthood’s own website make clear, supporting the newly proposed
Prevention First Act will be a high priority of the nation’s largest abortion
provider. The bill promises to make sure
that “reproductive health services” (i.e. mostly abortion) are available to all
families, regardless of income (likely at tax-payer expense.
Helen
M. Alvaré at the Culture of Life Foundation, provides a helpful look at where
unethical embryonic stem cell research stands today and what related
political developments we should expect to see in the near future. Excerpt:
Incoming President Barack Obama’s strenuous
support for legal abortion is well-known. His unbridled enthusiasm for
destructive embryonic stem cell research (ESCR) is likely less visible to most
Americans. But President-elect Obama’s
statements about ESCR throughout his campaign, and his behavior as a U.S.
Senator, make him a ‘warrior” for the cause no less fierce that (now-disgraced)
Senator John Edwards, who famously over-stated that if the federal government
had funded ESCR all along, the late actor Christoper [sic] Reeve might have
“[gotten] up out of that wheelchair and walk[ed] again.” ...
Fast forward four years, and science is demonstrating, as (Dr. E.
Christian Brugger wrote in his recent “Morning of the Stem Cell Revolution)
that it is adult stem cell research which is providing actual patient
treatments.
LifeNews reports. Excerpt:
One major problem is that they tend to form
cancerous cells or tumors after they are injected -- and scientists have yet to
stop that from happening.
A new article in Nature Reports Stem Cells
highlights the work of Mickie Bhatia and colleagues at McMaster University that
shows that the embryonic stem cells that look the best may perform the worst.
"When it comes to embryonic stem
cells, the very qualities researchers use to pick out a robust cell line may in
fact be bestowed by precancerous transformations," the article suggests.
“Current measurements are not capable of
distinguishing the difference between great stem cells and cancer stem cells in
vitro,” Bhatia explains.
The researchers say the problem is and
can't be determined before they transform into specific body tissues through
the process called differentiation. As a result, solving the problem of tumors
from embryonic stem cell injections may be difficult, if not impossible.
LifeNews reports. Excerpts:
While we must press on against FOCA, we
must not forget another serious, and maybe even more pertinent, threat: the
termination of the Hyde Amendment.
…
The Hyde Amendment, originally enacted in
1976, is a pro-life limitation amendment in the annual appropriations bill that
restricts the direct federal funding of abortion through Medicaid.
Without the Hyde Amendment, women eligible
for Medicaid would have their abortions paid for by the Federal Government – in
other words, OUR tax dollars. If abortions are free to the individual, you can
bet on abortion rates increasing.
The Wall Street
Journal reports. During the last
election season some people claimed that abortion and other pro-life issues “really
didn’t matter” because the president has very little control over pro-life
issues while Roe vs. Wade is on the
books. Nothing could be further from the
truth.
Tony
Perkins at the Family Research Council helpfully lists the many
pro-life executive policies that could be threatened in a new
administration.
- Rescind
the Mexico City policy, which would direct taxpayer dollars to groups that
provide and promote abortion overseas;
- Restore
funding to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which condones forced
abortion and sterilization policies in countries like China;
- Direct
the Department of Health and Human Services to change the conscience exemptions
for health care workers who morally object to abortion and other practices;
- Change
the Department of Justice Sexual Assault Protocol, Defense Department
pharmaceutical formulary, and USAID's Commodities Program to encourage the use
of "Plan B," which can act as an abortifacient;
- Create
incentives to provide subsidized birth control at college health centers and
other providers;
-
Make
"emergency contraception" available over-the-counter for girls of all
ages;
- Rollback
the abstinence-only education requirement for certain federal aid; and,
- Permit
the use of taxpayer funds for the destruction of human embryos through
unethical stem cell research.
HT:
FRC
A
second undercover video showing Planned Parenthood staffers in Indiana
attempting to cover up statutory rape has prompted Indiana State Representative
Jackie Walorski to call for an
investigation and a suspension of all state funding of Planned Parenthood until
the investigation is completed.
Hopefully, this incident will be a wake up call to the dangerous,
radically pro-abortion agenda of Planned Parenthood and will motivate citizens
to demand that their tax dollars not be used to support such a corrupt
organization.
To
view all the undercover videos visit http://www.liveactionfilms.org/.
The
South Bend Tribune reports. As does the
Indiana pro-family blog Veritas Rex.
Below is a YouTube video showing excerpts from the undercover videos.
LifeNews reports. Excerpt:
Two groups of researchers have made more
progress with the use of adult stem cells -- showing they are both more ethical
and more effective than their embryonic counterparts. In this latest find, they
demonstrated that adult stem cells can self renew and repair tissue damage.
Jill Stanek
provides us a look at disgraced Governor Rod Blagojevich’s anti-life
policies and a disturbing tour of Illinois’ political culture.
LifeNews reports. Excerpt:
"Anyone who has bought into the myth
that Obama is 'moderating' his positions should notice that the first section
is entitled 'Steps for the First Hundred Days.' Groups that have spent millions
supporting pro-abortion members of Congress, including Obama and Biden, aren't
in the mood to wait," he writes.
"Nowhere is there any of the
pre-election rhetoric about 'dialogue' or 'lowering' the number of abortions.
Hudson says the proposals would entrench
the unlimited abortion policies that currently guide the U.S.
"Taken together, the proposed policies
would accomplish three things: 1) treat abortion as a health care right, 2)
provide funding for abortions by insurance carriers or the government, and 3)
put judges and political appointees in place who will protect the abortion and
government-funding from future challenges," he explained.
Jill Stanek
explains at WorldNetDaily. Excerpt:
Four times in four years Wichita late-term
abortionist George Tiller or Planned Parenthood of Kansas has sued Kansas
Attorney General Phill Kline or Johnson County District Attorney Phill Kline
for investigating them. They have also filed hundreds of pages of ethics
complaints, which continue nonstop to this day.
Despite a hostile Kansas Supreme Court, the
majority of whom were appointed by a hostile governor who gets campaign money
from Tiller and who has even hosted a party for him at her mansion, and various
other hostile public officials who are on the dole for Tiller and/or Planned
Parenthood, nothing has stuck to Kline.
Despite every attempted roadblock, the
criminal investigations against Planned Parenthood and Tiller continue for
allegedly violating state laws prohibiting late-term abortions and mandated
reporting of underage abortions.
Phill
Kline’s work in Kansas is important for upholding the law and also bringing the
abuses of Planned Parenthood out into the light of day. CitizenLink also
reports.
CitizenLink reports. Excerpt:
Carrie Gordon Earll, senior bioethics
analyst at Focus on the Family Action, said women should not be enticed to put
their health and their lives at risk for financial benefit.
"That goes against every tenet of
medical ethics," she said. "Serious complications can come into play,
including blood clots, liver and kidney damage, future infertility and even
death.
"And even if the risks are minimal,
this type of idea enters into creating life outside of the marital union, and
that’s something Focus on the Family does not support.”
Chuck Colson explains. Excerpt:
The smartest thing “abortion rights”
advocates ever did was to coin the phrase “pro-choice.” That shifted our
attention towards the act of choosing and away from what was being chosen—the
dismemberment of a human being in utero.
Eventually, however, at some point, “choice”
has to go from mere rhetoric to an actual deed. Somebody has to actually
perform an abortion if “freedom of choice” is to become a reality, as one
medical student learned recently.
Read
full text here.
CNS News
reports on yet another (just one of many) important reason Americans should
beware the so-called “Freedom of Choice Act.”
LifeNews reports. An important question for Americans to ask
themselves is “Do I want my tax dollars to support this kind of activity?”
D.
Joy Riley, M.D gives an important perspective on the debate
over taxpayer funding of stem cell research that destroys human embryos. She also shows how Britain is an example of
where confusion over what a human embryo can lead. Excerpt:
“…induced pluripotent cells (iPS) —
embryonic-like stem cells formed without destroying embryos — have been
produced. James Thomson, who originally reported human ESC culture in 1998,
sees iPS as the future. Likewise, Ian Wilmut, famous for cloning
"Dolly", has endorsed iPS over cloning as the way forward. Still the
clamor for federal funds and human embryos continues.”
The
Telegraph has the exclusive interview with the woman who had her wind
pipe replaced using her own adult stem cells. This piece also includes video. Excerpt:
"The moment I woke after the
procedure, I looked up at the doctor and he smiled and told me it had been
successful - it was the best moment ever," she said. "I knew then
that I had a life and a future."
The 30-year-old Colombian mother of two,
who has lived in Spain for nine years, was struck down by tuberculosis five
years ago. She was given conventional treatment but her condition worsened.
"I was coughing all the time, I
couldn't walk very far and I couldn't say more than a few words at a time
before becoming breathless," said the dental nurse speaking on Wednesday
at the Barcelona hospital where she was treated. "I wasn't able to work
and couldn't do the normal things mothers do for their children."
Last January she was offered the chance of
a replacement windpipe grown using her own stem cells, a pioneering process
known as "tissue engineering". Without the transplant, surgeons would
have had to remove one of lungs, a procedure that carries a high mortality
rate.
LifeNews also reports.
Daniel
Herbster reporting
Citizens for Community Values of
Indiana is one of the many great organizations in our nation fighting to
protect family values and to oppose pornography and sexually oriented
businesses. I had the opportunity to
interview Patrick Mangan, the Executive Director of CCV of IN, about his work
enabling people to take back their communities.
DH: Patrick, I’ve enjoyed getting to know you and your
organization better over the last few months, so it’s a pleasure to introduce
you to our readers here at AdvanceUSA Blog.
I’ve seen first-hand how your work affects the state of Indiana and
especially my home town of South Bend.
Tell our readers what kinds of issues Citizens for Community Values
works on?
PM: Well our mission is to protect men, women, and
children from the misinformation of sexual activists, and the harms of sexual
addictions, sexual predators, sexually oriented businesses, materials harmful
to minors, broadcast indecency, and the porn/sex industry in all of its forms,
by promoting the principles of the Judeo/Christian ethic which is the
foundation of our nation.
Our vision is to empower concerned citizens and
community leaders to significantly reduce sexual exploitation, promiscuity, and
abuse in Indiana and beyond by:
G.
Tracey Mehan III provides an
important perspective when considering the results of the recent
elections. Excerpt:
This scapegoating of the solid and most
loyal of the three wings of the Reaganite coalition is inaccurate and just
plain wrong. It is self-defeating in the long run. It is rank blame-shifting
and a libel of a GOP constituency which has always supported low taxes, a
strong defense and a constrained judiciary. All it asked for was fair
consideration of its concerns with family and the culture of life.
Read
the full
article here.
HT:
FRC
The
Philadelphia Bulletin reports.
Excerpt:
Less than two miles from two main abortion
providers in the city, Planned Parenthood and the Philadelphia Women's Clinic,
The HOPE Center opened Friday to provide pregnancy support.
While 40 percent of state abortions happen
in the city, most crisis pregnancy centers are located in the suburbs. Former
Philadelphia Eagle, Rev. Herb H. Lusk II opened The HOPE Center through his
People for People community outreach organization to counter that statistic and
help expecting couples.
"I've always been pro-life, but I've
been passive about it," Rev. Lusk said. "When I began to consider
that the African-American population alone has declined in the past three years
across the nation, I realized that we're not procreating our own race; and that
is a direct result of abortion in our communities."
According to the Pennsylvania Department of
Health, 50 percent of black pregnancies end in abortion in Philadelphia. And
between 1973 and 1999, there were over 13 million African-American abortions
nationwide.
"It breaks my heart to hear that; it
makes me cry," Rev. Lusk said of the statistics. "We can do better
than that."
Read
the full
story here.
HT:
Tony Perkins, FRC
USA
Today reports. Excerpt:
Like previous presidents, Obama is expected
to issue a flurry of executive orders after he takes office Jan. 20. Some could
reverse Bush administration policies; others could promote his own.
Ending a ban on government funding for
research using embryonic stem cells would be among the most controversial.
"The question is, does the Bush policy
get replaced with the law of the jungle" where scientists can create and
clone human embryos for the sole purpose of studying their cells and then
destroying them, asks Richard Doerflinger, the bishops conference's associate
director of the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities. "We are very
concerned about it as a moral issue."
Americans
United for Life has created a helpful
online resource for finding out more information about the terrible and deceptively
named “Freedom of Choice Act” which would overturn every abortion restriction
in the nation and enshrine the faulty Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision into
Federal law. The website is FightFOCA.com and allows you to sign an
online petition against this terrible pro-abortion legislation.
LifeNews explains the likely
strategy that will be used by pro-abortionists to eliminate any restrictions on
abortions.
The
Times Online reports. Excerpt:
A leading British scientist is leaving the
country to work in France after claiming that British science gives too much
priority to embryo experiments over “more ethical” alternatives.
Daniel
Herbster reporting
One
of the most important causes in our nation today is the campaign to end
abortion. While it is important to wage
the legal and political battle so that our laws reflect true justice by recognizing
the inalienable rights of the unborn, another crucial facet of this campaign is
the battle for the hearts and minds of women.
Pregnancy resource centers, which provide real options for women
contemplating an abortion, do amazing work in our nation helping women and
families make the choice for life. Care Net is a nation-wide network that
serves pregnancy resource centers, and I’m happy to share with our readers my
interview with Kristin Hansen about her work at Care Net and of the importance of pregnancy
resource centers.
DH: As important as the legal/political aspect of
the pro-life movement is, why do you think an emphasis on providing real
options for women is also so important?
KH: The
pregnancy center movement was started in the 1960s by people who were strongly
opposed to abortion and also had a deep conviction about personally reaching
out to help women find alternatives. Care
Net was founded in 1975 as the Christian Action Council with its primary focus
to educate and promote legislative change on abortion. However, in the 1980s, we found the most
immediate path to saving lives was to offer women compassionate support and
practical help, one woman at a time. We
changed our name to Care Net and adopted a new mission to promote and grow a
national network of pregnancy centers. Today,
we serve 1,100 pregnancy centers across North America.
A grass roots, community-led movement, pregnancy
centers have developed and grown very effective over the years. Today, nine out
of ten women who visit a Care Net pregnancy center decide to carry their
pregnancy to term. Truly, if it weren’t for pregnancy centers in our country,
today’s abortion rate would be much higher.
DH: What are some of the services provided by
pregnancy resource centers?
KH: Pregnancy
centers offer a wide range of services depending on community needs. A pregnancy center in an urban inner city
area may have a different focus than one in the suburbs or one adjacent to a
college campus. However, the primary goal
of all pregnancy center services is to empower women to make an informed
pregnancy decision. All services are free, and that’s important. It indicates that the pregnancy center
doesn’t have a financial interest in their client’s pregnancy decision, unlike
abortion providers. Free services also send
a message of grace and forgiveness to a client who feels afraid, alone, and
perhaps ashamed.
Pregnancy center services may include: pregnancy tests,
peer counseling, abortion risk information, adoption and parenting information,
material support, parenting and childbirth classes, fatherhood support
programs, and community referrals to other service providers. At pregnancy
centers that offer medical services, licensed medical professionals may offer
limited ultrasound, prenatal care, and STD/STI testing and treatment. Many pregnancy centers also run abstinence
education programs in local schools, churches, and youth groups. Finally, pregnancy centers offer services to
those in emotional pain because of a past abortion. Tens of thousands of people have found forgiveness
and healing through a pregnancy center post-abortion support program.
All of these services are offered with the ultimate
hope that each client that walks through the doors of a Care Net pregnancy
center experiences the love of Jesus Christ.
DH: How does Care Net serve resource centers?
Thanks
to the pro-life rider in federal law know as the Kemp-Kasten provision, the
United States foreign aid cannot be used to support organizations that promote
forced abortion or forced sterilization policies. Because of these provisions, taxpayer funding of Marie
Stopes International (MSI) has been restricted.
This
incident is an important reminder of the ways Congress and the president can
have a powerful pro-life impact, even while the flawed Roe vs. Wade decision is still in effect.
Electing
pro-life leaders is still important, so don’t let anyone tell you that pro-life
issues don’t matter as long as Roe vs. Wade is the law of the land.
Doug
Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee has a piece
at NRO debunking the commonly used “we want to reduce abortion numbers”
excuse that pro-abortion politicians often resort to, and he sets the record
straight on Barack Obama’s record on abortion.
The
Senate on Friday rejected
a bill (on a cloture vote) which would have carved out a special drug price
kickback for the nation’s largest abortion provider at taxpayer expense.
If Barack Obama had
his way, Gianna Jessen wouldn’t be here today.
Ashley Herzog continues
in her article at Human Events.
The
Washington Post reports. Excerpt:
Scientists reported yesterday that they
have overcome a major obstacle to using a promising alternative to embryonic
stem cells, bolstering prospects for bypassing the political and ethical tempest
that has embroiled hopes for a new generation of medical treatments.
The researchers said they found a safe way
to coax adult cells to regress into an embryonic state, alleviating what had
been the most worrisome uncertainty about developing the cells into potential
cures.
LifeNews also reports.
MarketWatch
reports. Despite what detractors may
claim about abortion not mattering in many political races, this report shows
that electing pro-life state legislators can make a real difference for women
and the unborn. LifeNews also reports.
AdvanceUSA
has learned that the Senate could soon consider an amendment to H.R. 2638, the
Continuing Resolution, which would carve out special benefits for Planned
Parenthood at taxpayer expense. The
measure would allow the nation’s number one abortion provider to get special
prices on pharmaceuticals at taxpayer expense.
Call
both
your senators and urge them to oppose any effort to allow “university
clinics and private birth control clinics” from receiving what is called “nominal
drug pricing.”
UPDATE: The RSC has more details here.
The
House passed a Continuing Resolution (a bill which maintains the current budget
into the next fiscal year) yesterday which preserves important pro-life riders
and also maintains crucial abstinence education funding at current levels. Hopefully the Continuing Resolution will pass
through the Senate without dangerous anti-life or anti-family provisions being
added.
LifeNews reports. Excerpt:
Wisconsin scientist James Thomson is
considered the father of embryonic stem cell research for isolating the first
embryonic stem cell in 1998. Now comes the news that Thomson's two research
companies are merging and planning to focus their energies on stem cells that
don't involve the destruction of human life.
MarketWatch
reports on this well-deserved
award for some of the most important soldiers on the front lines of the
pro-life movement.
 Dr. Michael New explains at NRO his
recent research indicating that state
laws requiring parental consent or notice (with exceptions for abusive
relationships) before a minor teen can obtain an abortion are effective in
reducing abortion numbers. He makes
the case that more states should adopt such laws and he encourages the federal government
to adopt laws such as the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act (CIANA)
which would strengthen the enforcement of these laws by forbidding taking
underage girls across state lines to get around these effective laws.
Many
times men who have sexually abused young girls will take them across state
lines to avoid parental notifications laws and cover up their crimes through an
abortion. These laws would help combat
this practice.
Incidentally,
many of these abuse cover-ups have occurred in the clinics of the nation’s
largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood.
LifeNews
and MarketWatch
also report on Dr. New’s findings. To
read the full report visit frc.org.
Daniel
Herbster reporting
 Have
you ever wondered how the pro-life cause specifically affects African
Americans? Have you ever wondered if
someone was speaking out on the impact of abortion on blacks? Organizations like the National Black Pro-Life Union
are talking those issues head on. I had
the privilege to interview Day Gardner about her work with this organization.
DH: It’s good to get in touch with you again. How are things in DC?
DG: Thank you! Things are busy, very busy! There’s a lot
happening here.
DH: Why did you start the National Black Pro-Life
Union? What is its mission and what are
some of the accomplishments you’d like to share with our readers?
DG: Like
they say, where there is a need...I realized that most blacks don't know the
statistics--the truth about abortion in our community. Many of us still don't know what an abortion
really is or what it looks like. We also
realize that once African Americans are given the facts and see the racism of
abortion and Planned Parenthood, they will stand with us to stop the killing.
The National Black Pro-Life Union is an organization
founded to serve as a clearing house to coordinate the flow of communications
among all African American pro-life organizations and individuals in order to
better network and combine resources.
We realize that if we are to be successful, it is
necessary to share information and/or resources as well as “who gets the credit.” We acknowledge that the real credit for any
good thing always goes to GOD–not man.
DH: What is the greatest killer of African
Americans?
DG: ABORTION
is the NUMBER ONE KILLER of African American people, killing more blacks than
accidents, HIV-AIDS, crime, heart disease, stroke and all other deaths
COMBINED!
DH: Many today are unfamiliar with the racist,
eugenicist roots of Planned Parenthood.
Do you consider the nation’s largest abortion provider to be a promoter
of or predator to the black community?
The
AP reports. Excerpt:
Democratic presidential nominee Barack
Obama acknowledged Sunday that he was probably too flip when he said it was
"above my pay grade" to answer a question about when is a baby
entitled to human rights.
Daniel
Herbster reporting
An
Indiana county is considering an ordinance which would, as the Journal
Gazette reports, “require all surgeons and doctors that provide outpatient
invasive procedures to have ties to a local hospital and have on-call,
after-hours staff to handle emergencies.”
Proponents of the measure say the ordinance would protect patient health,
especially women’s health. I interviewed
Cathie Humbarger of Allen County Right to
Life about the ordinance, particularly concerning its pro-life
implications.
DH: Cathie, thanks for taking to time to inform
our readers about the proposed ordinance in Allen County, Indiana. First of all, what does your work at Allen
County Right to Life involve and what kinds of things does ACRL work on?
CH: It’s
my pleasure, Dan. Thanks for inviting me.
Just to review: On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court
legalized abortion in the United
States from conception through the ninth
month of pregnancy. Since that date, over 45 million abortions have been
performed at the rate of approximately one every 20 seconds. Right here in Fort Wayne approximately
fifteen abortions are completed each Thursday at the local abortion clinic.
In response to this situation, the Allen County Right
to Life Committee, Inc. was incorporated in March of 1976 and Three Rivers
Right to Life Educational Trust Fund, Inc. was founded in December of 1982 to
promote respect for innocent life from the moment of fertilization to natural
death. We agree with the self-evident truth that every human person is endowed
by their Creator with an unalienable right to life that must be defended. This
principle leads us to promote a culture of life in our community, which we
accomplish through education in the social, religious, legal, medical,
scientific and legislative fields. We also believe that abortion, infanticide,
and euthanasia are negative, violent and primitive responses to complex social
problems that demand genuine compassion and rational, responsible thinking.
Further, we denounce fetal stem-cell research and human cloning because they
involve the willful destruction of human life. We reject the notion that
society may destroy innocent life to solve any problem. Our approach has always
been non-violent and legal. One of our goals is to look for every opportunity
to influence the legislative and political process with policies that support
and protect pre-born babies and their mothers where otherwise they would have
no voice.
DH: What would this ordinance do?
The
Scientific American reports what many of us already know, that embryonic
stem cells are often rejected by donor’s bodies, unlike adult and umbilical
cord stem cells. Excerpt:
The much-ballyhooed human embryonic stem
cell apparently may share a problem with transplanted organs: a high
probability of rejection.
Researchers at Stanford University School
of Medicine found that mice mounted an immune response after being injected
with human embryonic stem cells (hESCs). The result: all the transplanted stem
cells—which hold the promise of maturing into several different types of
tissue—were dead within a week.
National
Right to Life responds to allegations by presidential candidate Barack
Obama that NRL is lying about his opposition to “Born Alive Infant Protection”
legislation while a state senator in Illinois.
Saturday
night’s presidential forum at Rick Warren’s church provided a clear distinction
between the major candidates on various issues, especially on social
conservative issues such as abortion, judges, and the rights of faith-based
organizations. To read a transcript of
the event click here. To view the entire broadcast via online video
click
here.
Daniel
Herbster reporting
The
Freedom of Choice Act may sound like an innovative education bill but it’s
anything but. This legislation if passed
would not only enshrine the infamous Roe vs. Wade opinion into federal law, but
it would also destroy every sensible limitation on abortion which federal,
state, and local governments have ever instituted. Many pro-choice politicians, including one of
the major presidential candidates, support this bill. My friend and colleague Tom McClusky, who is
Vice President at the Family Research Council,
recently prepared
a paper detailing just what the Freedom of Choice Act would mean for our
nation and the pro-life cause. I
recently had the chance to interview Tom about the Freedom of Choice Act and
his work at FRC.
DH: What is the Freedom of Choice Act?
TM: Some
of the supporters of the "Freedom of Choice Act" state that it merely
codifies Roe v. Wade. This
could not be further from the truth. As
the American Civil Liberties Union said in its Reproductive Rights Update from
December 20, 1991, "This [FOCA] bill prohibits such restrictions as
parental notification and consent, as well as the requirement that all
abortions be performed in a hospital, spousal consent, waiting periods ..."
DH: What kinds of effects would it have on
abortion restrictions in our nation?
TM: If
FOCA were to pass both chambers of Congress and be signed by a pro-abortion
President, it would single-handedly overturn countless laws that have passed in
the states in relation to abortion.
DH: If you had to come up with a different name
for this bill (one that more accurately describes its effects and intention),
what would it be?
TM: Federal
Usurpation of Rights and Abortion on Demand Act (FURADA?)
DH: What are some of the most surprising or
important things you learned about the proposed Freedom of Choice Act as you
prepared your research paper?
This
amazing piece in the Times of London highlights the
real-world, life-saving results from non-embryonic sources of stem cells. Excerpt:
Peter Houghton, a lorry driver from
Preston, is understandably excited about the establishment of Kingscord, a new
UK centre for storing discarded umbilical cords and placenta, which are packed
with precious stem cells. Why? Because his baby son's life was saved by the
umbilical cord of a baby in Australia, whose parents opted to donate it to a
cord blood bank after the birth of their child, in the hope that it would one
day provide someone with a life-saving stem-cell transplant, more commonly
known as a bone-marrow transplant.
Read
full
article here.
Time
reports. Excerpt:
After nearly a decade of setbacks and false
starts, stem-cell science finally seems to be hitting its stride. Just a year
after Japanese scientists first reported that they had generated stem cells by
reprogramming adult skin cells — without using embryos — American researchers
have managed to use that groundbreaking technique to achieve another scientific
milestone. They created the first nerve cells from reprogrammed stem cells — an
important demonstration of the potential power of stem-cell-based treatments to
cure disease.
As NPR
reports, these ethically obtained stem cells are not yet ready for
treatment, but the research provides hope that the neural cell destroyed by ALS
might one day be regenerated through induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC).
The
Telegraph also reports.
LifeSite reports
on how this dangerous UN treaty pushes abortion on unwilling nations. Some pro-abortionists want the United States
to be bound by this treaty.
Chuck
Colson explains the advantages of ethically obtained adult stem cells over
their unethical embryonic counterparts in a recent episode of
BreakPoint. He also explains how the
cult of scientism allows people to view human life as an object for use and
rather as something sacred to be protected.
Colson’s words are succinct and informative and are well worth the three
minutes it takes to listen. Read or listen to
this episode here.
CitizenLink reports. Excerpt:
Umbilical-cord blood has been used to treat
2-year-old Chloe Levine, who was born with cerebral palsy, a neurological
disorder that prevented her from using the right side of her body.
Two months after the Pinetop, Ariz.,
toddler was infused with stem cells from her own umbilical-cord blood, Levine
has made a 50 percent recovery and is walking, running and able to use her
right hand.
The
Freedom of Choice Act would overturn every pro-life law on the books and would
basically enshrine the Roe vs. Wade decision into federal law. Our friend Tom McClusky at the Family
Research Council has prepared
a paper on the Freedom of Choice Act which explains the effects it would
have and reveals how the major presidential candidates stand on its passage.
Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer is putting millions of dollars into adult stem cell research in the hopes of finding effective treatments for eye diseases. It’s interesting that people who actually want to make money off of cures and treatments are betting their investing their money in ethical adult stem cell sources rather than unethical embryonic sources.
Meanwhile, two doctors in Louisiana “have successfully used adult stem-cell therapy to help patients fight heart disease.” Citizenlink reports. Also, Harvard Medical School researchers have found that human adult and umbilical cord stem cells have been used to successfully create blood vessels in mice. This raises hopes that adult stem cells will be useful in repairing damaged circulatory tissue.
Check out the adult stem cell page or the adult stem cell blog category for more news on ethical breakthroughs and treatments.
 The Wash for Life is coming up on September 13. This program recruits young people to wash cars in order to raise funds for pregnancy resource centers. This campaign is a brilliant way to encourage the next generation of pro-lifers and to raise much needed funds for the great work being done by pregnancy centers.
Find out how you can be a part of this worthy cause at http://www.washforlife.com/.
A
Senate committee and House subcommittee are threatening the Mexico City Policy (which
prevents tax dollars from supporting organizations that promote or provide
abortions) and the Kemp-Kasten rider (which allows the president to prohibit
funds from organizations that support coerced abortions). Hopefully, the House and Senate will
eliminate the language which threatens these important pro-life riders. Otherwise, the president has promised to “veto
any legislation that weakens current Federal policies and laws on abortion, or
that encourages the destruction of human life at any stage.”
The
Pew Forum has released a helpful
resource on the stem cell debate.
According to Pew, the percentage of Americans who support unethical
embryonic stem cell research is shrinking.
If more people knew the facts about stem cells, this percentage would
likely shrink even more.
The
New York Times reports. Excerpt:
The Bush administration wants to require
all recipients of aid under federal health programs to certify that they will
not refuse to hire nurses and other providers who object to abortion and …
certain types of birth control.
Our
friend Dr. David Prentice and a team of experts, have authored a report on the amazing
adult stem cell success stories that have happened during 2008. Unethical embryonic research has yet to
produce one successful cure or treatment.
Take a look at these amazing results.
William
McGurn explains. Excerpt:
…could not the NAACP work for a society
where pregnant African-Americans had two doors open to them? Planned
Parenthood's not going anywhere, so the first would still lead to America's
largest abortion provider, a business that has already eliminated millions from
America's population. But the other would lead to people whose business is of a
vastly different order: welcoming these children into the world, and getting
their moms the help they need to live lives of purpose and dignity.
Then again, that would give women a real
choice.
Last
week, members of the House of Representatives held a “special order” to call
for the de-funding of the largest abortion provider in the nation. Many Americans have no idea that their tax
dollars subsidize the flag ship of the abortion industry and AdvanceUSA thanks
these House members for taking this bold stand.
LifeNews reports. See the video here.
Visit
HelpShapeHistory.com to read
more about this pro-life rally in our nation’s capital. Excerpt:
On August 16, we are calling every Christian
of every faith tradition, young and old, every race, every pro-life
organization, and every individual to gather in Washington D.C. to pray for our
nation with a massive focus on the ending of abortion and the healing of our
land.
Daniel Herbster reporting
 In the stem cell debate, you will often here proponents of unethical embryonic stem cell research say that we have hundreds of thousands of “leftover embryos” from IVF clinics and that the “only” thing to be done with them is to kill them for use in research. Besides the fact that the numbers of available embryos is greatly exaggerated (when you consider that most parents of frozen embryos want to keep them), the fact that human embryos can be and have been adopted by couples unable to have children on their own shows that death in the lab is not the only option for IVF embryos.
One organization seeking to publicize this exciting adoption option is Nightlight Christian Adoptions. I recently came across their website (http://www.embryoadoption.org/) and I am happy to share with you my interview with Ron Stoddart, the Executive Director of NCA.
Note: The above photo is President Bush, soon after vetoing an unethical embryonic stem cell research funding bill, holding a child who was adopted as an embryo.
DH: Ron, why should we care about what happens to “leftover” IVF embryos?
RS: It is a scientific fact that life begins at conception. The argument is over when life is deserving of protection. There are certainly those who would rather argue that embryos are not life – or are not persons – rather than admit that they just don’t want to afford them the same protection as life that is further developed. They have a fear that if we accord too much respect to embryos then it will be an opening to have Roe v. Wade overturned. I believe that all human life is sacred and deserving of protection. The fact that the embryos have been frozen does not change their nature and they deserve a chance at continued life.
DH: About how many unused embryos are there in this country, and how many of those are even available for research purposes?
RS: The best estimates are that there are about 500,000 embryos currently frozen in fertility clinics around the United States. The decision about the fate of the embryos rests with the family who created them (except in Louisiana where they are protected from destruction). Different surveys have attempted to estimate how many families would donate their embryos for research, so the estimate varies from 15,000 embryos and up. The reality is that the vast majority of families with stored embryos do not know what to do and are struggling with their decision. We are trying to encourage them to have the embryos implanted, if not in the family who created them then in an adoptive family.
DH: Should we respect the rights of human embryos the same way we do for adult human beings? What is the state of the law regarding the treatment of embryos?
RS: A person’s a person regardless how small. There is a lot of wisdom in these words from the WHO. My answer to the question is “yes.” The state of the law, except for Louisiana, is that embryos are treated with slightly more respect than property. Most of the conflicts have arisen when a couple is divorcing. In those cases, the courts have consistently sided with the spouse who wants to destroy the embryos rather then allowing the other spouse to implant them or donating them to another couple. Not much respect there.
DH: What is the mission of Nightlight Christian Adoptions? How long have you been in operation, and how did it get started?
The
AP reports. Excerpt:
A federal appeals court ruled that South
Dakota can begin enforcing a law requiring doctors to tell women seeking
abortions that the procedure ends a human life.
World Net
Daily also reports.
The
Washington Times reports. Excerpt:
“Hoisting signs declaring "abortion is
not a family value," about 60 black demonstrators descended on Democratic
and Republican headquarters on Capitol Hill Thursday morning to demand that
political candidates refuse funding from Planned Parenthood.”
With
all the talk about sinister “big corporations” these days, it’s interesting
that Planned Parenthood often escapes scrutiny.
As The
Wall Street Journal and LifeNews
explain, the biggest abortion provider in the nation is drastically expanding
its business model.
LifeNews reports. Excerpt:
As it has done in past years, Planned
Parenthood abortion businesses in California are willing to shell out some of
their abortion profits to make sure they can leave parents in the dark about
teen abortions. They are, once again, spending heavily to defeat a parental
notification measure.
Planned
Parenthood is the biggest profiteer from the abortion industry and is understandably
hostile to any measure that would cut into profits, even if this involves
helping underage girls get abortions without notifying parents.
Some
experts looking to get a return on their money are betting on ethically
obtained induced pluripotent stem cells rather than unethical embryonic stem
cell research, according to this
piece at LifeNews.
Bobby
Schindler explains. Excerpt:
Recently, yet another situation similar to
that of my sister Terri Schiavo has made headlines. In West Palm Beach, Florida,
Raymond Weber is asking the court to dehydrate his disabled wife, Karen, to
death.
Fox News reports. Amazingly enough, radical pro-abortionists
advocate more availability for RU-486 and refuse to seriously investigate its
potentially lethal side effects, despite chilling stories like this one. The BBC also
reports.
Daniel Herbster reporting
Pregnancy resource centers are on the front lines of the abortion conflict, giving real options for pregnant women contemplating an abortion by showing them love and giving them accurate information about the innocent life within them. Also, in order for the pro-life movement to be victorious, the younger generations (and “generations yet unborn” as Edmund Burke would have said) must be trained and recruited to carry the battle standard into the future. With these facts in mind, pro-lifers would do well to participate in the third annual Wash for Life.
It is my pleasure to interview Jonathan Tonkowich who is the Director and creator of the Wash for Life. The Wash for Life seeks to recruit and educate the younger generation by enlisting them to wash cars and donate the funds raised to local pregnancy resource centers. Find out more about the Wash for Life at washforlife.com and by reading my interview with Jonathan below.
DH: Jonathan, thanks for doing this interview. We appreciate your time. First, what is the Wash for Life and what is its purpose?
JT: The Wash for Life is hundreds of groups all over the country (and now the world thanks to individuals in Canada and Kenya) who unite on the same Saturday in early September and hold car washes to raise money for their local pregnancy resource center. All the money is donated by the individual groups to their local centers and we collect the stories and total numbers.
We have three main goals for the Wash for Life.
1 – To support the work of pregnancy resource centers. These centers are such an important part of the pro-life movement. They are at the front lines helping real people in difficult situations with their love and compassion.
2 – To recruit a new generation of pro-life leaders and advocates. The Wash for Life is a great way for young people to get involved in bringing about the end of abortion. We have so many stories from the first two washes of young people becoming passionate and excited about working for the cause.
3 – To let the world know that our generation is pro-life. Our generation has been damaged and diminished by abortion. We have seen the destruction it has caused and we need to have voice in speaking out against it.
DH: Who came up with the idea for the Wash for Life and how did it get started?
JT: I actually had the idea while sitting in math class my senior year of college at Thomas AquinasCollege in Santa Paula, CA. The idea stuck with me and I could not stop thinking about it. I knew God must be telling me something. I prayed about it and then started talking with some of my friends. That summer (2006) we all moved to Virginia and worked out of my parent’s basement making phone calls and sending emails trying to get as many groups all over the country to participate.
DH: What is the date for this year’s Wash for Life?
JT: This year the date will be September 13th.
DH: How could our readers start their own Wash for Life in their own neighborhoods?
JT: It’s quite simple and easy. You just hold a car wash at your church, your school, your local gas station, or even your driveway on September 13th. Then donate the money you raise to your local pregnancy care center (if you need help locating one we are more than happy to help you).
Please sign up on our website and we will post your carwash location on our website, so those in the area who want to support can visit your carwash. After your carwash email us your results, your pictures, and your stories, so we can share them. You are joining thousands of others all across the country to be part of a huge nationwide car wash.
DH: Why did you decide to benefit pregnancy resource centers? Why do you think the work they do is so important?
According to new scientific research
it appears that Parkinson’s disease, one of the maladies often cited by
proponents of unethical embryonic stem cell research as sure to be cured if
only we spend tax dollars to destroy innocent human embryos, might soon be
treated with adult nasal stem cells instead.
Physorg.com
reports. Excerpt:
Research released today provides evidence
that a cure for Parkinson's disease could lie just inside the nose of patients
themselves.
The Griffith University study published
today in the journal Stem Cells found that adult stem cells harvested from the
noses of Parkinson's patients gave rise to dopamine-producing brain cells when
transplanted into the brain of a rat.
News-Medical.net also reports.
And
according to CitizenLink, a man’s back pain was successfully treated in the nation’s first
spinal disc surgery using adult stem cells.
Excerpt:
"Stem cells have shown great promise
over the past three years for treating back pain," Dr. Jeffrey Kleiner said.
"In combination with the dis[c]ectomy, we hope to offer patients long-term
relief from their back pain and to decrease their risk of needing additional
surgeries."
Adult stem cells have been injected into
patients' backs and joints to promote tissue growth, but this is the first time
stem cells have been injected during a spinal surgery, doctors said.
The bone-marrow cells used in the procedure
were harvested from the middle-aged man then brought to the laboratory, where
millions more were grown over three weeks using the patient's blood. Tens of
millions of the cells were then injected into the man's back during a
discectomy, a surgery to remove a herniated or bulging disk.
For
more exciting news on real results from ethical adult stem cell research check
out the AdvanceUSA adult
stem cell page.
CitizenLink reports. Excerpt:
Researchers and doctors have used adult
stem cells to successfully treat 2-year-old Nate Liao, who had a rare, fatal
skin disease called recessive dystrophic epidermolysis.
In October, Nate received a cord-blood and
bone-marrow stem-cell transplant from his brother, Julian. Their mom said
Nate's skin is already stronger. Nate, who was never able to eat normal food,
is now eating pork chops and chips.
Although
clearly biased toward a pro-choice perspective-using terms such as “abortion
rights”-this AP report paints a stark contrast between the two
remaining major presidential candidates on abortion. Excerpt:
ABORTION
McCain: Opposes abortion rights. Has voted
for abortion restrictions permissible under Roe v. Wade, and now says he would
seek to overturn that guarantee of abortion rights. Would not seek
constitutional amendment to ban abortion.
Obama: Favors abortion rights.
 
LifeNews reports. Excerpt:
Just one day after South Carolina residents
received good news that Choose Life license plates are on the way, Gov. Mark
Sanford on Thursday signed a pro-life bill into law. The legislation allows
women a chance to see an ultrasound of their unborn child before the abortion.
When used in pregnancy centers, such
ultrasounds persuade as many as 70-80 percent of women to keep their baby
rather than follow through with an abortion.
Denis
Boyles unravels the twisted tale of allegations of illegal abortions,
investigations, obstruction, cover-up, and other peculiar political
circumstances. This article is well
worth the read for any pro-lifer and perhaps could hopefully open many eyes to
the corruption
and deviousness of Planned Parenthood.
Excerpt:
Caleb Stegall, Kline’s lead attorney, saw
the case in simple terms. “Laws restricting and governing abortion are
worthless if they cannot be enforced,” he said, “and up until today, they have
not been enforced. Planned Parenthood wants to keep it that way. So the message
being sent by this case as a whole is if you try to enforce these laws, if you
even try to talk about enforcing these laws, we will bury you. This overriding
message has seeped into our body politic and threatens to corrupt some of our
most basic and cherished principles such as freedom of speech and political
debate, the rule of law, and the principle of equality before the law.”
This
post
by newsUSA is a helpful reminder of the difference between ethical adult
stem cell research (which are already producing amazing results) and unethical
embryonic stem cell research.
Daniel
Herbster reporting
I had the
opportunity to interview Mark Tooley about his work with UMAction
at the Institute on Religion and Democracy. The following is my interview
with Mark.
DH: What is UMAction
and how would you sum up its mission? Do you see it as more of a
theological or political movement or both?
MT: UMAction
is the Methodist program of the IRD. Its goal is to foster accountability
and reform within United Methodism. We’re not political in the sense that
we endorse candidates or specific legislation in civil society. We are
political in that we are concerned about the church’s public policy witness. We
are theological in that we vigorously affirm the official, orthodox teachings
of our church. DH: I understand
that you were very active in the recent United
Methodist Church’s
global conference in Forth Worth, Texas.
Are you encouraged by what took place there?
MT: Yes,
I’m encouraged by the growing numbers and influence of the non-U.S. church,
especially in Africa. They are the hope of the church’s future.
But the church still faces many battles ahead.
DH: What kinds of
decisions were reached on pro-life issues?
MT: There
were some small, incremental steps supporting parental consent and affirming
the sacredness of unborn human life. We narrowly failed to remove church
agencies from the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. Had the
vote been NOT on the last day, when many of the Africans had left, we probably
would have won.
DH: What progress
was made in affirming the traditional definition of marriage and Biblical
teaching on sexual morality?
Zenit
reports on a new book citing evidence from experts which demonstrates that unborn children can feel
pain. Excerpt from article:
The contributions from the large number of
experts who contribute to the book agree in affirming that a fetus can feel
pain before birth, the two editors explain in their introductory essay.
"Recognizing human dignity and human suffering from life in the womb is a
clinical duty in the service of better treatment," they declare.
Evidence
like this shows the need for the Unborn
Children Pain Awareness Act now in Congress (check home page and scroll
down for more information on this important pro-life bill).
LifeNews
provides helpful commentary in
reading through euthanasia spin.
Excerpt:
Even the most despicable ideas can be made
palatable when euphemisms are used to spin them. That's why abortion advocates
call themselves "pro-choice" rather than "pro abortion."
It's also why they talk about "terminating a pregnancy" rather than
"killing a baby."
Controlling the language not only controls
the argument, it often determines the outcome of the argument.
Proponents of euthanasia understand the
power of language in shaping debate. Therefore, instead of using the term
"physician-assisted suicide" to describe the practice they advocate,
they use euphemisms like "death with dignity" and "end of life
choices" to sugar coat the reality of the killings they have in view.
Daniel Herbster reporting
 Dr. David Prentice is one of the foremost experts on bioethics in the country. He has valuable science experience from his days as researcher and teacher, and he now works for groups like the Family Research Council and Do No Harm speaking out on some of the most important (though sometimes confusing) ethical issues facing our society today. I’ve had the opportunity to meet Dr. Prentice a number of times and have heard him speak often so it is a distinct pleasure to interview him today and share with you his scientific expertise.
DH: First off, tell our readers a little about yourself. What did you do before you came to FRC? What are your responsibilities at FRC and Do No Harm?
DP: Before FRC, I spent almost 20 years as Professor of Life Sciences at Indiana State University, at the same time as Adjunct Professor of Medical & Molecular Genetics for Indiana University School of Medicine.
During those years I taught and did lab research, and also spent a few years in administration.
My job description now is somewhat similar: I lecture, give briefings, and testify about science, especially the scientific facts regarding stem cells, cloning, and other biotechnologies.
DH: You often hear people say that we should “leave science to the scientists,” that we who have ethical concerns with particular research techniques have no right to an opinion if we are not scientists ourselves. Is this true? Do we as a society have a stake in deciding what research should or should not be allowed? Why is this notion so dangerous?
 DP: Some scientists might like that, but the fact is that society sets the agenda, both in terms of what's allowed as well as what resources are provided to science. Everyone has a stake in this discussion, because everyone is affected. Leaving these decisions just to one group means we abdicate our responsibility to help form a strong society.
DH: Dr. Prentice, what are stem cells?
DP: A stem cell has 2 main characteristics: (1) It continues to grow and divide, making copies of itself, and (2) given the correct signal, a stem cell can form many different specialized cells of the body.
DH: What are the two general types of stem cells, and are there any ethical differences between them?
 Unfortunately our pro-life compatriots in Great Britain were unsuccessful in passing a ban on the creation of human-animal hybrid embryos for unethical stem cell research in Parliament (for more details check this BBC report). However, it looks as though a move to lower the abortion limit from 24 weeks to 22 or 20 weeks might prove successful. It in encouraging to know that pro-lifers are fighting the good fight elsewhere in the world, but the fact that Britain will likely allow the creation of hybrid cloning is a sobering warning that such research could be coming to American shores in the near future (unless legislation like H.R. 5910 and S. 2358 is passed).
The fact that Great Britain even has a gestation limit on abortion illustrates the surprising fact that the United States is among the nations with the most unrestrictive abortion laws in the world. Many Americans are unaware that the Supreme Court decisions of Roe vs. Wade and Doe vs. Bolton basically mandate that abortion for whatever reason is permissible at almost any stage of prenatal development.
See also: pro-life page, stem cell page
Photo source: roots-travel.co.uk
LifeNews reports. Excerpts:
Wesley Smith, an attorney and bioethics
watchdog, responded to the news.
"Geron Corporation has released a
series of press releases over several years stating that 'next year' it would
start the first human trials using ES cells. Apparently, that won't be
happening yet," he said.
"Tumors are an important worry, as is
efficacy. Meanwhile, those adult stem cell advances keep rolling in," he
added.
…
[Senator] Brownback said human trials
involving embryonic stem cell research are unnecessary given the enormous
success scientists have had with adult stem cells.
“What makes this even more troubling is
that there is a viable ethical alternative with adult stem cells," he
said.
"They are currently being used in the
treatment of well over 70 different diseases and conditions, including spinal
cord injury, type-I diabetes, heart failure, and Parkinson’s disease as
validated by peer-reviewed, published results."
So
said the late Julian Simon (referring to population concerns and not to using
human life as a mere commodity). Steven
Mosher has written a new book which explodes the “overpopulation” myth which
has been used as justification for forced abortion, eugenics, and other
horrors. LifeNews reports. Excerpt:
The numbers show that the world is not, has
never been, nor ever shall be, overpopulated. In fact, according to the world's
experts -- even the ones advocating population control -- birthrates around the
world are dropping at a precipitous rate.
The book thus torpedoes the lifeboat
scenario, which argued that in order to survive, we had to throw some of the
earth's passengers overboard.
But it is much more than this. The history
of the population control movement is replete with human rights abuses. Those
who were made to walk the plank of abortion, sterilization, and contraception
-- all for the supposed good of humanity -- have some horrific tales to tell.
The
Alliance Defense Fund reports. Excerpt:
A Missouri judge ruled Friday that a state
law that enforces health and safety standards for surgical abortion clinics
also regulates clinics that dispense the abortion-inducing drug RU-486.
KMOX
also reports.
 Proponents of unethical embryonic stem cell research often argue that unused embryos that were created through in vitro fertilization should be destroyed for research purposes because they will only be discarded anyway. The fact that embryos are being adopted (many known as “snowflake” children) by parents unable to have children of their own shows that this argument is incorrect.
CitizenLink recently interviewed the first snowflake family. Click here to read this informative and heart-warming interview.
Our friends in Congress tell us that the House Subcommittee on Health will hold hearings tomorrow on stem cell research. We are pleased that several proponents of ethical adult stem cell research (including a man who was successfully treated with his own adult stem cells after a heart attack) will testify, but we are concerned that the hearings will be used to promote unethical embryonic stem cell research, particularly its support with tax-payer dollars.
CitizenLink also reports.
AdvanceUSA
was privileged to sign onto a letter, along with other conservative organizations, encouraging
President Bush to tighten regulations regarding tax-dollars and Planned
Parenthood. The
Hill reports. Excerpt:
“We respectfully ask that you make the
necessary changes to the Title X regulations so that U.S. taxpayer funds are
not used to promote and facilitate abortion,” the groups wrote in the letter.
Title X provides nearly $300 million in
federal funds to family planning groups such as Planned Parenthood.
Former President Ronald Reagan first issued
regulations more than 20 years ago that prohibited family planning
organizations from providing advice to help women obtain abortions. The
Reagan-era regulations were upheld by the Supreme Court, but were then
rescinded soon after former President Bill Clinton took office in 1993.
 Not only has the United Methodist Church recently made progress in recognizing the need to protect the sanctity of traditional marriage and upholding Biblical teaching on sexual morality, but it seems this influential, global organization is moving closer to a position of defending the sanctity of unborn and elderly human life. At the recent global conference (which occurs every four years) the sanctity of human life was upheld by resolutions in the following ways (source: The Institute on Religion and Democracy):
- "Affirm and encourage the Church to assist the ministry of crisis pregnancy centers and pregnancy resource centers that compassionately help women find feasible alternatives to abortion."
- "Respect the sacredness of the life and well-being of the mother and the unborn child."
- Support for adult "notification and consent" when a minor is seeking an abortion.
- "Reject euthanasia and pressure upon the dying to end their lives."
- Delete language from a previous United Methodist statement that had been used to support abortion as a means of back-up birth control.
- Decrying the international problem of gender- selective abortions, while describing abortion as "violent" and opposing "trivial reasons" for abortion.
LifeNews also reports. Excerpt:
Mark Tooley, the director of the UMAction Committee of the Institute on Religion and Democracy told LifeNews.com he's pleased with the small steps to move in a pro-life direction.
"These incremental steps continue a trend from the last several General Conferences towards an increased acknowledgement of the sanctity of all human life," he said.
"The United Methodist Church is slowly moving towards the historic Christian concern for the most vulnerable," he added. "These latest moves continue this positive trend."
 The Cures Without Cloning coalition will continue its campaign to amend the Missouri constitution to fully ban human cloning but must wait until 2010. Unfortunately, because of delays in the court process there will not be enough time for the coalition to gather enough signatures to put a true cloning ban on the Missouri ballot in 2008. Anti-cloning forces are encouraged by aspects of a recent appellate court ruling but plan to appeal the final verdict to the Missouri Supreme Court.
Regardless, Cures Without Cloning and other pro-life organizations in Missouri will prepare for the efforts to get the cloning ban on the 2010 Missouri ballot. Click here for read CWC’s press release on the recent court ruling and on plans for the future.
CitizenLink reports. Excerpt:
Johnson County District Attorney Phill
Kline has charged Planned Parenthood's Kansas City clinic, Comprehensive
Health, with 107 criminal charges in district court, including 23 felonies.
Planned Parenthood wanted the court to
order Kline to return medical records from 30 patients' files. But the court
ruled today that Kline has proper legal clearance to be in possession of the
abortion records.
"It's about time the courts allowed
Phill Kline to do his job and conduct this investigation involving serious
allegations against Planned Parenthood," said Dawn Vargo…
LifeNews reports. Excerpt:
Stem cell researchers continue to make
progress with induced pluripotent stem cells or iPS cells, which are
embryonic-like stem cells that don't require the destruction of human life to
obtain. After their discovery last year, pro-life groups hailed the cells as an
ethical alternative to embryonic stem cell research.
The UCLA researchers that have advanced the
use of the iPS cells before were able progress further and grow functioning
heart and blood cells.
They said the success is the first time iPS
cells have been differentiated into the three types of cardiovascular cells
needed to repair heart and blood vessels.
LifeNews reports. Let’s hope this speaker can convince this
influential organization to respect the sanctity of unborn human life.
Mary E. Traeger explains
in the Metro Voice. Excerpt:
It is evident the cloners have won the day.
They have again used the court system to stop efforts to ban human cloning in
Missouri. Even though the judges would uphold Judge Joyce's new ballot language
there is not enough time now to gather the needed 150,000 petition signatures
by the 5 p.m., May 4, 2008, deadline. Again the will of the people of Missouri,
the majority of whom do not support human embryonic cloning, is mocked by
ambitious politicians and judicial charades.
At the same time this charade of justice
was playing out in Missouri, a renowned international scientist admitted to the
public that human embryonic stem cell research hasn't been successful. Of
course, this is not news to pro-life proponents, but it is quite an
acknowledgment for a well-accepted embryonic cloning researcher to admit. On
April 8, 2008, the chairman of the UK National Stem Cell Network, Lord Patel of
Dunkeld admitted in a "Scotsman" newspaper interview that this
controversial science may never deliver new treatments for diseases. He
explained, "In terms of embryonic stem cell therapy, there is currently no
such therapy that is available in a large number of patients. We have to be
cautious. It may not deliver therapy for anything. We may find that stem
therapy is quite a risky business." (LifeNews.Com, April 8, 2008) …
Bioethics conservative watchdog Wesley J.
Smith sums it up well in his statement, "By hyping the potential, the
politicized science sector misled people to win a political debate, and in the
process reduced science to just another special interest spinning and
obfuscating to get a greater share of gruel in the public trough."
It is regrettable that the State of
Missouri is also tied up to that public embryonic stem cell trough along with
the State of California which is facing a $16 billion dollar deficit.
The
fight against human cloning in Missouri will continue and you can find out more
about it at MOCuresWithoutCloning.com.
AdvanceUSA has learned that the third annual “Wash for Life” will be held on September 13, 2008. The Wash for Life recruits young people across the country to hold car washes to raise funds for and awareness of pregnancy resource centers in their communities. Pregnancy resource centers do great work providing real choices for pregnant women, and are worthy causes for support. Mark your calendars for September 13 so you can get your car washed “for life” or organize your own “Wash for Life.”
Check out washforlife.com to see photos and results from last year’s Wash for Life and keep checking back with AdvanceUSA for more updates on this year’s event.
As
the Weekly Standard reports, with an influx of membership in Africa combined
with a growing conservative evangelical movement in the United States, the United
Methodist Church could begin to take more conservative positions on issues
such as homosexuality, abortion, family, and Christian doctrine at its quadrennial
global conference now meeting in Texas.
Already, a well-publicized anti-Israel resolution has been defeated, and
observers are expecting to see more surprising results in the future.
The
United Methodist Church is a global and highly influential organization (with a
large facility right next to the U.S. Supreme Court), and it is encouraging to
think that they might soon adopt a more Biblical understanding of sexual morality,
the family, and the right to life.
Concerned citizens would do well to pray that this influential
organization would cease to undermine traditional morality and the right to
life with its resources and policies.
The
Institute on Religion and Democracy has been watching and reporting on the
developing conservative movement within Methodism, and their
website is a helpful resource for monitoring these developments.
Think creating half human, half animal creatures is only the stuff of science fiction? Think again. Some researchers want to create human-animal embryos so they can destroy them for stem cell research.
Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ), who is the chairman of the Congressional Pro-Life Caucus, has recently introduced legislation which would prohibit the creation of human-animal hybrid embryos. Read the text of this bill here. Similar legislation was proposed last year in the U.S. Senate by Senators Sam Brownback (R-KS) and Mary Landrieu (D-LA). Let your representative and both your senators know that you support H.R. 5910 and S. 2358.
CitizenLink
reports on an upcoming
conference which will discuss the embryo adoption. Embryo adoption belies the notion that unused
embryos produced by IVF (In Vitro Fertalization) must only be discarded or else
used for research. These embryos can and
have been adopted by couples wanting children, and hopefully this conference
will raise awareness of this important alternative. No human life should be considered “leftover.”
President Bush holds
a “snowflake” child (a child who was adopted as an embryo) at a While House
press conference
Despite
a veto from Oklahoma’s governor, the OK state legislature overruled the veto
and passed a bill
strengthening a woman’s right to view an ultrasound of her unborn child
before making an abortion decision. It’s
time for so-called proponents of “choice” to actually allow some informed
decision making in the abortion process.
Let’s hope other states adopt ultrasound bills which dramatically
illustrate the humanity of the unborn and provide crucial information to women.
Unfortunately,
it appears that appeals by pro-cloning forces in Missouri may not allow
signature gatherers enough time to get the proposed
cloning ban on Missouri’s 2008 ballot.
It is still possible the feat could be accomplished with determined
grassroots effort, but the fight to fully and completely ban human cloning in
Missouri will continue regardless.
LifeNews reports.
Basically,
even if iPSC did allow for easier cloning or easier creation of hybrid embryos,
it does not change the fact that iPSC is an excellent and ethical source of
pluripotent stem cells. As in many
instances, just because a scientific procedure (i.e. induced pluripotent stem
cell research) can be abused (i.e. human cloning, human-animal hybrid embryos,
etc.) does not mean that procedure is inherently unethical.
AdvanceUSA
contacted Dr. David Prentice and he concurs that recent “concerns” over iPSC
are probably attempts to create hype which undermines the significance of
ethically derived induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) which make human cloning and embryonic stem cell research unecessary.
The
Metro (UK) reports. Excerpt:
Paralysed [sic.] people could gain the use
of their limbs again after scientists found a 'messaging system' that could be
used to control adult stem cells.
Researchers found the cells respond to
chemical signals which instruct them to help repair tissue.
The work, funded by the Medical Research
Council, could eventually lead to the development of techniques to tell adult
stem cells to mend the body.
Scenta
(UK) also reports. Excerpt:
Avoiding many of the ethical issues
associated with embryonic stem cells, ASCs could have many therapeutic uses and
could potentially be controlled by the chemical signalling [sic.] systems
within the body that instruct cells to contribute to tissue repair.
CNN
Money reports.
Our
friend Dr. David Prentice was quoted in the piece. Excerpt:
Dave
Prentice, senior fellow for life sciences at the Christian organization Family
Research Council, opposes the use of human embryos in research. "You
shouldn't be destroying human embryos at the earlier stage of human life to
harvest cells," said Prentice, who has a PhD. in biochemistry from the University
of Kansas.
Other stem cell options are available, he said, such as harvesting them from
umbilical cord blood or adult tissue, or "reprogramming"
adult cells to behave like stem cells, as demonstrated in recently-released
but early-stage studies.
LifeNews reports. Let’s hope other states follow suit with this
important legislation which seeks to give women complete information of what
abortion involves.
There is more encouraging news in the potential power of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) which are obtained ethically by inducing ordinary skin cells into an embryonic-like state without actually creating or destroying embryos. News of treating Parkinson’s with iPSC is especially important in light of the recent misleading media reports that cloning (SCNT) had been used to treat mice with Parkinson’s. Unlike SCNT, which would be completely unethical in humans, induced pluripotent stem cells offer an exciting and ethical alternative source of pluripotent (can become any type of tissue) stem cells for research and potential treatments.
For more information on stem cells check the stem cell page.
Jeff
Jacoby provides some insightful commentary on the disturbing
trend toward sex-selection abortion around the world and here in the United
States. This is yet another reminder of
the prevalence of the culture of death in our world. Excerpt from Boston Globe article:
THE UNFETTERED "right to choose"
is a progressive value, we are instructed by the abortion lobby - one
indispensable to the empowerment of women. But a new study in PNAS (the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) prompts an awkward question:
How exactly are American women empowered when abortion is deployed to prevent
the existence of American girls?
…
But nothing can excuse such abortions in
the United States - nothing except the theology of "choice," which
elevates the right to an abortion above all other considerations. You don't
have to be a feminist to know that being a girl is not a birth defect, or to be
horrified by a practice that lethally reinforces the most benighted forms of
sexual discrimination. For what kind of feminist would it be who could
contemplate the use of abortion to eliminate ever-greater numbers of girls, and
not cry out in horror?
Operation
Rescue has created a
helpful timeline of events to help people understand the outrageous
abortion scandals involving late-term abortionist George Tiller and Planned
Parenthood of Kansas. This is an
important case for the pro-life movement and we are grateful for this helpful
resource.
The
House of Representatives has approved
a version of PEPFAR anti-AIDS funding that is much improved from the original
version which would have mandated abortion funding, drastically cut back
abstinence and faithfulness education, and weakened anti-prostitution
provisions. Though significant
improvements have been made to the bill, not all conservatives support the
measure because of fiscal concerns over massive spending increases and concerns
that there is insufficient accountability over how funds are spent. The bill will now go to the U.S. Senate.
LifeNews reports. Excerpt:
A leading pro-life member of Congress plans
an amendment to a bill on health care for Native Americans that's similar to
the language of an amendment the Senate approved last month. Rep. Joe Pitts
wants to make sure the Indian Health Care Improvement Act (H.R. 1328) isn't
used to fund abortions with public money.
AdvanceUSA
thanks Congressman Pitts for proposing this important pro-life amendment, and
urges the rest of the Energy and Commerce Committee to support it. CitizenLink also
reports.
You
can look up members of the committee here, and
find your representative’s contact
information here (look them up by name or zip code).
Graphic source: CitizenkLink
Ken
Connor has a thought provoking piece on the need
to protect disabled children from abortion by making sure mothers have
accurate information about disabilities.
Excerpt:
Most parents receive the news that they are
"expecting" with joy and excitement. For some, however, the good news
turns sour when they learn that their unborn or newly born child has Down
syndrome or is afflicted with some other disability like cystic fibrosis. What
parents are told about their child's future and how they are told it often
influences whether that child is born at all. That's why Senators Sam Brownback
and Ted Kennedy have co-sponsored the "Prenatally and Postnatally
Diagnosed Conditions Awareness Act".
Barack
Obama referred to being “punished with a baby” when confronted with a pro-life
Democrat in Pennsylvania recently. Obama
also disparaged abstinence education at the event. Politico
has the details.
By
Daniel Herbster
When
I first read recent
media reports about research which seemed to indicate mice with Parkinson’s
disease were successfully treated using a form of cloning called somatic cell
nuclear transfer (SCNT), I was skeptical.
But even if the media reports of success were correct, it still would
not make SCNT ethical for use in humans because it would amount to cloning and
killing human beings (embryos). I wanted
get an expert opinion on the actual science behind the reports so I contacted
Dr. David Prentice whom I’ve had the privilege to hear speak and meet on
several occasions.
Reinforced
my concerns with the unethical nature of the research if it were ever tried in
humans, Dr. Prentice told me…
…the whole idea of
so-called "therapeutic cloning" is unethical on several levels. It requires creating and destroying an
embryo, a young life. It also requires a
tremendous number of eggs to make just one dish of cells, so it risks women's
health, making them factories for raw parts for the experiments.
Dr.
Prentice also mentioned three crucial points the reports neglected to point
out.
- 1 out of every 6 mice showed
"graft overgrowth". In
other words, the implanted embryonic stem cells grew too well.
- They only let the animals go for 11
weeks, so we don't know if they would have gone on to form tumors, or if
the treatment has any lasting effect.
- The technique is also already
outdated. The paper was originally
submitted in Feb 2007, long before most of the results with iPS cells
[induced pluripotent stem cells].
So the science has already passed this by, with easier, ethical,
and successful procedures.
Thank
you Dr. Prentice for sharing your expertise with us. Find out more about Dr. Prentice’s work at FRC.org and at DoNoHarm.
Dr. David Prentice
Graphic source: FRC
Click here for more
information on human cloning, and click here for more
information on embryonic stem cell research.
Planned
Parenthood has released its annual
report for 2008. The following
points are a few important and outrageous facts AdvanceUSA has been alerted to:
- An increase in the number of
provided abortions from 264,943 in 2005 to 289,650 in 2006.
- A doubling of “excess of
revenue over expenses” funds from $55.7 million in 2005 to $112 million in
2006.
- Acknowledge receipt of over
$336 million in [local, state, and federal] government grants and
contracts.
With
all the recent controversies regarding potential illegal activity by Planned
Parenthood centers across the country, why is Planned Parenthood getting our
tax dollars?
To
sign the Family Research Council’s petition to withhold federal Title X funding
from Planned Parenthood click
here.
The
Columbia Missourian reports. Let’s
hope the Appeals Court upholds Judge Joyce’s
ruling allowing Missourians to see an
accurate summary of the proposed human cloning ban on their 2008 ballot.
Cures
Without Cloning is waiting until the court makes its decision before beginning its
signature gathering campaign to get the cloning ban amendment on the
ballot. If you live in Missouri click here to find out how you
can be a trained signature gatherer.
For
more information on human cloning click here or visit MO Cures Without Cloning.
Scientists in the U.S. believe they have been able to treat mice that have Parkinson’s disease using somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) which was the same process used to create Dolly the sheep. (Some like to euphemistically call this procedure “therapeutic cloning” but they’re only right about the “cloning” part because there is nothing “therapeutic” in the procedure for the cloned embryo.) The scientists took the nucleus from a mouse cell and inserted it into a mouse egg cell. When the resulting mouse embryo developed to a certain stage it was destroyed so its stem cells could be harvested and injected into the original mouse.
As the media breathlessly reports, some scientists are hoping this type of treatment could one day be used on humans. They neglect to point out that if this research were to be done in humans it would, in effect, amount to creating a twin of the patient (a clone) only to destroy that twin at an early stage of development (embryo) for its stem cells. Cloning humans is unethical because it would violate the rights of the cloned embryo and because it cheapens human life to the level of a commodity. We should not be wasting our time and resources pursuing research we know to be unethical.
These limited results seen in mice pale in comparison to the many exciting results coming from ethical forms of adult stem cell research. Furthermore, with the new research being done in induced pluripotent stem cells (embryonic like stem cells obtained without creating or destroying embryos) we can ethically obtain pluripotent stem cells that do not appear to risk rejection from the bodies of patients.
For more information on human cloning click here.
The
Calgary Herald reports on Leah
Telder’s success in overcoming the ravages of MS with ethical adult stem
cell transplants. Excerpts:
There she was, the Telders' youngest child,
Leah, walking towards them in the airport lobby late Monday amidst the
disembarking passengers, grinning and waving a greeting.
"That was amazing. She walked off . .
. I mean, there she was, actually walking," said Jacky of the moment.
…
"I haven't felt this good since before
I was diagnosed," she said.
She can walk on her own again and talk
without difficulty. She can make a cup of coffee -- something she hasn't been
able to do since she was 21.
And the majority of her vision has been
restored.
Leah Telder
Graphic Source: canada.com
LifeNews reports. We hope other states will take a look at these effective pro-life laws that seek to give women real choice through access to ultrasound information.
LifeNews reports.
AdvanceUSA’s Daniel Herbster had the privilege to hear the personal reports of Amy Daniels and Jill Rosen during their visit to Washington, DC. They told how they were literally dying until they were treated with their own stem cells. Today their health has improved dramatically. They are both concerned that many people in this country will die because they cannot raise the money to travel to nations where ethical adult stem cell research is allowed or because their insurance will not cover adult stem cell transplants.
Call your representative today and urge him or her to cosponsor and vote “Yes” on the Patients First Act which instructs the Health Department to make effective and ethical adult stem cell research a high priority.
For more information on adult stem cell research click here. For information on stem cells in general click here.
Last night the Senate rejected a pro-life amendment proposed by Sen. Wayne Allard (R-CO), which would have covered unborn children under the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. Instead, the Senate passed the Boxer amendment which categorizes pregnant mothers as “children” in order to provide these women with health coverage without committing the liberal sacrilege of insinuating that the unborn are in fact children.
To see the vote results, check the vote box below or AdvanceUSA’s Congress Vote Watch Page. To see how your senators voted on the Allard amendment click on “Full Results.”
Senate Vote on the Allard Amendment (S.A. 4233) to allow unborn children to receive health coverage under SCHIP
March 13, 2008
Full Results
|
|
|
Yeas |
|
Nays |
|
PRES |
|
NV |
|
Republican |
|
44 |
|
4 |
|
— |
|
1 |
|
Democratic |
|
2 |
|
47 |
|
— |
|
1 |
|
Independent |
|
— |
|
1 |
|
— |
|
— |
|
TOTALS |
|
46 |
|
52 |
|
— |
|
2 |
Sen. Ensign (R-CO) proposed an amendment yesterday which would have set aside money for the enforcement of the Child Custody Protection Act, which prevents minors from being transported across state lines to avoid state abortion laws requiring the consent of the parents. This common-sense, pro-life legislation failed by a vote of 49-49.
Senate Vote on the Ensign Amendment (S.A. 4335) to provide funds for the vigorous enforcement of the Child Custody Protection Act
March 13, 2008
Full Results
|
|
|
Yeas |
|
Nays |
|
PRES |
|
NV |
|
Republican |
|
44 |
|
3 |
|
— |
|
1 |
|
Democratic |
|
5 |
|
45 |
|
— |
|
1 |
|
Independent |
|
— |
|
1 |
|
— |
|
— |
|
TOTALS |
|
49 |
|
49 |
|
— |
|
2 |
NBC11 and CBS4 report
on the touching story of Dallas Hextell of Sacramento, California, a little boy
born with debilitating cerebral palsy.
Dallas has seen significant improvement
after being treated with ethical adult stem cells taken from his stored
umbilical cord blood.
 Sen. Wayne Allard (R-CO) has again proposed an amendment to the budget bill which would provide health coverage for unborn children on the SCHIP program. His amendment would codify this important policy into federal law, and will most likely be voted on when the Senate begins an intense session of voting this Thursday (March 13). AdvanceUSA thanks Sen. Allard for proposing this important pro-life legislation. Call both your senators today and urge them to vote “Yes” on Sen. Allard’s amendment (#4233) protecting unborn children under SCHIP!
For more information on SCHIP click here.
The
MBC Pathway reports on the status of the proposed
constitutional amendment to fully ban human cloning in Missouri. Excerpt:
[Missouri Secretary of State] Carnahan’s
rewrite of language submitted last fall by Cures Without Cloning (CWC) was
struck down Feb. 20 by Cole County Circuit Judge Patricia Joyce under
precedents established by previous judges as insufficient or unfair. Legally it
means her work is “inadequate, especially lacking adequate power, capacity or
competence. The word ‘unfair’ means to be marked by injustice, partiality, or
deception.” In other words, according to legal precedent, she stated the
consequences of the initiative “inadequately and with bias, prejudice,
deception and/or favoritism.”
An appeal filed by people sympathetic to
the argumentation of Missouri Coalition for Lifesaving Cures will be heard by
the Missouri Court of Appeals, Western District, March 26. Once all legal
appeals are exhausted, it is believed that approximately 150,000 valid
signatures would need to be collected by May 5, the deadline for getting it on
the ballot in November. Many citizens are ready to fan out all over the state
to go get the necessary signatures once elected officials and judges are
finished with their work.
“We are confident the court of appeals will
uphold the ballot summary written by the circuit court and are preparing for
that outcome,” wrote Missourians Against Human Cloning (MAHC) Executive
Director Jaci Winship in an email alert that went out to supporters in the last
week of February. “We are hopeful the appeal process will move quickly so that
our volunteer army that has been preparing for months will be able to move
forward.”
HT: Sam Lee
LifeNews reports. Excerpt:
"Recently, my niece gave birth to her
first baby. It should have been a joyful moment for the entire family, but as I
stood looking at her cradling her newborn, I felt tears pricking at my
eyes," Woodgate wrote in a London Daily Mail column.
"All of a sudden, I found myself being
transported back in time almost 40 years, to the day that I was admitted to a
small cottage hospital in Leicester for a termination," she added.
Her memories of the abortion were so vivid
that she can still smell the disinfectant and see the "disapproving"
looks on the faces of the staff at the facility.
LifeNews reports. Excerpt:
A pro-life organization for Republicans is
calling on John McCain, who has captured enough delegates to be the party's
presidential nominee, to keep the GOP platform pro-life on abortion. The
Republican Party currently supports a human life amendment to the Constitution
to offer legal protection to unborn children.
Delegates to the Republican convention in
Minneapolis this summer will reconsider the party's 93-page platform that
opposes abortion and supports President Bush's policy against using tax dollars
to fund embryonic stem cell research.
“Students Raise
Money for Teacher’s Adult Stem-Cell Transplant”
CitizenLink
reports on this heart-warming
story.
Adult Stem Cells on
the Cutting Edge of Joint Repair and Replacement
As
Reuters reports, doctors are making great strides in joint repair and
replacement using novel biological techniques, including ethical adult stem
cell transplants. Excerpt:
Stem cell therapy could eventually
eliminate the need for joint replacement, said Einhorn, who last year performed
his first hip replacement surgery using the patient's own stem cells.
The undifferentiated, unspecialized stem
cells can morph into specialized cells with specific functions in the body.
Adult stem cells are available from a number of sources, including bone marrow
and fat.
Stem cells from a patient's own body are
being used to repair bones, ligaments, cartilage, muscle, spinal cord and
nerves.
By Daniel Herbster
I had the opportunity to speak to sophomore biology students and senior chemistry students at my high school alma mater about stem cells, cloning, and the pro-life cause. The students at Community Baptist Christian School were great, and showed genuine interest in the presentation. I'd like to thank Miss Anderson for inviting me to speak to her students and for taking these photos.
Explaining the science of human embryo development.
For more information about bioethics and life issues check the pro-life, stem cell, adult stem cell, and human cloning pages at AdvanceUSA.org or check the stem cell, adult stem cell, pro-life, abortion, and human cloning categories at AdvanceUSA Blog.
LifeNews reports. Excerpt:
A Johnson County grand jury has failed to
issue an indictment against a Planned Parenthood abortion center near Kansas
City. The verdict of "no true bill" comes after several allegations
that the grand jury process had been distorted by a judge who sided with the
abortion business in limiting the panel's access to abortion records.
The
Washington
Post also reports.
LifeNews reports. Ultrasound bills are important steps toward
fostering a “culture of life” in our nation.
Let’s hope even more states take a look at these effective pro-life
laws.
“A
person’s a person, no matter how small.”
Does
that sound like a pro-life slogan to you?
This is a quote from Horton the elephant in Dr. Seuss’s classic “Horton
Hears a Who.” As World
Magazine’s Blog reports, with the release of a new animated film of the
same name, pro-lifers in Colorado are using the quote to demonstrate the need
for a state constitutional amendment to protect the unborn from the moment of
conception.
The
Virginia Senate has voted to prohibit
funds for Planned Parenthood because they advocate for and perform
abortions. Let’s hope other states and
the federal government begin to follow their example. It is a travesty that the largest company in
the abortion industry receives millions of dollars in tax dollars.
LifeNews and KETV
report. It looks like dangerous
loopholes allowing for “clone and kill” research have been removed from this
legislation in Nebraska, causing pro-life organizations to support it for fear
that something far worse would take its place.
Let’s hope Nebraska can continue to avoid following down the same road
that Missouri took
in 2006.
Overcoming MS with Adult Stem Cells
WRAL in Raleigh, NC reports on the amazing story of Barry Goudy who no longer has any symptoms of MS thanks to adult stem cell treatments. Click here to see WRAL’s video report on Barry’s story.
Barry Goudy fought his MS with adult stem cells
Graphic source: WRAL
“Medical Journal: Adult Stem Cell Research Trumps Embryonic in Helping Patients”
LifeNews and US News report. Why should we spend the hard-earned money of taxpayers on research that destroys human embryos when ethical adult stem cell therapies are show real-world results?
For more information check the stem cell page and adult stem cell page.
LifeNews reports. Furthermore, our friends in the House tell us
that abstinence and faithfulness education will still be supported, and they
are convinced that language allowing abortion promoting organizations to receive
taxpayer dollars has been fully eliminated.
Our thanks
to all who made their voice heard on this issue. Also, special thanks to Rep. Chris Smith
(R-NJ), Chairman of the House Pro-Life Caucus, for his tireless efforts to address
the pro-life and pro-family concerns with PEPFAR.
Rep. Chris Smith
(R-NJ)
LifeNews
has some helpful commentary on
Phill Kline, the Kansas district attorney and former Attorney General who
dared to hold Planned Parenthood accountable to the law. Kline has been unfairly maligned and this
piece helps shed the light of truth on the case.
District Attorney
Phill Kline
Graphic source: LifeNews
The
bi-partisan PEFAR anti-AIDS funding legislation is being marked up right now. To watch the hearings via live streaming
check the website
of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and click on the “Live Webcast” link
in the lower right margin or click
here.
Listening
in around 11:30 one could hear Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) give an excellent
defense of abstinence and faithfulness education for combating the global
spread of AIDS. Let’s hope that no tax
dollars will go to support abortions under this bill.
 AdvanceUSA is happy to report that the Vitter amendment passed this morning by a vote of 52 - 42. Now Americans can rest assured that their tax dollars will not be used to fund abortions under the Indian Health Services bill (click here for more information). For full vote results and to see how your senators voted on this important pro-life amendment check the vote box below (or click here).
AdvanceUSA thanks all those who called their senators concerning this pro-life matter. The voice of ordinary Americans can make a powerful difference in Washington when people exercise their rights to petition their government and to express their political opinions.
Also, AdvanceUSA thanks Senator David Vitter (R-LA) for proposing and defending this important legislation. UPDATE: LifeNews reports.
Senate Vote on the Vitter Amendment (S.A. 3896) to codify the pro-life Hyde amendment in the Indian Health Services bill
February 26, 2008
Full Results | News Story
|
|
|
Yeas |
|
Nays |
|
PRES |
|
NV |
|
Republican |
|
43 |
|
3 |
|
— |
|
3 |
|
Democratic |
|
9 |
|
38 |
|
— |
|
3 |
|
Independent |
|
— |
|
1 |
|
— |
|
— |
|
TOTALS |
|
52 |
|
42 |
|
— |
|
6 |
See other important Congressional vote results on the Congress Vote Watch page.
Our
friends in the Senate tell us that the pro-life Vitter amendment (# 3896) will
be considered tomorrow. The Vitter
amendment would prevent taxpayer dollars from supporting abortions under the
Indian Health Services bill.
Call
both
your senators today and urge them to vote “Yes” on the pro-life Vitter
amendment (# 3896)!
There is exciting new hope that Missouri voters will be able read an accurate summary of the proposed constitutional amendment to fully ban human cloning in state when they step into the voting booth in November. Most Missourians would likely oppose the cloning of human life for the purpose of destroying it for research, but anti-cloning forces must get their message out despite well funded opposition, media bias, and unfriendly state officials (as in this case). Bioethics expert Wesley J. Smith summarizes the situation:
I admit that I am pleasantly surprised. The pro cloning bias among the political elite and media in Missouri make it almost impossible to get the straight information to the people of MO about this crucial ethical issue. When a new initiative to outlaw all human cloning was filed awhile ago, the Secretary of State wrote a summary that was both inaccurate and breathtakingly biased. Well, lo and behold, a court has righted the wrong.
Also, the AP (via the Columbia Missourian) has a lengthy article explaining the situation and its implications. Click here (PDF file) to read a press release from Missouri Cures Without Cloning.
For more background information about the Missouri case and about the science of human cloning check AdvanceUSA’s human cloning page.
Conservatives are often told that abortion really shouldn’t be an important issue when selecting a president because “all he can do is appoint judges.” Our friend Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost clearly explains today why this is not the case. He shows just how much power a president has to help or hinder the pro-life movement.
He lists five specific areas and explains each:
- Preserving the Pro-Life Riders
- Filing of amicus briefs in cases before the judiciary
- Issuance of executive orders
- Selection of political appointments
- Using the "bully pulpit"
He mentions the presidential veto when discussing pro-life riders. This important constitutional power of the presidency can hardly be overstated, especially when Congress is controlled by pro-abortion leadership.
Excerpt:
Christians have an obligation to the most vulnerable members of our society to elect politicians who have both a robust view of human dignity and the temerity to govern accordingly. We betray this duty when we downplay the role the executive branch in advancing the pro-life cause. Judges and legislators matter; but presidents matter too.
To read the full post click here.
AdvanceUSA is grateful to Joe for citing us as a source when discussing the pro-life riders, and hope others will find our site a helpful resource as well.
 The House Foreign Affairs Committee will vote on PEPFAR anti-AIDS funding reauthorization on Thursday, February 28. Call your representative today (especially if they serve on this committee) and urge him or her to vote against the PEPFAR legislation unless pro-abortion code words like “family panning” and “reproductive health” are removed and abstinence education and anti-prostitution language is maintained. LifeNews reports on the abortion funding aspect while the AP reports on President Bush’s statements urging lawmakers to preserve crucial abstinence and faithfulness funding.
Click here for more information on PEPFAR or check the AdvanceUSA home page.
The
Chicago Tribune reports on how adult stem cells could help prevent many amputations. Excerpts:
A new procedure launched at the
Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago in January offers hope to patients
with critical limb ischemia (CLI), or severely blocked leg arteries.
Doctors transplanted a purified form of the
patients' own stem cells into their leg muscles to grow new, small blood
vessels and restore circulation in their legs. Two patients underwent the
procedure. They are the first subjects in a 20-site national trial.
…
Losordo said a treatment for CLI could be
available by 2012.
AdvanceUSA
has learned that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has filed cloture on
the Indian Health Services bill, and a vote on the essential pro-life Vitter
amendment is expected on Monday or Tuesday (25th or 26th). Call both
your senators and urge them to support the Vitter Amendment (# 3896) to the
Indian Health Services bill!
Click here for more information on the imporant Vitter amendment.
Adult “Stem Cell Treatment Attracts Thousands”
ABC News reports (in a very balanced fashion) on the visible results Paul Flynn has achieved from the adult stem cell therapies he received in China. Excerpt:
Using stem cells harvested from umbilical cord blood (UCB), Hu said his company has treated over 2,000 patients since 2005. They claim an 85 percent rate of improvement in a variety of conditions, from spinal cord injuries to autism.
…
"Little things like that. I can jump now, which I couldn't jump earlier. I can jump now, little frog hops, which requires all the contraction and releasing and coordination of all of your leg muscles all at once. So, just little things like that. Squatting, I can squat a little better now without falling over."
His wife, Teresa, has also taken note. "I've noticed a lot of improvement in his walk, his speech, his overall sense of well being," she said.
Unfortunately, many of the results in China have not been submitted for official scientific review, but personal testimonials like Paul’s definitely merit careful consideration.
Paul Flynn with his son Michael in China
Graphic source: ABC News
“Ethical Method of Creating Embryonic-Like Stem Cells Overcomes More Hurdles”
Scientists report that the embryonic-like induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC), which can be obtained ethically from ordinary skin cells, can be used for treatment without causing tumors. One of the chief faults with using normal embryonic stem cells (besides the fact that they require the destruction or endangerment of human embryos) is that they often form tumors. Once again, ethical stem cell research shows the greater promise of actually achieving treatments and cures. LifeNews also reports.
“Racehorse Wins after Pioneering [Adult] Stem Cell Treatment”
Horse lovers, pro-lifers, and medical junkies will be fascinated to learn that adult stem cell treatments are even producing real results in the animal kingdom. Excerpt:
Pioneering stem cell treatment has enabled British steeplechaser Knowhere to come back from severe injuries to win Cheltenham's Gold Cup Trial last week.
Graphic source: horsetalk.co.nz
“UCLA Adult Stem Cell Speech”
Michael Webster shares his success story from having used adult stem cell treatments.
“Stem Cell Storage Turns to Menstrual Source”
The Chicago Tribune reports. Excerpt:
Some call it a curse, some an inconvenience, and some even think of it as a feminine privilege, joining them with the cycles of nature.
Now a Florida firm wants women to think of their monthly period as a precious chance to gather stem cells that could later prove a lifesaver to them or their families.
LifeNews reports. This is even more evidence of why the United
States should never sign the CEDAW treaty.
How
would you respond to the following statement?
"In my opinion, the moral thing for
older mothers to do is to have amniocentesis, as soon during pregnancy as is
safe for the fetus, test whether placental cells have a third chromosome #21,
and abort the fetus if it does. The brain is the last organ to become
functional."
LifeNews and the | | |