MCCL Blog

'The Stem Cell Debates: Lessons for Science and Politics'

2012-01-31T13:07:00.000-06:00

An excellent new report, "The Stem Cell Debates: Lessons for Science and Politics," is published in the Winter 2012 edition of The New Atlantis. It is authored by the Witherspoon Council on Ethics and the Integrity of Science, comprised of a number of distinguished scholars and scientists from institutions such as Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and Columbia.

The report is lengthy (146 pages, including endnotes) and well-documented, an up-to-date resource regarding stem cell research and its science, ethics and politics. And it is available in its entirety online.

From the preface of the report:

In this inaugural report, the Witherspoon Council considers the proper relationship between science, ethics, and politics by examining the most prominent science-related controversy of the past decade: the stem cell debates. These debates touched on fundamental questions concerning the governance of science and the moral status of embryonic human life. More than just a scholarly assessment of those debates, this report seeks to improve the public understanding of how science and democratic politics relate, including the responsibilities of scientists and policymakers. We consider the inevitable interplay between science and ethics and the conflicts of interest that arise when scientists are both advisors to policymakers and petitioners for their allocations. Among the report's most crucial lessons is that, in our system of participatory republican government, we are responsible for considering not only the potential benefits of scientific research but also the ethical implications of that research.

The report covers the following:

From Discovery to Debates
Science, Policy, and Politics
The Bush Funding Policy: How Science Informed Ethics and Politics
Ten Common Misrepresentations
[including:]
Embryonic stem cells are superior to adult stem cells, or adult stem cells are superior to embryonic stem cells.
Somatic cell nuclear transfer is not cloning and does not produce embryos.
As a result of the Bush funding policy, the United States fell behind other countries in stem cell research.
Opposing embryonic stem cell research means opposing cures for suffering people.
Opposition to embryonic stem cell research is a matter of religious ideology.
The Bush stem cell funding policy was an illegitimate politicization of science.
Case Studies from the Stem Cell Debates [including Ron Reagan, California's Proposition 71, and more]
Lessons of the Stem Cell Debates
Beyond the Stem Cell Debates

In addition, lengthy and detailed appendices cover these topics:

The Science of Embryonic Stem Cell Research
The Promise of Stem Cell Therapies
Ethical Considerations Regarding Stem Cell Research
Stem Cell Research Funding: Policy and Law
Overview of International Human Embryonic Stem Cell Laws

Assessing Pres. Obama's statement on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade

2012-01-27T18:57:00.000-06:00

President Barack Obama issued an official statement on the Jan. 22 anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that (together with companion ruling Doe v. Bolton) struck down the democratically-decided abortion laws of every state and imposed on the entire nation a policy of legal abortion for virtually any reason throughout all of pregnancy. Applauding the decision, Obama emphasized his commitment to "a woman's right to choose" and said abortion is a "fundamental constitutional right."

Women at the 2012 MCCL March for Life,
disagreeing with Pres. Obama

It is revealing that Obama so staunchly supports Roe, a constitutionally indefensible ruling that even legal scholars who support legal abortion (including Obama friend, adviser and member of the administration Cass Sunstein) think was badly decided. As Timothy Carney notes in the Washington Examiner, Obama "either shows a strikingly poor understanding of constitutional law (especially for a Harvard Law grad), or he buys into the dishonesty that pervades the opinion and its defenses." Law professor and legal-abortion advocate Kermit Roosevelt put it well in a 2003 Washington Post column:

You will be hard-pressed to find a constitutional law professor, even among those who support the idea of constitutional protection for the right to choose, who will embrace the [Roe] opinion itself rather than the result.

This is not surprising. As constitutional argument, Roe is barely coherent. The court pulled its fundamental right to choose more or less from the constitutional ether.

In any case, let's consider two claims Obama offers in his short Roe statement, both of which are typical of pro-choice rhetoric. The first is this:

As we mark the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, we must remember that this Supreme Court decision not only protects a woman's health and reproductive freedom, but also affirms a broader principle: that government should not intrude on private family matters.

He uses three key phrases here: "women's health," "reproductive freedom," and "government should not intrude on private family matters." Let me briefly take them one at a time.

First, Roe wasn't about women's health -- it was about legalizing elective abortion. (Laws before Roe allowed abortion to save the life of the mother.) That is what Obama supports. That is the issue in dispute.

Second, "reproductive freedom" is a vague term, but in this case Obama means the freedom to have an abortion, which, as a plain factual matter, is the killing of a member of the species Homo sapiens at the fetal stage of development. Of course, Obama agrees that "freedom" doesn't justify legalizing acts that assault the dignity and rights of other persons, such as intentionally drowning one's toddler in the bath tub. (Obama also opposes "freedom" -- to at least some degree -- with regard to a wide range of issues, including economics, health care, gun ownership, and so on.) The issue, then, is obviously not freedom, but rather whether abortion is or is not the kind of act, like drowning a toddler, that should not be permitted. And this depends, in turn, on whether the being dismembered and killed by abortion counts as someone deserving of respect and protection, as human beings at later developmental stages do. On that matter -- that is, the matter of whether his position on abortion is correct or not -- Obama has exactly nothing to say.

Third, to say that "government should not intrude on private family matters" is likewise to beg the question as to whether elective abortion is really a "private family matter" or is instead a fundamental human rights violation, like when a man abuses his wife or strangles his child in the privacy of his own home, both practices that are wrong and should not be permitted.

So Obama has not offered any reason to think that abortion is morally permissible and ought to be legal (much less subsidized by taxpayers and exported to developing nations, as Obama advocates). To my knowledge he never has.

The second claim is this:

And as we remember this historic anniversary, we must also continue our efforts to ensure that our daughters have the same rights, freedoms, and opportunities as our sons to fulfill their dreams.

The freedom to have an abortion, then, is necessary for women to have "the same rights, freedoms, and opportunities" as men. It is true that, as a fact of biology, only women can become pregnant, and so the "burden" of not killing human beings in utero falls disproportionately on them. It is also true that the burden of not killing five-year-old children falls disproportionately on parents who have five-year-old children, so we might say that such parents do not have the same freedoms and opportunities as non-parents. But we would not then legalize the killing of five-year-old children, whose own "rights, freedoms, and opportunities," indeed very lives, are at stake.

Everyone is equally morally prohibited from killing innocent persons. This prohibition is not gender-specific. The question at hand is whether it includes the killing of the unborn. Pro-life advocates point to the scientific facts of human embryology and fetal development, which show that the unborn is a living member of our species, a human being, and then argue that all human beings, irrespective not only of gender, race, class, religion and ethnicity, but also of age, size, ability, dependency and cognitive function, ought to be treated with basic moral respect and protected by law.

Some thoughtful pro-choice advocates have engaged and responded to that case, and/or have seriously argued for the moral permissibility and legality of abortion. Most pro-choice activists have not, relying instead on intellectually superficial rhetoric. Pres. Obama is firmly in the latter category.

'The unbearable wrongness of Roe'

2012-01-24T19:48:00.001-06:00

Michael Stokes Paulsen, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas here in Minnesota, wrote recently for Public Discourse about Roe v. Wade and its consequences.

After nearly four decades, Roe's human death toll stands at nearly sixty million human lives, a total exceeding the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin's purges, Pol Pot's killing fields, and the Rwandan genocide combined. Over the past forty years, one-sixth of the American population has been killed by abortion. One in four African-Americans is killed before birth. Abortion is the leading cause of (unnatural) death in America.

It is almost too much to contemplate: the prospect that we are living in the midst of, and accepting (to various degrees) one of the greatest human holocausts in history. And so we don't contemplate it. Instead, we look for ways to deny this grim reality, minimize it, or explain away our complacency—or complicity.

Paulsen discusses what Roe held, why constitutionally it was an "utterly indefensible" decision, and how morally its results are simply catastrophic. Below are some notable excerpts.

On what Roe actually did:

The right created by the Supreme Court in Roe is a constitutional right of some human beings to kill other human beings. I do not mean for my description to be provocative, but simply direct—blunt about facts. One need not presume that the human fetus has a right not to be killed in order to recognize that, as a descriptive matter, Roe creates a right for one class of human beings to kill other human beings.

On the constitutional basis for Roe:

If the U.S. Constitution actually protected such an extreme personal legal right to kill the human fetus, that would be troubling enough, but the trouble would be with the content of the Constitution. The further problem with Roe is that it has absolutely no basis in the text, structure, or history of the Constitution. No rule or principle of law fairly traceable to the text, discernible from its structure, or fairly derived from evidence of intention or historical understanding of an authoritative decision of the people, remotely supports the result reached in Roe. In terms of fair principles of constitutional interpretation, Roe is perhaps the least defensible major constitutional decision in the Supreme Court's history.

Roe's reasoning, distilled to its essentials, is that the Constitution creates a "privacy" right to abortion, on the premise that the right not "to bear" a child is protected by the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause. No serious constitutional law scholar thinks this is a plausible reading of the Due Process Clause. That clause forbids government to "deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law." Without due process of law are crucial words. The Due Process Clause does not say that government never may deprive a person of life, liberty or property. It only says that government may not do so "without due process of law"—that is, arbitrarily, lawlessly, not in conformity with duly enacted laws and accepted procedures for their application. [PS note: The government rightly deprives people of the "liberty" to murder, rape and steal.]

On Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), which reaffirmed the constitutional right to abortion invented in Roe:

If Roe was radical, Casey was craven. A majority of the Supreme Court apparently believed that Roe was wrongly decided, fully understood the moral and human consequences of the decision, and deliberately adhered to it anyway. Stare decisis has never been thought required by the Constitution, before or since. Brown v. Board of Education (1954) famously repudiated Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) on the question of whether racial segregation was consistent with "equal protection of the laws." The Court has overruled scores of its own precedents. Indeed, it overruled two cases in Casey. Casey's reaffirmation of Roe, in the name of stare decisis, was a sham—perhaps the most transparently dishonest major judicial decision since Dred Scott.

On what makes Roe unbearable:

Roe is a radical decision and a legally indefensible one. But what really makes Roe unbearably wrong is its consequences. The result of Roe and Doe has been the legally authorized killing of nearly sixty million Americans since 1973. Roe v. Wade authorized unrestricted private violence against human life on an almost unimaginable scale, and did so, falsely, in the name of the Constitution.

Our our response:

Here is the problem, undressed: If human embryonic life is morally worthy of protection, we have permitted sixty million murders under our watch. Faced with this prospect, many of us—maybe even most—flee from the facts. We deny that the living human embryo is "truly" or "fully" human life, adopt a view that whether the embryo or fetus is human "depends," or can be judged in degrees, on a sliding scale over the course of pregnancy; or we proclaim uncertainty about the facts of human biology; or we proclaim moral agnosticism about the propriety of "imposing our views on others"; or we throw up our hands and give up because moral opposition to an entrenched, pervasive social practice is not worth the effort, discomfort, and social costs. The one position not on the table—the one possibility too hard to look at—is that abortion is a grave moral wrong on a par with the greatest human moral atrocities of all time and that we passively, almost willingly, accept it as such.

Read the whole piece.

Thousands join MCCL March for Life; women speak out against dangerous RU486 abortions

2012-01-22T23:02:00.000-06:00

Members of Congress, Legislature participate in March commemorating 39 years of abortion on demand

ST. PAUL—Over four thousand Minnesotans marched at the State Capitol today to urge lawmakers to establish inspections of abortion centers and to ban "webcam abortions."

The 2012 MCCL March for Life marked the 39th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's Jan. 22, 1973, Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decisions that have resulted in the deaths of more than 567,000 unborn Minnesota children (Minnesota Department of Health), and more than 53 million unborn babies nationwide.

MCCL's 2012 legislative agenda calls upon lawmakers to require abortion centers to be inspected. A legal abortion center in Philadelphia was inspected for the first time in more than 20 years recently. The state found not only filthy conditions, but evidence that a significant number of babies had been born alive, then killed by the severing of their spinal cords. At least two women died after going to the facility. Minnesota has no way of knowing whether abortion centers in the state are safe for women, because they remain unregulated and uninspected.

Webcam abortions are done without a doctor physically present. Instead the doctor administers the RU486 abortion drugs remotely via an Internet-based webcam video connection. This increases the risks of RU486, which can be severe: At least 14 women have died in the U.S. after taking the drugs. Canada has banned the abortion method due to safety concerns. Yet Planned Parenthood offers it to young Minnesota mothers without a doctor available to physically examine the woman prior to administering the drugs.

"Governor Dayton, Speaker Zellers and Majority Leader Senjem, hear us loud and clear—ban webcam abortions now!" MCCL Development Director Jennifer Kistler told the huge crowd of citizens from across the state.

Mary Johnson of Silent No More Minnesota, a post-abortion recovery group, shared her horrific experience with RU486. Not only was the pain of the abortion excruciating, but she was left alone in her regret and grief. "If I could talk to a woman considering the RU486 method, I would encourage her not to have an abortion because she will regret it and they are misleading women into believing it is a better option," Johnson said. She now serves as the director of Alpha Pregnancy Resource Center in Savage.

Congressman John Kline encouraged pro-life citizens to persevere. "We've got to be here year after year, week after week, day after day fighting the fight," he said. "Push back to save those lives!"

Congressman Erik Paulsen said, "Let's work and promise that we will communicate and organize and vote to protect the unborn."

In her first public appearance since leaving the presidential race, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann told the crowd, "We will never forget those little ones who were taken from us—over 50 million strong! … We will never give up! Join me this year—choose life!"

Congressman Chip Cravaack reminded people to mourn the lives lost to abortion. "We must do everything to protect the unborn and now, our senior citizens. ... Keep up the fight, Minnesota!"

In a written greeting, Congressman Collin Peterson pledged to continue to work on passage of pro-life policies.

View photos from today's 2012 MCCL March for Life on the MCCL website.

MCCL is Minnesota's oldest and largest pro-life organization with more than 70,000 member families and 240 chapters across the state.

Roe v. Wade: Absurd, deadly, catastrophic

2012-01-21T15:17:00.000-06:00

In Roe v. Wade the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the right to liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution includes an unstated "right to privacy" that is in turn "broad enough to encompass" a right to abortion (which is also never mentioned in the Constitution) and this entails that states are constitutionally required to permit abortion on demand. Got it?

There was no reason to think the Constitution contains a right to abortion, and every reason to think it doesn't. Most obviously damning are all the state abortion bans enacted in the latter half of the 19th century, about the same time the Fourteenth Amendment was put into place. As Justice William Rehnquist wrote in his Roe dissent, "To reach its result, the Court necessarily has had to find within the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment a right that was apparently completely unknown to the drafters of the Amendment."

Absurd? Completely.

The consequence of Roe (and its companion decision, Doe v. Bolton) was a Court-mandated, nationwide policy of abortion on demand at virtually any stage of pregnancy. Thirty-nine years later, this policy has resulted in the legal and deliberate killing of some 53 million unborn human beings. That's 53,000,000 innocent members of the human family.

Abortion, under the Roe policy, is the leading cause of human death. The number of Americans killed because of Roe dwarfs the number of American casualties from every war in our history combined. More Americans die from abortion each day than died on that horrific day in September of 2001.

But those comparisons can be misleading. Abortion isn't death in the service of national defense, freedom and justice, or death as a result of natural causes, like heart disease (as tragic as those deaths are). Abortion is intentional killing for the convenience or supposed benefit of others; it is the elimination of those very young, defenseless and voiceless human beings who get in the way of what we want. Abortion, in other words, is precisely the kind of injustice that our soldiers have fought and died to defeat.

Tomorrow, Jan. 22, is the 39th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion on demand nationwide. At 2 p.m. we will hold the annual MCCL March for Life at the state capitol in St. Paul. We will commemorate the lives lost and women hurt. We will call for legal protection for unborn children and introduce MCCL's pro-life legislative agenda for the upcoming session. If you live in Minnesota, please join us.

Understanding Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton

Why Roe was wrong

Abortion defenders explain why Roe was a terrible legal decision

NARAL attacks Minnesota pregnancy centers and Positive Alternatives

2012-01-19T18:13:00.001-06:00

NARAL Pro-Choice Minnesota has released a report titled "State-Funded Deception: Minnesota's Crisis Pregnancy Centers," a supposed exposé of our state's pro-life pregnancy care centers (also called crisis pregnancy centers, or CPCs). NARAL hopes to get rid of the Positive Alternatives program, which provides modest state grants to a select number of pregnancy centers in Minnesota, by discrediting these organizations. NARAL also hopes to slap certain legal restrictions on them, but laments that "not all of the harmful practices CPCs engage in can be remedied through legislation."

What are these horrible places that perpetrate "gross injustice" (as the NARAL report puts it)? Pregnancy care centers help pregnant women and new mothers in need (and their families) without advocating the wrong of abortion as a solution to the difficulties of life. Rather, these pregnancy centers offer the information, counseling, medical referrals, adoption help and various other kinds of assistance (e.g., parenting training programs, baby supplies, housing and employment assistance) necessary to become a prepared parent or to place a child for adoption in a loving home. They are a one-stop location for pregnant women who may lack resources and support, feel desperate, or feel that abortion is their only option. (Such women will not find what they need at the typical abortion clinic.)

The Positive Alternatives program, created in 2005 through MCCL-backed legislation, helps counteract the $1.5 million-plus of state taxpayer money each year that directly pays for abortions, in addition to all the taxpayer money that funds organizations that perform and promote abortion. MCCL has compiled some stories of women helped and unborn lives saved through Positive Alternatives. More than 25,000 women statewide were helped through the program in its first four years (July 2006-June 2010). The program correlates to a four-year trend of declining abortions in Minnesota. (This is not to say that Positive Alternatives is solely responsible for the abortion decline, but there is no doubt that lives are saved through the program.)

NARAL investigated 15 pregnancy centers (of the nearly 100 in Minnesota) via in-person visits, website analyses and phone calls. The resulting report doesn't offer much substance. It is, however, full of ideological rhetoric. Those who oppose abortion are called "anti-choice," a purely ideological term if there ever was one. Pregnancy centers are said to "frighten and intimidate women," a ridiculous charge to those who actually know the staff and volunteers at such centers. Pregnancy centers are blasted for "promot[ing] their own agenda," which is really just the intention to help women, better lives and rescue young human beings from the killing of abortion.

The report claims: "Perhaps the most damaging and memorable practice CPCs engage in are the emotionally manipulative tactics CPCs use to scare and shame women out of exercising their right to choose abortion." How do pregnancy centers do this? They "scare and shame women" by doing things like "telling personal stories, crying [abortion has often been a very personal issue], using fetal models ... or videos to show fetal development." Such emotional appeals are not bad -- in fact, they can be good and important -- as long as they are grounded in truth. (Consider, in contrast, the emotion-based appeals that form the bulk of popular pro-choice rhetoric and argument. They either obscure sound reasoning, are based on false claims, or both.)

The most absurd statement in NARAL's report is this: "By using the key words such as 'pregnancy' or 'help' or 'choices' in web searches, the CPCs deceive women seeking guidance." What?

More substantively, the report attacks as false certain statements about the effect of abortion on women. First, the report says there is no link between abortion and a higher risk of developing breast cancer. Really? Check out this list of studies pertaining to the relationship between abortion and the development of breast cancer. Learn more about the evidence here and here.

Second, the report denies that there is an increased risk of mental health problems following abortion. A 2011 meta-analysis published in the British Journal of Psychiatry -- "the largest quantitative estimate of mental health risks associated with abortion available in the world literature" -- strongly suggests otherwise. Third, the NARAL report downplays any increased risk of future infertility and miscarriage following abortion. Evidence suggests that the risk is real (go here for the infertility risk and here for miscarriage).

The irony is that abortion advocates are unfairly targeting pregnancy centers at a time when the abortion industry itself has been exposed. From the horrifying and illegal practices of abortionists Kermit Gosnell, Steven Brigham and Nicola Riley to Planned Parenthood's cover-up of apparent statutory rape and underage sex trafficking -- abortion defenders are eager to deflect attention. And to undermine the lifesaving and woman-helping work of pregnancy care centers.

Should there be judicial retention elections in Minnesota?

2012-01-17T22:41:00.000-06:00

Blogger Walter Hudson provides some helpful background information for the debate about how judges ought to be selected in Minnesota:

Judges in Minnesota are currently subject to contested elections with one or more names on a ballot. However, in practice, few judges ever face a challenger, and fewer still have lost to one. A number of explanations have been offered as to why judges have not been effectively challenged. There were some odd rules about campaigning and fundraising which were, in recent years, struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. What has emerged since is a debate between those who seek additional measures to strengthen contested elections and those who seek to amend the state constitution so that judges would instead face a retention election.

The options in a retention election are "yes" and "no." You vote to either retain the judge or not. Under MSRE [merit selection retention elections], judges who lost a retention election would be replaced by a gubernatorial appointee selected from a list provided by a merit selection commission.

Got all that? Let's make it a little harder for you. Under MSRE, in addition to the Merit Selection Commission (which already exists in order to facilitate appointments when judges retire early or otherwise vacate the bench between elections), there would also be a newly formed Judicial Performance Evaluation Commission whose job would be to advise voters on whether or not to retain judges under the new election system. The performance commission would look at factors like punctuality, timely decision making, and respectful treatment of litigants -- not how judges ruled on particular cases -- and grade incumbents as well qualified, qualified, or not qualified.

This is pretty wonky stuff. It's nonetheless important when you consider how much power the judicial branch holds. Judges need to be held accountable. The question these proposals attempt to answer is how best to do so. Do we leave the "performance evaluation" and "merit selection" to the voters? Or do we create commissions to do the job for us?

Why are judicial retention elections a bad idea? Hudson continues:

The effect of MSRE would be to insulate the judiciary from political consequences. "Every one of these processes is political ..." Franklin said of proposals for reform on The Late Debate. "[Our goal is] to make sure that hot button issues don't dominate the bench." Of course, what makes an issue a hot button is the fact that voters care about it. So the translated goal is to make sure voters don't dominate the bench.

It's important to clarify that we are talking about "the bench" in the collective sense, not a particular judge, but the judiciary as an institution. Understanding that distinction is critical. MSRE advocates stress that retention elections "empower the voter" to oust sitting judges. This is true. However, retention elections bar voters from ever directly determining who will sit on the bench. So while a particular judge might be voted out for one reason or another, his or her replacement will not be vetted by the same voters. This allows the judiciary as a whole to withstand the wrath of the electorate, letting particular judges take it on the chin while enabling a political clone to replace them.

The euphemism for this political insulation is "impartiality and stability." Whenever you hear someone talk about impartiality, your next question should be "by whose standard?" The choices presently offered are the standard of the voters and the standard of a 24-person commission appointed by a given political establishment. If you're going to assert that the voters as a whole aren't qualified to determine a judge's impartiality, it seems strange to turn around and argue that 24 appointees somehow are. We're not dealing with separate species here, voter sapien and voter superior.

As for stability, well, dictatorship is pretty stable. Justice seems a higher consideration. ...

Contested elections result in an elected judiciary. Retention elections do not.

Read the rest.

Relativism, abortion, and Calvin and Hobbes

2012-01-16T14:05:00.002-06:00

Hobbes: "How are you doing on your New Year's resolutions?"

Calvin: "I didn't make any. See, in order to improve oneself, one must have some idea of what's 'good.' That implies certain values. But as we all know, values are relative. Every system of belief is equally valid and we need to tolerate diversity. Virtue isn't 'better' than vice. It's just different."

Hobbes: "I don't know if I can tolerate that much tolerance."

Calvin: "I refuse to be victimized by notions of virtuous behavior."
-- Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes (Jan. 2, 1995)

Often a defender of legal abortion will say something like, "If you don't like abortion, don't have one." But this seems to be a misunderstanding. For opponents of abortion are not saying they don't like abortion; they are asserting that abortion is wrong, whether they like it or not. (It is true that we dislike abortion, but that stems from the wrongness of the act, not the other way around.) To clearly see the error, imagine someone saying, "If you don't like spousal abuse, then don't abuse your spouse." That's absurd.

The pro-choice advocate has misconstrued the pro-life position as a subjective claim, rather than a claim of objective morality. He has reduced abortion to a question of personal preference -- e.g., "If you don't like Pixar, watch Dreamworks instead" -- rather than objective fact.

Consider another claim: "I'm personally opposed to abortion, but I don't want to force my view on everyone else by telling them they shouldn't have abortions." Again, the person making this statement sees opposition to abortion as a mere personal preference. Imagine someone saying, "I'm personally opposed to slavery, but I don't want to force my view on everyone else. So if you want to enslave the Canadians, go right ahead."

Underlying these statements is an idea called moral/ethical relativism. It holds that no objective standard of right and wrong exists; rather, morality is relative to each individual or culture. "What is right (or wrong) for me," the explicit relativist says, "might not be right (or wrong) for you." The alternative view is called moral objectivism or realism, which holds that morality is independent of what any particular person or culture thinks, feels or decides.

Relativism is more prevalent than some people realize. New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote recently about an in-depth study of the moral views of young people, detailed in the new book Lost in Transition (authored by the team that conducted the study, led by distinguished Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith). Brooks explains:

The default position, which most of [the young people interviewed] came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. "It's personal," the respondents typically said. "It's up to the individual. Who am I to say?" ...

Many were quick to talk about their moral feelings but hesitant to link these feelings to any broader thinking about a shared moral framework or obligation. As one put it, "I mean, I guess what makes something right is how I feel about it. But different people feel different ways, so I couldn't speak on behalf of anyone else as to what's right and wrong."

Mona Charen, an author and nationally syndicated columnist, reviewed the same book:

Six out of ten [young people interviewed] told the authors that morality is a "personal choice," like preferring long or short hair. "Moral rights and wrongs are essentially matters of individual opinion." One young woman, a student at an Ivy League college, explained that while she doesn't cheat, she is loath to judge others who do. "I guess that's a decision that everyone is entitled to make for themselves. I'm sort of a proponent of not telling other people what to do." A young man offered that "a lot of the time it's personal. It changes from person to person. What you may think is right may not necessarily be right for me, understand? So it's all individual." Forty-seven percent of the cohorts agreed that "morals are relative, there are not definite rights and wrongs for everybody."

Often, it seems to me, moral relativism is less a rationally held position than it is an attitude that is thoughtlessly absorbed, the result of intellectual movements that have shaped the way our culture thinks about moral matters. In any case, we must ask whether relativism is true. Advocates offer two main arguments.

First, relativists observe widely differing moral views, particularly among the many cultures around the world and throughout history. But a divergence of moral opinion does not mean that a fact of the matter does not exist, any more than disagreement about the solution to a complex math problem shows that there is no correct answer. Moreover, differences of moral opinion are not nearly as great as many think. There seems to be agreement concerning broad principles, and disagreement only about their proper application or about matters of (non-moral) fact. C.S. Lewis wrote:

Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to -- whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or every one. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired.

Even in the abortion debate, notes Francis Beckwith, disagreement can be overstated. Both sides value autonomy and agree that people should be free to make a wide range of choices about their lives; they disagree about whether abortion is one of the few choices (e.g., theft, child neglect) people should not be able to make (i.e., whether it violates the autonomy of another; whether it is unjustified homicide). Both sides agree that persons ought to be respected and protected; they disagree about whether unborn human beings count as members of the moral community. Some pro-choice people even agree with the moral principle of the equal dignity and right to life of every human being, but are confused about the scientific question of whether the embryo and fetus are living human organisms (human beings). This is a factual disagreement, not a moral one.

Second, relativists argue that to affirm objective moral truth is to be intolerant and closed-minded. But relativists themselves affirm the objective (non-moral) truth of a particular view -- namely, moral relativism. Is it "intolerant and closed-minded" to say that all those who disagree with relativism are wrong? Holding an opinion does not make one intolerant. Indeed, this is a misunderstanding of tolerance, which actually presupposes disagreement, since if there is no disagreement one does not "tolerate" but rather embraces.

Moreover, the claim that we "should" be tolerant is a moral claim. But if morality is subjective, then the imperative to be tolerant need not apply to me, or anyone else! As Greg Koukl explains, "There is no tolerance in relativism, because the moral obligation to be tolerant violates the rules." On the other hand, if everyone ought to be tolerant, then at least one objective moral norm exists ("everyone ought to be tolerant"), and relativism is by definition false. Tolerance, ironically, is incompatible with relativism.

So the arguments in favor of relativism are completely unpersuasive and point, instead, to the objectivity of moral norms. In addition, relativism is plagued with difficulties. Consider just three problems.

First, relativism provides no basis for moral evaluation. I cannot morally condemn mass murder, rape, child abuse or intolerance; I can only say that they are wrong for me personally or for my own culture. I cannot praise the generosity and selflessness of others as morally superior to stinginess and selfishness, for that is just my own view; others might legitimately favor stinginess and selfishness. I cannot say that the actions of Mother Teresa were better than the actions of Osama bin Laden in any objective sense; they both "did what was right in [their] own eyes" (Judges 17:6). I cannot morally improve myself, for I am equally "good" the way I am now; nor does trying to reform society by ending practices such as sexism and racism make any sense. Thus, relativism totally undermines the existence of morality as classically understood and translates into a kind of moral nihilism. It is tantamount to the view that there is no such thing as right and wrong; there is only what I think, feel and decide to do.

Second, moral relativism is unlivable. We cannot help but make judgments about good and bad, right and wrong, particularly when we are personally wronged or treated unfairly. This is because we naturally think in moral categories and crave fairness and ultimate justice. "Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real right and wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later," wrote C.S. Lewis. "He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining 'It's not fair' before you can say Jack Robinson."

Third, relativism is never held consistently. A relativist contradicts himself when he offers moral prescriptions, such as when he says that we ought to be tolerant (discussed above). The relativist, who denies the existence of objective moral truths, is making an objective moral truth claim himself!

Consider the common claim that we ought to not judge the choices of others. This is self-refuting: By saying "you should not judge," the relativist is morally judging the choice (to judge) of another. Some pro-choice advocates tell pro-lifers: "You shouldn't impose your personal morality on others." But in saying this, the pro-choice advocate is trying to "impose" his "personal morality" -- that it's wrong to impose morality on others -- on pro-lifers. Thus, the claim that "you shouldn't impose your morality on others" refutes itself. ("Impose" is a misleading term: Pro-lifers are instead working within our democratic system, proposing and arguing for the position that abortion is the unjust killing of an innocent human being and ought not be permitted by law, just as killing a five-year-old child, for instance, is unjust and ought not be permitted by law.)

Many in the pro-choice community talk as if morality is relative, but no pro-choice activist really believes it. Rather, such activists are committed, whether they know it or not, to moral objectivism: They contend that it is wrong not to permit women to have elective abortions, and that individuals and cultures that disagree are mistaken. (Abortion-promoting international organizations are working tirelessly to "impose" legal abortion on African and Latin American countries that strongly oppose it; abortion advocates in the United States are working to deny conscience protection for health care workers who do not wish to be involved in abortion.) Abortion, they say, is a fundamental and universal right.

For these three reasons, among others, relativism as a moral theory is a complete failure. After all, if the Nazi Holocaust was morally wrong whether or not anyone thought so -- if Adolf Hitler really was wrong in his belief that genocide was right -- then moral relativism is false and moral objectivism true. Noted Lewis: "People may be sometimes mistaken about [moral truths], just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table."

Morality is real. Elective abortion is wrong, not because we dislike it (though we do), but because it unjustly takes the life of an innocent human being.

Video: Attend the 2012 March for Life

2012-01-11T16:20:00.000-06:00

Please note: The video (since it was created last year) mistakenly says the March begins at noon. It begins at 2:00 p.m. on Sunday, Jan. 22, at the State Capitol in St. Paul.

The state of the pro-life movement in Minnesota

2012-01-09T14:26:00.001-06:00

Even as Planned Parenthood advances its agenda of more abortions through whatever means possible, and even as pro-abortion Gov. Mark Dayton vetoes every piece of lifesaving legislation that reaches his desk, the pro-life movement in Minnesota is making progress. As a result of public education, compassionate support and alternatives for pregnant women in need, and pro-life laws enacted in recent years (notably Woman's Right to Know and Positive Alternatives), the number of abortions has slowly but consistently declined in Minnesota.

Two new articles discuss the state of the pro-life movement in Minnesota. In the Northern Cross, Kyle Eller writes:

Someone scanning headlines about tax-funded abortion and conscience protection and the platforms of the president and governor might imagine the pro-life movement as downcast and dwindling.

But 39 years after Roe v. Wade, the reverse is true. Although it often comes with the caveat that the movement has a long way to go, prolife leaders feel the wind squarely in their sails. ...

"Pro-lifers and activists should be very encouraged," said Jason Adkins, executive director of the Minnesota Catholic Conference, the public policy arm of Minnesota's bishops.

He says public attitudes are changing, and presents polling to back it up. A May Gallup poll analyzed by National Right to Life shows 61 percent of Americans taking a generally pro-life position that abortion should be illegal in all or most circumstances. Only 37 percent took a position generally in favor of legal abortion.

It's true at the state level too, Adkins said. "I think Minnesotans are nice people, and it's not nice to kill babies."

Fewer babies are being killed in Minnesota—and in cities like Duluth and in the United States as a whole.

Bill Poehler, communications director for Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life, said that numbers are going down across the country, that the rate of abortions in Minnesota is the lowest since 1975, and that teen abortions are the lowest ever recorded. ...

Poehler said for the first time in 20 years an abortion facility in the state closed—at Regions Hospital in St. Paul. On the other hand, Planned Parenthood is building the third largest abortion facility in the country in the same city, within walking distance of seven college campuses and right on the rail line.

Joanne Martens, director of the Lake Superior Life Care Center, which served more than 2,300 clients (including 138 abortion-vulnerable women) at locations in Duluth and Superior last year and materially assisted many more, said the organization is getting more volunteers, including younger people. She said the center, which will soon offer ultrasounds for expecting mothers, is also seeing increased referrals from social service agencies that don't identify as pro-life, in part because the Positive Alternatives law passed in Minnesota several years ago has given it more visibility and credibility. ...

Among pro-life groups, there is also an improved sense of collaboration, according to many of those interviewed—something that is not always easy given the number of different organizations and approaches in the pro-life community.

Many leaders explain the change in cultural attitudes simply: Young people have grown up seeing amazing ultrasound pictures of life in the womb, and many have also seen the effect of 50 million abortions since 1973 on women. ...

There have been political victories. Poehler said both the United States and the European Union banned patenting of human DNA, and one large corporation involved in such research ceased operations.

But at the State Capitol, it's tough going. Five pro-life bills were passed last year, some with large, bipartisan majorities, and sent to Gov. Mark Dayton.

"Unfortunately, the governor vetoed them all," Poehler said.

Lacking a veto-proof majority for those measures, Poehler said the 2012 legislative focus will be on the safety of women.

For instance, cases in other states have drawn attention to a lack of regulation for abortion facilities, a situation pro-life leaders say is present in Minnesota. MCCL will be pushing legislation to address that.

Another issue is "webcam abortions," where a pregnant mother is given the abortion medication RU-486 after consulting with a provider in another city by video link, with no physical examination.

Poehler said Planned Parenthood has rolled out the practice to every facility in Iowa and in 2011 started doing them in Rochester, raising concerns that it will also expand in Minnesota and increase the number of abortions.

Poehler said the practice is unsafe, noting RU-486 has already been banned over safety concerns in Canada and that 14 women have died from it. Not being observed means still greater risk, he said, and may involve clients who lack nearby emergency medical care in case of complications.

Read the whole article here. Meanwhile, Scott Noble writes in the Minnesota Christian Examiner.

Number of abortions in the state at record lows, the closing of the abortion clinic at Regions Hospital and the continued move of more people to the pro-life position. These and a host of other factors give Minnesota's pro-life leaders encouragement for the movement and its future.

Two of the state's most well-known and effective pro-life groups—Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life (MCCL) and Pro-Life Action Ministries (PLAM)—have played key roles in advancing pro-life legislation and providing prayer support for the pro-life movement. ...

Even though the closing of the abortion clinic at Regions was good news for pro-life groups, it also highlighted what Scott Fischbach, executive director of MCCL, referred to as a "consolidation" of abortion services in Minnesota.

"Regions shutting down was good," he said. "But it's kind of like the corner grocery store that you had for years and then a big Cub moved in and now the corner grocery store is kind of a waste of time. Regions should have never been involved in abortions. They are a hospital. There's been a consolidation that we've seen in the abortion reports that come out every July. There has been a consolidation in the abortion industry. Planned Parenthood's numbers continue to go up and up and up. Everybody else's are going down." ...

"I think you are seeing, as the younger generation now matures, that they've lived through their friends and their brothers and sisters having gone through or experiencing close at hand people who have suffered from abortions," he said. "And they know it's not the route to take."

One of the reasons for the movement toward more pro-life support, Fischbach believes, is the advancement in technology.

"When Roe v. Wade was decided, we didn't have the neo-natal intensive care units, we didn't have the 3-D ultrasounds, we didn't have the audio of the unborn child's heart beating, we didn't have all of these studies of all of these women for the last 40 years who we now can study the effects that having had an abortion has," he said. "When you begin to put all of that together and you see the effects, different people, different arguments, different facts are going to bring people to the movement."

Read the rest here.

Dear Abby highlights solution to problem of frozen embryos

2012-01-04T17:58:00.000-06:00

In yesterday's "Dear Abby" column, "Deadlocked in New Jersey" asks for advice about the fate of her frozen human embryos. She and her husband used in vitro fertilization and gave birth to two children, and two "excess" frozen embryos remain. Her husband does not believe they can financially accommodate any more children, but "Deadlocked" has moral concerns about having the embryos destroyed.

Abby responds:

This isn't an either/or question. I discussed it with Diane Goodman, the past president of the Academy of California Family Formation Lawyers, who suggests a third option. Your embryos could be donated for embryo adoption by a couple who have been unable to conceive, and who would love to raise them. For more information, you should contact an attorney who specializes in family formation, or contact the Snowflakes Frozen Embryo Adoption and Donation Program. Its phone number is 714-693-5437 and its website is www.nightlight.org.

The biological fact is that human embryos are human beings in the embryonic stage of development. I was once an embryo, and so were you, the reader of this post. Destroying embryos, or donating them to be killed for scientifically dubious research, are not ethical options. Those practices treat intrinsically valuable members of the human family as mere raw material to discard or dissect in order to harvest useful parts.

Embryonic human beings should be given the chance to grow up. But an embryo's genetic mother need not gestate the embryo herself. Embryo adoption, as Abby rightly notes, is a life-affirming alternative, just as regular adoption is a wonderful alternative to the killing of abortion.

I wrote about a personal story of embryo adoption in the January 2010 issue of MCCL News. The article is reprinted below (I have changed the names for privacy).

John and Nicole, a married couple from St. Paul, struggled with infertility. They considered traditional adoption, but felt God leading them to another alternative: the adoption of human embryos.

Embryo adoption offered John and Nicole a chance to experience the joys of pregnancy and birth—and also to rescue young human beings trapped in a frozen state from possible destruction.

Some 400,000 human embryos currently reside in a state of suspended animation, frozen in liquid nitrogen (a process called cryopreservation) and stored in fertility clinics across the United States. They are "left over" from in vitro fertilization (IVF); the genetic parents may choose to implant them at a future date, store them indefinitely, discard them, donate them for destructive research, or donate them to an adoptive couple.

These embryos are not mere tissue, but distinct, living and whole human organisms—members of the species Homo sapiens, like the rest of us, only at a much earlier stage of their development. They are "created in God's image," as Nicole puts it, and ought to be treated with dignity and respect, not farmed for their useful parts for research or simply thrown away.

Through the Snowflakes Frozen Embryo Adoption Program (www.snowflakes.org), John and Nicole were matched with a couple willing to donate their surplus embryos after IVF. John and Nicole agreed to accept all 10 of the couple’s leftover embryos.

The process was similar to that of a traditional adoption, involving a home study and a visit by a social worker. Two embryos were transferred into Nicole in October of 2007. One survived and, after a normal pregnancy, was born as a healthy baby boy the next year. John and Nicole hope to implant more embryos in 2010.

Unlike a traditional adoption, Nicole explains, "There was no guarantee of a baby at the end." Embryos must successfully implant in the mother's uterus and avoid miscarriage; many do not make it.

As with traditional adoption, embryo adoption can be "open" or "closed." To honor the wishes of the genetic parents, details about John and Nicole's son are withheld from this story.

Advocates of embryonic stem cell research, which requires the killing of human embryos in order to derive stem cells, often tout the existence of leftover IVF embryos as a reason to proceed with destructive research. Such embryos would be "discarded anyway," proponents claim.

But they need not be. They can now be adopted by loving families like John and Nicole and allowed to grow up. As Dr. Micheline Mathews-Roth of Harvard Medical School explains, "We should offer these extra embryos to infertile couples to implant and allow them to be born, and not kill them either by experimentation or by disposal."

Embryonic research faces serious scientific obstacles and has yet to benefit human patients; ethical, adult stem cells have already successfully treated patients with more than 70 different conditions.

Couples who have used IVF and now have extra embryos have an "awesome option," John says, to place their embryos for adoption. And couples burdened with infertility can choose to adopt these embryos and give them a chance at life.

"We've had a fantastic experience," Nicole says. "We have a wonderful child because of [embryo adoption]. He was just waiting [in a frozen state]."

She adds: "He's who God had for our family."

For more information about embryo adoption, visit snowflakes.org, embryoadoption.org and embryodonation.org. (HT: Embryo Donation and Adoption Awareness Center)

Responding to the case for legalized abortion in Africa

2012-01-03T16:07:00.001-06:00

Alexis Okeowo argues at the International Herald Tribune that African nations should legalize elective abortion in order to prevent the death of women from illegal abortions ("Africa's Abortion Wars," Dec. 15). The argument fails on two levels.

First, only by assuming that abortion does not unjustly take the life of an innocent human being can Okeowo's case hold any water. For if the human fetus killed by abortion is a rights-bearing member of the human family, like each of us, Okeowo's argument is tantamount to saying that because some people will endanger themselves trying to kill other people, the government ought to legalize such killing. Mary Anne Warren, the distinguished American pro-choice philosopher, explains: "[T]he fact that restricting access to abortion has tragic side effects does not, in itself, show that the restrictions are unjustified, since murder is wrong regardless of the consequences of prohibiting it."

Thus, in resolving the legal question of abortion, the decisive factor is whether abortion is unjust or not. Most Africans believe it is—a position firmly supported by modern embryology together with sound moral reasoning about the dignity and rights of human beings at early developmental stages. African countries have good reasons to maintain laws against elective abortion.

Second, Okeowo is wrong to suggest that legalizing abortion can "solve" the problem of maternal mortality. She offers two statistical examples. "Just two years after abortion became legal in South Africa [in 1997]," she claims, "the number of deaths among pregnant women who underwent the procedure fell precipitously." But whatever the number of abortion-related deaths, the maternal mortality rate as a whole has not improved in South Africa. In fact, it has gotten much worse. According to the 2010 South African Health Review (SAHR), 625 mothers died per 100,000 live births in 2007. This is up from 369 in 2001, and it is double the 1990 rate. The SAHR explains, "South Africa … is actually in the small group of countries where the [maternal mortality ratio] has increased since 1990."

Okeowo says efforts in Ghana (where abortion is broadly legal) to make abortion more accessible led to a "slow" drop in the maternal mortality rate between 1990 and 2008. But she offers no reason for attributing the supposed decline to abortion efforts (abortion accounts for only a small percentage of maternal deaths in Ghana), and the numbers she cites are themselves contradicted by other estimates, which tend to vary significantly. The truth is that despite its long-time policy of legalized abortion and serious efforts in recent years to make abortion "safer" and more accessible, Ghana faces an enormous maternal health challenge. In 2003 the Ghana Health Service developed a strategic plan for the provision of abortion with the goal of reducing maternal deaths, and in 2006 that plan was fully implemented. More than four years later, DailyGuideGhana.com reported, "The country's stringent efforts at reducing [the] maternal mortality rate seem to be failing miserably, as reports indicate that the rate is soaring across the country."

Evidence from around the world shows that maternal mortality is determined mainly by the quality of maternal health care, independent of the legal status of abortion. For example, Chile prohibited abortion in 1989, and subsequently the maternal mortality rate continued to decline significantly; the rate of maternal deaths due specifically to abortion also dropped. Today Chile has the lowest maternal death rate in Latin America. In the developed world, the decline in maternal mortality rates coincided "with the development of obstetric techniques and improvement in the general health status of women" (from about 1935 to the 1950s), according to the World Health Organization. This took place well before the widespread legalization of abortion.

Legalizing abortion in African countries that lack adequate maternal health care would only increase the number of abortions and thereby increase the number of pregnant women exposed to the dangers of abortion. For the sake of both women and their unborn children, abortion should not be legalized and promoted throughout Africa.

Infanticide of disabled newborns: Issues and options

2011-12-28T15:23:00.000-06:00

Back in 1991, J.P. Moreland wrote an article in the Criswell Theological Review titled "Infanticide: Issues and Options," which can be read online here. Moreland is a prolific author (his many books include The Recalcitrant Imago Dei: Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism and Body & Soul: Human Nature and the Crisis in Ethics) and is currently Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology.

From Moreland's article:

Infanticide is not new; various cultures throughout history such as China, Greece, and India have permitted it. Historically, a number of reasons have been offered to justify infanticide: 1) the absolute authority of the father over his family, 2) an abnormal child facing little prospect for a happy life, 3) an unwanted female child, 4) economic considerations, 5) social pressures (e.g., the child was conceived and born out of wedlock) and 6) a child not judged fully human (e.g., seen as a subhuman parasite).

While infanticide has been considered morally permissible in various cultures down through history, it still could not be practiced without justification, and there was a general respect for the human life of infants. This is especially true in cultures which were affected by the Judeo-Christian faith. The first century Jewish philosopher Philo was an opponent of infanticide, and the coming of Christianity, with its emphasis on the inherent value of all human beings since they are made in the image of God, moderated much of the infanticide in the cultures it penetrated.

Today, most of the moral dilemmas regarding the treatment of defective newborns occur in the neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) of hospitals. Increased medical technology has heightened our ability to sustain life and increased the need to sharpen our moral focus regarding the withholding or withdrawing of medical treatment from newborns. ...

Two main issues are involved in the debate about infanticide. First, is it morally permissible to allow a defective newborn to die, and under what conditions is this permissible? Second, if it is morally permissible to permit a defective newborn to die, then is it also morally permissible actively to take the life of that newborn? ...

This article will focus on the first question. Is it morally permissible to permit a defective newborn to die, and if so, what conditions make such an act morally permissible? There are five major views which present different answers to this question. In what follows, each view will be presented followed by an evaluation of its strengths and weaknesses.

The five views regarding the treatment of disabled newborns are these: (A) withhold treatment in light of third-party harms, (B) withhold treatment in light of quality-of-life judgments, (C) withhold treatment judged not in the child's best interests, (D) withhold treatment for defective nonpersons (i.e., newborns are not "persons" and so they do not have a right to life), and (E) treat all nondying infants.

As Moreland shows in his critiques, the first four views suffer from tremendous difficulties and ought to be euthanized. Only the fifth, what Moreland calls the "sanctity-of-life view" (i.e., the pro-life view), withstands serious scrutiny. This position "holds that all infants have equal intrinsic worth and dignity simply because they are human beings, that if it would be wrong to withhold a treatment from a nondefective infant then it is wrong to withhold it from a defective infant, and the only cases where foregoing treatment is justifiable are those where [withholding treatment] in general would be justifiable."

Moreland further explains:

[C]hildren should not be judged as to whether they are defective or not; rather, treatments should be judged as to whether or not they are effective and beneficial. If [withholding treatment] were justifiable in general, then it would be justifiable for a defective newborn: if an infant is terminal or death is imminent; if treatment is judged excessively burdensome, heroic, and extraordinary; and if death is not directly caused or intended, it can be permissible to allow an infant to die. [In such cases we do not kill, but rather allow someone to die a natural death while respecting his or her human dignity.] However, we should not ground nontreatment decisions on the basis of a handicapped condition by itself. That would be discrimination of the worst sort.

The pro-life view, notes Moreland, "preserves our intuition that all human beings have equal and intrinsic worth and dignity by grounding that intuition in membership in the natural kind, humankind"; "avoids the counterexamples, vagueness, and subjectivity inherent in the quality-of-life and the nonperson views"; "places the proper focus of infanticide on the infant alone while preserving the principle of justice which requires that we not discriminate against the weak and helpless"; "accords with the basic conviction that it is simply wrong to kill infants"; and "preserves the respect for life in the family, medicine, and society at large."

Let me briefly mention the second question Moreland posed, which he does not address in his article: whether it is permissible to actively kill a disabled newborn. Given the impermissibility of causing the death of newborn babies by withholding care/treatment on the grounds of disability (explained above), it is clear that actively causing death (such as with a lethal injection) is also impermissible. This second practice, though obviously wrong, is actually advocated for by a number of thinkers, and is disturbingly and openly used in the Netherlands.

Both practices -- killing disabled infants both passively and actively -- are a form of infanticide that is sometimes called child euthanasia. And both are grave moral wrongs in light of the equal dignity and fundamental rights of every member of the human family, regardless of health, disability or "defect."

I recommend reading Moreland's helpful ethical analysis of this crucial life-or-death issue in our culture.

MCCL News now accessible online

2011-12-28T13:12:00.001-06:00

The latest issue of MCCL News (Nov.-Dec. 2011) was mailed to members shortly before Christmas, and is also available for members online.

Stories cover topics including the upcoming Jan. 22 March for Life, the upcoming legislative session, the upcoming Feb. 7 precinct caucuses, the closing of the Regions Hospital abortion clinic, RU486 and "webcam" abortions in Rochester, and the anniversary of the Doe v. Gomez decision. Also included is a "pro-life conversation guide for the holidays" (which should be helpful year-round), posted separately online here.

Become a member to get a subscription.

When Jesus came into the world—and its implications for abortion

2011-12-23T06:04:00.000-06:00

Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. But the incarnation—when "the Word became flesh" (John 1:14)—didn't happen in the manger. It happened some nine months earlier. We know this not just because that's how human biology works, but because the Bible itself says so. (All Scripture below is taken from the English Standard Version).

Mary is said to be "with child" (Matthew 1:18) upon Jesus being "conceived ... from the Holy Spirit" (Matthew 1:20). Earlier, Mary is told she will "conceive in [her] womb ... a son, [to be named] Jesus" (Luke 1:31), who even before birth is called a "child ... [who] will be called holy—the Son of God" (Luke 1:35). In Luke 1:41-44, the unborn John the Baptist (probably near the end of his second trimester in the womb) "leaped for joy" in his mother's womb when he entered the presence of the unborn Jesus (who was probably a several-days-old embryo at the time). Many other passages in Scripture affirm a continuity of personal identity through the life of a human being, from conception until death.

So Jesus was once an embryo and a fetus, just as he was once a newborn baby, a toddler and a teenager. By extension, all adult human beings are the same beings as the fetuses from which they developed, just as they were once also infants, adolescents, etc. To have killed the fetus growing in my mother's womb would have been to kill me.

This has implications for abortion and for how we treat unborn human beings. For each of us has a right to life, and merits basic moral respect, by virtue of who/what we are by nature, and so we have that right to life at all stages of our lives. I matter simply for being me. Thus, it would be wrong to kill my prenatal self by elective abortion, just as it would be wrong to kill my adult self for those same reasons.

Put differently: Given that there is a continuity of personal identity throughout the life of a human being (as shown biblically in the case of Jesus, and as is consistent with our common-sense intuitions), and given that each of us has a right to life simply by virtue of who we are (which is also a biblically-supported position), it follows that each of us has a right to life from the time human beings come into existence at conception.

And that's why abortion is wrong.

Planned Parenthood begins performing abortions at new St. Paul mega-center

2011-12-22T17:38:00.001-06:00

Planned Parenthood's new Minnesota headquarters has now officially opened. Located on Vandalia Street (near University Avenue) in St. Paul's Midway neighborhood, the $16 million, three-story, 46,000-square-foot facility is the largest abortion center in the state and the third largest in the nation.

Thousands of abortions will be performed there every year.

Planned Parenthood's new abortion center

Planned Parenthood has also announced that it will expand the hours at its Uptown (Minneapolis) clinic, which does not perform abortions but refers women to the St. Paul center. The change in hours "allows us to serve even more men, women and teens in the area," says Sarah Stoesz, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota.

Earlier this year Planned Parenthood began offering "webcam" RU486 abortions at its Rochester, Minnesota, clinic -- a particularly dangerous method of abortion for pregnant women, but one that is sure to increase Planned Parenthood's abortion total and revenue. (MCCL's just-updated brochure on RU486 webcam abortions is now available online; to order copies, contact us by email or call 612.825.6831.)

Planned Parenthood in Minnesota increases its abortion numbers to record highs virtually every year, even as the total number of abortions in Minnesota has slowly declined.

What Christmas tells us about human dignity

2011-12-22T15:00:00.003-06:00

Last Christmas I posted excerpts from a piece by Carson Holloway in Public Discourse. They are worth re-posting. Holloway writes:

I would suggest that the ethical core of Western Civilization—or at least a key principle by which it distinguished itself from what it regarded as savagery and barbarism—is respect for the dignity of humanity and of the individual human person. This is the moral principle underpinning the more obvious institutional characteristics such as the rule of law, constitutionalism, limited government, and division of social authority among various centers of power. All of these expedients share a common aim: limiting the power of some people over others, and especially limiting the power of the strong over the weak. This aim in turn is informed by the sense that all people deserve such protection, that they all possess a certain dignity that ought not be abused.

The celebration of Christmas has been a powerful teacher of the dignity of the human person. For Christians, Christmas is the feast of the Incarnation—the celebration of the moment when God became a man in order to live among men. It shows that God thought of human beings as worthy of being saved, and that he sought to save them by taking on humanity in a perfected form, thus opening the way to their own perfection. Christian belief in the Incarnation is thus inseparable from belief in the objective, and even transcendent, value of the human race as a whole, and of each human person as an individual.

Belief in the Incarnation further implies a certain egalitarianism that has also been important to Western Civilization. According to Christian teaching, all are sinners, and none can claim to be fundamentally superior to others in this important respect. Conversely, and more positively, God wanted to save all people, of all ranks, from their sins and to open the way to a lofty destiny for them all. Thus the Christian understanding of the Incarnation has been important in fostering the West's sense that, whatever social order may require in terms of hierarchy and rank, there is an irreducible moral equality of all human beings: all are owed a certain respect, even the lowliest among us.

Moreover, the story of the Incarnation, the Christmas story, emphasizes this equality and powerfully presents it to the imagination. As the story goes, the God who became man chose to be born into a family of no outstanding social importance, one supported by a man who had to work with his hands. Jesus was born in circumstances of poverty, and his birth was first announced not to the princes of the earth but to the ordinary shepherds to be found at hand. As he grew to manhood and carried out his public mission, Jesus chose to continue to live, work, and teach primarily among the common working people of the world. According to the Christian story, God teaches not only by his doctrines but by his actions that all men are equal in their fundamental human dignity.

Another observation: Jesus came into the world in the same condition all of us do, first as a zygote, embryo and fetus, then as a newborn baby in the manger. He came into the world in the most vulnerable and needy condition imaginable -- evidence, I think, that dependency is completely irrelevant to the dignity of human beings, who deserve profound respect and protection at all stages of life and in all conditions.

In implementing ACA, vulnerable lives need to be protected

2011-12-22T13:47:00.003-06:00

The following news release was issued yesterday, Dec. 21, 2011.

ST. PAUL — Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life (MCCL) supports efforts for Minnesota to create the health insurance exchange required by the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

"We firmly believe that an exchange created by our state, for our state, will be immensely better than one imposed on us by the federal government," said Scott Fischbach, MCCL Executive Director. "The time is now to get this work done."

The ACA allows states the flexibility to make determinations about the health insurance exchange required under the law, so it best fits the state’s needs as well as complies with federal law. To avoid being forced into the federally-administered exchange, Minnesota must prove by Jan. 1, 2013, that it will have an operational exchange by the Jan. 1, 2014, deadline.

Detailing part of the exchange requirements, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released a bulletin on Dec. 16 providing guidance on establishing an essential benefit set for individual and small group plans. The guidance allows states to choose the essential benefit set from among the largest existing insurance plans in the state. By selecting one of the state-specific plans, Minnesota is afforded the opportunity to set the benchmark of essential health benefits for our state.

According to the ACA, maternity and newborn care must be included in any package of essential health benefits. By also excluding abortion coverage, Minnesota would move in a positive direction toward offering protections for the unborn that the ACA does not. Additionally, safeguarding against denial of care based on age, "quality of life" or degree of disability would protect Minnesota's elderly and disabled citizens from the threat of rationing.

When the ACA was passed in 2010, MCCL and other pro-life organizations opposed it because of its disregard of reasonable protections for our nation's most vulnerable citizens, including the unborn, the disabled and the elderly.

"Despite our opposition, the ACA has become law, and while we hope that it will be repealed or struck down, we believe it is vitally important to continue our efforts to protect our state's most vulnerable citizens, even under the confines of this deeply flawed law," Fischbach said. "By ensuring that no one is denied care because of age, disability or quality of life, we can work to build a health care system that doesn't discriminate against our state’s oldest and most vulnerable citizens."

University wins award for fending off human cloning limitations

2011-12-21T12:08:00.001-06:00

The University of Minnesota has won a national award for its efforts to defeat legislation that would have prohibited human cloning for biomedical research (or for any other reason). On its website, the University boasts:

On October 4th the University of Minnesota Stem Cell Institute was awarded a prize for Public Advocacy at the World Stem Cell Summit, Pasadena, California.

The prize was in recognition of the role the Institute played in defeating legislative attempts in the State of Minnesota to ban somatic cell nuclear transfer: a technique used in certain types of stem cell research.

The prize was accepted by Stem Cell Institute Director, Dr. Jonathan Slack. He said "This is an award for the whole University of Minnesota. The Communications Office of the Academic Health Center did great work organizing the campaign, and there was good backing from the leadership of both the University and the Mayo Clinic. The role of patient advocacy organizations and the business community in Minnesota was also critical, and we are very grateful to them."

The University is referring to MCCL-backed legislation to prohibit the cloning of human organisms (via the cloning technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer, or SCNT), which easily passed the Minnesota Legislature this spring but was vetoed by Gov. Mark Dayton. (Also vetoed was legislation to continue an existing ban on state funding of human cloning.)

The University did indeed work vigorously against the proposed human cloning ban. But it did not do so admirably, honestly and ethically -- the way one would hope an important public institution would advocate for its views. Rather, it did so very dishonestly and apparently without shame. That sounds like hyperbole or wild political rhetoric, but it's not, as we've documented here repeatedly throughout the course of the debate.

For example, University researcher John Wagner claimed in a Star Tribune op-ed that legislation banning human cloning was "a full-scale assault on stem cell research" and would "criminalize lifesaving work at the University of Minnesota." But the bill would not have affected any stem cell research -- or any other current or pursued work -- at the University, as the University had admitted in testimony and even to the media. And to call the University's non-existent cloning work "lifesaving" is simply absurd, as anyone familiar with the failure to date of so-called "therapeutic" cloning knows. Never in his op-ed did Wagner explain what the bill actually did. He clearly led readers to believe it would prohibit existing embryonic stem cell research (it would not, as he elsewhere admitted). He never mentioned SCNT (cloning), the sole subject of the legislation.

In his op-ed and in a longer piece with his colleague Meri Firpo, Wagner carefully avoided using the correct scientific term for the entity from which embryonic stem cells are derived. (It's called a human embryo -- that is, a human organism at the embryonic stage of development.) The University misled regarding the nature of somatic cell nuclear transfer and cloning -- at least, those few times when it admitted that SCNT was involved. And never did the University offer a serious ethical justification for human cloning or embryo killing. That, I suppose, would first require being honest about the practice whose ethical status we are evaluating.

On its website today, the University makes some of the same obviously false statements, claiming that defeat of the bill preserved "lifesaving research." And in its announcement of the award for "public advocacy" (quoted above), the University says SCNT is "used in certain types of stem cell research," a misleading claim at best. The University is not pursuing SCNT, and stem cells have never been successfully derived from SCNT-produced human embryos -- though researchers recently derived (therapeutically useless) stem cells from abnormal cloned embryos produced using a modified SCNT process.

Jonathan Slack, the Stem Cell Institute director, said at a University event opposing the human cloning ban: "It isn't the business of legislators to decide what researchers can do." Arrogant. Ridiculous. Utterly thoughtless.

So how did the University win its award? Persistent deception of the taxpaying, University-supporting public in order to preserve the possibility of deciding at some point in the future to create cloned members of the human species to then kill by harvesting their useful parts, a practice that seems less and less to have any potential therapeutic value whatsoever. As the University boasts of an award for its slimy politics, no benefits of embryo-destructive cloning research are in sight.

In this regard, Minnesotans can only be ashamed and embarrassed of our state's flagship University.

A pro-life conversation guide for the holidays

2011-12-17T15:11:00.000-06:00

Note: A shorter version of this piece appears in the current (Nov.-Dec. 2011) issue of MCCL News. Included in the text are numerous hyperlinks to other blog posts and articles that provide further information.

The holiday dinner table offers a natural forum for congenial (hopefully!) conversation about current events and issues. Defenders of unborn human life should be prepared to take advantage of opportunities when they arise. Here are some suggestions to help you effectively discuss abortion with family members and friends who may not share the pro-life view.

(1) Know how to clarify the issue

When faced with an argument or reason for abortion, ask yourself whether it works to justify killing obvious examples of rights-bearing human beings, such as newborn babies, toddlers, teenagers and adults. If not, it assumes that the being killed by abortion, the unborn (i.e., the human embryo or fetus), is not an intrinsically valuable human being, like toddlers and teenagers—that is, it simply assumes the very conclusion it must defend.

For example, a woman should not have a "right to choose" to drown her toddler in the bathtub. The question at hand is whether the unborn, like a toddler, deserves full moral respect and ought not be killed for the convenience or benefit of others. If so, killing the unborn by abortion, like killing a toddler for the same reasons, is a serious moral wrong.

(2) Know how to articulate the pro-life argument

The pro-life position is that elective abortion unjustly takes the life of an innocent human being. This position is supported by modern science (showing that what abortion kills is a human being, a member of our species) together with a foundational moral principle (the equal fundamental dignity and right to life of every member of the human family).

The science of embryology tells us that the unborn from conception is a distinct, living and whole human organism—a member of the species Homo sapiens, the same kind of being as each of us, only at a much earlier stage of development. This fact is uniformly affirmed by embryology textbooks and leading experts.

Morally, no relevant difference exists between human beings before and after birth. Unborn humans differ from older humans, such as newborns, in their size, level of development, environment and degree of dependency—remember the helpful acronym SLED—but none of those differences are significant in a way that would justify killing the former. For example, a five-year-old child lacks the physical and mental abilities of a 10-year-old, but she is no less valuable and deserving of respect and protection.

Each of us has a right to life by virtue of what (i.e., the kind of being) we are, rather than because of acquired characteristics or abilities that only some human beings have and others do not. So all human beings, including the unborn, are equal in having basic dignity and a right not to be killed without just cause.

(3) Know how to respond to common objections

Rape and incest account for less than one percent of abortions, so they cannot be used to justify the vast majority of abortions. Regardless, the circumstances of someone's conception have no bearing on his or her moral status as a human being; an innocent child should not be killed for the crime of her father. Moreover, evidence shows that abortion only worsens the psychological trauma of a sexual assault victim.

Claims by abortion advocates about the number of women who died from illegal abortions are wildly overstated, as NARAL co-founder Dr. Bernard Nathanson frankly admitted. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 39 women died from illegal abortion in 1972, the year before Roe v. Wade, while 24 died from legal abortion (abortion had been legalized in some circumstances in some states). Maternal mortality improved in the decades preceding Roe as a result of advances in modern medicine having nothing to do with legal abortion.

If you cannot answer a challenge, don't let it fluster you. Be honest and say you will get back to the challenger after thinking and reading more about the issue. Contact MCCL for help.

(4) Know facts about fetal development

In addition to knowing that the life of a human organism, a human being, begins at conception (see above), it is useful to know some details about the development of human beings in the womb. These facts bring home for many people the humanity of the unborn child. For example, the heart begins to beat about three weeks after conception, before many women even know they are pregnant. At about six weeks, brain waves can be detected. By 20 weeks, a wealth of evidence indicates that unborn children can experience excruciating pain.

The stunning complexity of prenatal human development is "beyond any comprehension of any existing mathematics today," says renowned medical imaging expert and mathematician Alexander Tsiaras.

(5) Know how abortion can hurt women

The health risks of abortion, both physical and psychological, are very well documented. Familiarize yourself with a few facts.

For example, many studies suggest that abortion can increase a woman's risk of breast cancer. Moreover, while no one ultimately regrets not having an abortion, many, many (though of course not all) women now deeply regret their decision in favor of abortion. A 2011 meta-analysis published in the prestigious British Journal of Psychiatry—"the largest quantitative estimate of mental health risks associated with abortion available in the world literature"—found an 81 percent increased risk of mental health problems among women who have had abortions.

(6) Know about alternatives to abortion and compassionate support for women

Both motherhood and adoption are ethical, life-affirming options. Some 3000 pro-life pregnancy care centers across the United States stand ready to help pregnant women in need. Many programs are available to help women and others deal with the aftermath of abortion.

(7) Be winsome

Pro-lifers must be kind, respectful, fair-minded and willing to listen and respond thoughtfully to those who disagree. Don't call someone "pro-abortion" in conversation, since it is usually inconsistent with how he sees his position and can turn him off to productive dialogue. Show compassion toward pregnant women facing difficult circumstances and women who have undergone abortions.

(8) Ask questions

Instead of relying just on blunt assertions—and putting the burden of proof on yourself—ask strategic questions to poke holes in someone's position and get him thinking. Make him defend his claims. For example, if he says a baby becomes a person after birth, ask how a mere trip through the birth canal, a shift in location, can change who/what someone is or whether or not she has a right to life. If a pro-choice advocate says he is personally opposed to abortion but thinks it should remain legal, ask why he is opposed; note that the reason for personal opposition (abortion kills a human being) is precisely the reason abortion should not be permitted under law. (I recommend the "tactical approach" developed by Greg Koukl and used in Ch. 9 of Scott Klusendorf's The Case for Life.)

You probably won't change someone's mind on the spot. But you can have a friendly conversation and give him or her something to think about. That should be your goal.

Send comments and questions to blog@mccl.org.

Pro-life news in Minnesota: December 2011

2011-12-16T04:59:00.000-06:00

A few facts that every pro-life Minnesotan should know (especially as families gather for the holidays, sometimes discussing current events and issues):

Among the major candidates now competing for the 2012 Republican nomination for U.S. president (Romney, Gingrich, Perry, Santorum, Bachmann, Paul and Huntsman), all take a pro-life position. By contrast, the future nominee's opponent in the general election, Pres. Barack Obama, is a committed advocate of abortion on demand and has compiled a lengthy track record of policies promoting and expanding abortion.

Regions Hospital in St. Paul stopped performing elective abortions this month. This good news is tempered by the fact that other abortion providers, particularly Planned Parenthood, are eager to make up the difference.

Planned Parenthood's new headquarters in St. Paul is scheduled to open this month. It will be the state's largest abortion center, and the third largest abortion center in the nation.

Planned Parenthood this summer began doing "webcam" abortions at its Rochester, Minn., clinic. It marked the first time that Planned Parenthood in Minnesota has performed abortions outside of St. Paul. The webcam abortion method is particularly dangerous for pregnant women and will allow Planned Parenthood to expand its reach and increase the number of abortions it performs. (MCCL's just-updated brochure on RU486 webcam abortions is now available online; to order copies, contact us by email or call 612.825.6831.)

Embryonic stem cell research company Geron Corp. recently abandoned its work with human embryos. It is the latest setback for unethical research that requires the killing of embryonic human beings; such research has resulted in no medical benefits, while ethically-derived adult stem cells have successfully treated many thousands of human patients.

The annual MCCL March for Life will be held on Sunday, Jan. 22, at 2 p.m. at the state Capitol in St. Paul. It is the anniversary of the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that imposed a nationwide policy of abortion on demand. If you live in Minnesota, please make sure to attend.

Other upcoming events include the start of the 2012 state legislative session in January (MCCL will be there advocating for pro-life legislation) and the precinct caucuses on Feb. 7 (attend to elect pro-life delegates and offer pro-life resolutions). Both are previewed in the new (Nov.-Dec. 2011) issue of MCCL News.

To stay informed, be sure you are receiving MCCL News (become a member to get subscribed) and are following this blog.

Sixteen years of state-sponsored abortion in Minnesota

2011-12-15T15:13:00.000-06:00

The following news release was issued today, Dec. 15, 2011.

Doe v. Gomez, MN Supreme Court's abortion-on-demand decision, costs taxpayers $17 million for abortions

ST. PAUL — More than 54,000 unborn babies have been killed in Minnesota with taxpayer funds since a Dec. 15, 1995, Minnesota Supreme Court ruling required taxpayers to fund abortions, according to the Minnesota Department of Human Services (MDHS). The Doe v. Gomez ruling established the most extreme abortion-on-demand policy in the nation.

"The Doe v. Gomez ruling by a handful of activist judges has been disastrous for Minnesota women and their babies," said Scott Fischbach, Executive Director of Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life (MCCL). "On this 16th anniversary of the decision, Minnesotans continue to believe it is not the mission of the state to abort thousands of innocent unborn children each year, yet that is exactly what is happening under this radical ruling."

The Supreme Court's Doe v. Gomez decision established a new state constitutional "right" to abortion on demand. This supposed right would remain protected by the state Constitution even if Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision legalizing abortion in the United States, were to be overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Doe v. Gomez allows abortions for reasons such as "stress" or "discomfort." It forbids the state to "interfere" in any way with a woman's "decision making" about abortion.

Doe v. Gomez also obligates the state—and thus, taxpayers—to pay for abortions, something not required by the U.S. Supreme Court. From June 1994 (under a previous ruling) through 2009, state taxpayers paid more than $17.2 million for 54,802 abortions, according to MDHS. In 2009 alone (the most recent statistics available), state taxpayers paid $1.58 million for 3,933 abortions (MDHS). The state does not report how many women have been hurt or killed from these abortions.

While the total number of abortions in the state is declining slightly, taxpayer funding of abortions has risen nearly every year since 1995. Minnesota taxpayers now pay for almost 32 percent of all abortions performed in the state.

"This is not the will of the majority of Minnesotans, who oppose abortion on demand, and it is not the function of state government to fund the destruction of its most powerless innocent citizens," Fischbach said. "The Court took away the people's ability to decide whether they want abortion on demand in the state and whether they should be required to pay for others' elective abortions. It's time for change in Minnesota."

No relevant difference: A simple argument against abortion

2011-12-14T14:17:00.001-06:00

Since you, me, toddlers, teenagers, etc., have basic rights, and since there is no morally relevant difference (that is, relevant to whether one has basic rights) between us and human beings at earlier, prenatal developmental stages, it follows that unborn humans also have basic rights. This precludes killing them for the reasons that people have elective abortions ("unwantedness," convenience, economics, disability, etc.), just as our rights-bearing status precludes killing us for those same reasons.

The disputed premise is that there is no morally significant difference between unborn and already-born human beings. But consider the differences. Size doesn't matter, since big people are not more valuable than small people. Development doesn't matter, since a five-year-old girl is not less deserving of moral respect than her more-developed older brother. Location (in the womb or out) doesn't matter, since one doesn't become something or someone different by driving from Minneapolis to St. Paul. Dependency doesn't matter, since we may not kill breast-feeding newborns, parasitic uncles or people reliant on kidney machines or pacemakers. Intelligence doesn't matter, since smart people don't have more rights than dumb people. Appearance doesn't matter, since the "elephant man" was still, after all, a man. The sentiment of others doesn't matter, since a shunned and reclusive leper ought to be treated with dignity.

Philosophers who defend abortion offer more sophisticated criteria for excluding unborn human beings from the community of rights-bearing persons. But these differences don't matter morally either. The capacity to suffer doesn't matter, since people with congenital insensitivity to pain are still people. The possession of desires doesn't matter, since a Buddhist who succeeds in eliminating every desire retains his right to life. The capacity for self-awareness doesn't matter, since infants and temporarily comatose people should be respected and protected, not killed when we think it is in our best interest.

The strenuous intellectual efforts in recent decades to find some plausible exclusionary criterion have simply failed, as the recent work of philosophers like Francis Beckwith, Patrick Lee, Christopher Kaczor, Christopher Tollefsen and Robert George makes clear. Unless someone can find reason to think there is some actually relevant difference between unborn human beings and older, unquestionably-rights-bearing human beings, this "argument from no relevant difference" holds, and elective abortion is wrong.

What babies learn in the womb

2011-12-14T07:24:00.000-06:00

At CNN.com, Annie Murphy Paul, author of Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives, writes:

Starting a few years ago, I began noticing a dazzling array of findings clustered around the prenatal period. These discoveries were generating considerable excitement among scientists, even as they overturned settled beliefs about when we start absorbing and responding to information from our environment. As a science reporter -- and as a mother -- I had to find out more.

This research, I discovered, is part of a burgeoning field known as "fetal origins," and it's turning pregnancy into something it has never been before: a scientific frontier. Obstetrics was once a sleepy medical specialty, and research on pregnancy a scientific backwater. Now the nine months of gestation are the focus of intense interest and excitement, the subject of an exploding number of journal articles, books, and conferences.

What it all adds up to is this: much of what a pregnant woman encounters in her daily life -- the air she breathes, the food and drink she consumes, the chemicals she's exposed to, even the emotions she feels -- are shared in some fashion with her fetus. They make up a mix of influences as individual and idiosyncratic as the woman herself. The fetus treats these maternal contributions as information, as what I like to call biological postcards from the world outside.

By attending to such messages, the fetus learns the answers to questions critical to its survival: Will it be born into a world of abundance, or scarcity? Will it be safe and protected, or will it face constant dangers and threats? Will it live a long, fruitful life, or a short, harried one?

The pregnant woman's diet and stress level, in particular, provide important clues to prevailing conditions, a finger lifted to the wind. The resulting tuning and tweaking of the fetus's brain and other organs are part of what give humans their enormous flexibility, their ability to thrive in environments as varied as the snow-swept tundra in Siberia and the golden-grassed savanna in Africa.

The recognition that learning actually begins before birth leads us to a striking new conception of the fetus, the pregnant woman and the relationship between them.

The fetus, we now know, is not an inert blob, but an active and dynamic creature, responding and adapting as it readies itself for life in the particular world it will soon enter. The pregnant woman is neither a passive incubator nor a source of always-imminent harm to her fetus, but a powerful and often positive influence on her child even before it's born. And pregnancy is not a nine-month wait for the big event of birth, but a crucial period unto itself -- "a staging period for well-being and disease in later life," as one scientist puts it.

Read the rest.

(HT: Right to Life of Michigan)

The exceptional Tim Tebow is a testament to the exceptionality of human life

2011-12-13T10:14:00.000-06:00

Tim Tebow might be the most talked-about and "polarizing" figure in professional sports right now. It stems from experts' criticism of his unorthodox throwing technique, his remarkable ability to lead comeback victories week after week regardless, and perhaps above all the startling (for so many) authenticity of his faith, and commitment to living those convictions and upholding those admirable principles in every area of life. (Tebow's habit of giving thanks on the football field has sparked an enormously popular internet meme called "tebowing.")

Tebow also stirred quite a bit of controversy almost two years ago, when he was still in college, by appearing in a subtly pro-life Super Bowl commercial with his mother, Pam Tebow. The short ad itself is completely innocuous,* but behind it is Pam's story of how a doctor in the Philippines (where she and her husband were missionaries) urged her to have an abortion after she contracted amoebic dysentery, a potentially deadly condition. The Tebows refused to have the abortion, and Pam and her unborn child both almost died at various points during the very difficult pregnancy. "Your child is a miracle baby," said the attending physician after the child was born. "I can't explain how it happened, but despite all odds, he beat them. Only a small part of the placenta was attached, but it was just enough to keep your baby nourished all these months."

Tim Tebow, right, with Vikings quarterback Christian Ponder

That baby, Tim, went on to win the Heisman trophy (given to the most outstanding college football player in the nation) and two national championships as quarterback for the University of Florida. Now he's compiled a 7-and-1 record this season as starting quarterback for the NFL's Denver Broncos, including five come-from-behind victories. The team started the season 1-and-4 before Tebow took the reigns (he began the season on the bench). As a recent New York Times editorial puts it: "Tebow has made his team believe in winning and has forced commentators to backpedal ... Tebow is lowly rated statistically except in the fourth quarter. Then he delivers miracles after unabashedly citing Proverbs 27:17 to his mates in the locker room."

Meanwhile, Pam Tebow has been speaking all across the country, using her personal story and national platform to advocate against abortion and for the sanctity of human life in the womb. She recently spoke at a banquet for New Life Family Services, a pro-life pregnancy center network here in Minnesota.

The Tebows' story is powerful, in part, because it focuses our attention on the fact that the fetus developing inside Pam Tebow in 1987 was the very same being who, for example, defeated the Minnesota Vikings on Dec. 4, 2011. So to have killed that fetus, as the doctor recommended, would have been to kill Tim Tebow. Indeed, each of us was once a fetus, and then a newborn, a toddler and so forth. And as Pam says: "A child's right to life begins at conception, not at birth. From conception, all children are people, made in the image and likeness of God."

Abortion isn't wrong because Tim Tebow became a great person and a famous athlete (some of us become terrible people). Abortion is wrong because it kills an innocent human being, the unique kind of being who by nature has the capacity to love, to learn, to think, to achieve, to do good works, to be creative -- whether or not that capacity is developed and actualized. The exceptional life and success of Tim Tebow merely exemplify the exceptionality of humanity itself.

---------------
* Guess who weirdly called for a boycott of the Tebow Super Bowl ad? Mark Dayton, unswerving abortion advocate, now governor of Minnesota.

The University of Minnesota should take an ethics class

2011-12-10T00:37:00.000-06:00

The University of Minnesota is set to offer a new undergraduate course dealing exclusively with stem cells. Although it will be a science class, one part will be about stem cell history and probably touch on the ethics of destroying human embryos for their stem cells. From the Minnesota Daily story by Rachel Raveling:

Discussion of using human embryonic stem cells for anything is naturally going to attract moral concerns, [Jeffrey Simon, a genetics, cell biology and development professor who will teach the course] said.

But he said the cells never come from an embryo that was fertilized in a woman.

Simon explained that most human embryonic stem cells used in research were donated and created in culture dishes in a lab, similar to how in vitro fertilization centers make fertilized embryos for couples who struggle to get pregnant naturally.

To clarify: There is no such thing as a "fertilized embryo" (that's like calling a 16-year-old a "fertilized teenager"). An egg is fertilized, resulting in a new human organism at the embryonic stage of life. The human embryos used for research are created through in vitro fertilization (IVF) for infertile couples, but are then donated to researchers. The embryos are destroyed in order to derive embryonic stem cells.

I'm not sure if Simon is stating an ethical position, as the author implies. If he is, he appears to think that the fact that an embryo is created through IVF somehow changes what it is and/or how it may be treated. But whether created through natural fertilization or IVF, the resulting organism is exactly the same. And location (inside a woman's body or out) is utterly irrelevant to whether an embryonic human being may be intentionally killed and instrumentalized for the possible benefit of others.

The University of Minnesota itself, as an institution, has taken a bold position on the ethics of killing human embryos. Not only is the University currently conducting embryonic stem cell research, it has strongly supported legislation to provide taxpayer funding for that research and to sanction human cloning (a different means of creating human embryos for destructive research). This past spring the University vigorously opposed both a proposed ban on human cloning and a measure to continue the existing ban on taxpayer funding of human cloning. Both bills easily passed the legislature but were vetoed by Gov. Mark Dayton.

But never, to my knowledge, have University scientists and spokespersons offered a serious ethical justification for embryo killing and human cloning, the latter of which would entail the creation of young members of our species specifically in order to kill them for research purposes. Rather, the University has persistently -- indeed, shamelessly -- misled the public about legislation, cloning, embryos and therapeutic potential.

Perhaps a new ethics course would be helpful.

The moral status of unborn human beings

2011-12-08T21:08:00.001-06:00

The following first ran in the Sept.-Oct. 2011 issue of MCCL News.

Many sophisticated defenders of abortion concede that the unborn (the human embryo or fetus) is a living organism of the human species (as a matter of scientific fact), but deny that he or she bears a right to life. That is, unborn human beings do not have the moral status of a "person," as you and I do—someone with intrinsic moral value and basic rights who ought not be killed without just cause.

To have such a status, these abortion defenders argue, one must possess certain acquired properties and/or be able to function in a particular way. Philosophers have proposed a variety of different criteria, including consciousness, self-awareness, sentience, desires and rationality. But such criteria fail to justify excluding some human beings from the community of rights-bearing persons.

Function v. being

The fundamental mistake is basing human value on characteristically-human functions rather than on simply being the sort of entity from which those functions arise (i.e., a human being). People who are asleep or unconscious do not function as persons generally do (in many respects), but they are still persons with dignity and a right to life. Abortion defenders typically reply that it is the capacity to function in particular ways (e.g., self-awareness, rationality) that is morally important, not that one is currently functioning in those ways, and unborn human beings lack such a capacity.

But there is a sense in which unborn humans do have a capacity for higher mental functions, albeit in radical or "root" form. By virtue of being a human being—a member of our species—they have the natural capacity to develop themselves by a self-directed process to the stages at which the functions characteristic of persons can be exercised, whether or not that development is obstructed by injury, disease or death. Humans have this capacity by nature.

To exclude the unborn, then, abortion defenders contend that inherent human capacities must be developed (to some extent) and perhaps immediately (or nearly immediately) exercisable in order for a human being to merit full moral respect. But this position is untenable.

Three fatal flaws

First, the proposed criteria seem inescapably arbitrary and ad hoc. The present capacity for any particular function is merely the development of a human being's underlying basic capacity for that function. But what degree of development of a basic capacity is necessary, and why? How can a mere difference in degree, rather than in kind, serve as the basis for radically different treatment (i.e., whether one has a right to life or not)? Moreover, what qualities (self-awareness, rationality, ability to feel pain, etc.) are morally relevant in the first place? Why do some qualities matter and not others?

Second, the properties that are said to confer moral worth come in varying degrees, and this entails that moral status is also a matter of degree: since some people possess more of the requisite higher mental functions than others (e.g., have developed those capacities to a greater extent), some people are more valuable than others. A 10-year-old child, then, probably has greater worth and a greater claim to life than his four-year-old sister. This position destroys any basis for equality among persons.

Third, the proposed criteria—whatever they are—inevitably exclude obvious examples of valuable persons, as many thought experiments and real-life examples confirm. They may, for example, exclude mentally handicapped or temporarily comatose people. And because newborn babies lack the immediate capacity for various higher mental functions, a number of thinkers who defend abortion also defend the permissibility of infanticide. Some believe that babies do not become "persons" meriting full respect until months or even years after birth, when they finally acquire the property or ability that the thinker in question deems relevant. But this conclusion is clearly wrong.

Conclusion: Human equality

For these three reasons, among others, it is false that we have our fundamental dignity and right to life by virtue of acquired properties possessed by some human beings but not by others. Rather, we have our dignity by virtue of what (i.e., the kind of entity) we are, and thus we have that dignity from the time we come into existence at conception. So every human being, irrespective of age, size, ability, stage of development and condition of dependency, ought to be treated with full moral respect.

A look at Planned Parenthood's new MN abortion headquarters

2011-12-06T23:24:00.000-06:00

The new headquarters of Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota is scheduled to open this month. Located near University Avenue in St. Paul's Midway neighborhood, the $16 million, three-story, 46,000-square-foot facility will be the largest abortion center in the state and the third largest in the nation. Planned Parenthood will perform both surgical and non-surgical (RU486) abortions there.

Here's how the new abortion center currently looks (click the photo to enlarge). Probably more than a third of all abortions in Minnesota -- some 4,000 per year -- will take place in this building.

Pro-lifers don't have the money that Planned Parenthood and other abortion advocates have (much of it from us taxpayers), but we will work that much harder to educate Minnesotans, change hearts and minds, help pregnant women in need (Planned Parenthood certainly doesn't), and pass legislation that will save lives from abortion. The stakes are too high to do otherwise.

Misguided, shamefully deceptive push for embryo-destructive research collapses

2011-12-05T19:06:00.000-06:00

A new Daily Caller story by Neil Munro provides a very good overview of the political debate over embryo-destructive research, including the "utter disgrace" (to use the words of Princeton's Robert George) of those who wildly overhyped the therapeutic potential, the increasingly-obvious failure of that research, and the triumph of ethical stem cell alternatives that have treated many thousands of patients. Here's how it begins:

The Democrats' decade-long strategy of hyping embryo stem cell research crashed into a hard fact on Nov.15. That's when Geron Corp., the world's leading embryo research company, announced it was closing down its much-touted stem cell program, despite the guarantee of more government aid from Democratic-affiliated sources.

The political battle waged over embryonic stem cell research burst onto the front pages in 2001, when many reporters and scientists began touting stem cells as medical miracles that would offer cures for Alzheimer's, diabetes, Parkinson's and other diseases.

From 2000 onwards, "Democrats and liberals were hyping the research absurdly," Princeton professor Robert George, a member of President George W. Bush's Council on Bioethics, told The Daily Caller. "There was no real prospect of therapeutic uses of [Geron's] embryonic stem cells."

University of Pennsylvania bioethics professor Art Caplan [who supports embryo-destructive research] agreed. "Companies like Geron tried to attract investors by over promising."

Social conservatives and some liberals were appalled by the prospect of companies, such as Geron, manufacturing embryos so their parts could be sold to the highest bidder. Democrats, however, eagerly used the prospect of miracle cures to lure sick voters and retirees, flatter professionals and stigmatize conservatives as being anti-science.

Read the rest.

Just recently, Dr. Ian Wilmut, the scientist who famously cloned Dolly the sheep, suggested that new, better (and, I would add, ethical) stem cell approaches are making embryonic stem cells obsolete.

Despite all the clarifying developments of recent years, scientists at the University of Minnesota used worn-out scare tactics and misinformation last spring to argue that taxpayer funds should be available for human cloning for the purpose of embryo-destructive research. Because of a veto by Gov. Mark Dayton, a human cloning advocate, the University won that battle, for now.

Stuck on the slippery slope

2011-12-01T05:14:00.000-06:00

In defense of late-term abortion, Ann Furedi, head of Britain's largest abortion-providing organization, says:

There isn't any profound point at which you can say there is a difference between one kind of fetus and another. ...

So if we think [early abortion is] a morally wrong or morally coarsening thing to do, then I think we should oppose abortion right from the very earliest weeks. If we don't think that, then we have to ask ourselves, very clearly, who decides when late is too late? ...

I would really question why, if there is no objective reason, no objective sudden value change, we need to intervene and create a point at which we apparently have the right to override a woman's own subjective decision-making process. Because actually, any definition of late abortion is arbitrary and subjective.

Furedi seems to be saying that because there are no morally significant differences between human fetuses at different stages in the womb, and since (she thinks most people believe) the abortion of early fetuses is morally permissible, then it is also the case that the abortion of late fetuses is permissible.

But one could also argue that because there are no morally significant differences between fetuses at different stages, and because (most people do in fact believe) the abortion of late fetuses is impermissible, then it is also the case that the abortion of early fetuses is impermissible.

Furedi herself, I assume, believes there is a point in human development at which a human being ought not be killed. That point is probably birth. Furedi would surely not want to legalize the killing of toddlers or teenagers for the reasons that people have late-term abortions. But if it is wrong to kill toddlers, and if there is no morally significant difference between toddlers and human beings at earlier developmental stages, such as fetuses, then it is also wrong to kill human fetuses.

Thus, to hold both that killing toddlers is impermissible and killing fetuses is permissible, Furedi must hold that there is some relevant difference between the two. She has already said that there is no morally significant milestone at any point in prenatal development. But it's not clear how any point in early post-natal development is any more plausible as a moral dividing line. (There is no essential change, but rather a seamless continuum of development of an enduring organism.) And birth can hardly be said to be relevant, since it is merely a change in location, not in the nature of the developing human being. As abortion/infanticide-defending philosophers Peter Singer and Helga Kuhse write, "The pro-life groups are right about one thing: the location of the baby inside or outside the womb cannot make such a crucial moral difference. We cannot coherently hold that it is all right to kill a fetus a week before birth, but as soon as the baby is born everything must be done to keep it alive."

So, ironically, Furedi's argument undermines her position of support for abortion. Her opposition to killing toddlers and other already-born human beings must rationally lead to opposition to killing unborn human beings, for birth is clearly "arbitrary and subjective" as a criterion for deciding who we may and may not kill.

Video: A mother's letter to her aborted child

2011-11-30T20:28:00.001-06:00

The following video was created by a high school student, using the text of an actual letter written by a post-abortive woman to her unborn child.

Does having a brain make one a person? Does sentience?

2011-11-29T23:16:00.000-06:00

Someone said recently that a human fetus cannot be considered deserving of full moral respect until he or she develops a central nervous system and cerebral cortex. But imagine a rational, intelligent alien race whose physiology is radically different than ours. These aliens are clearly persons who ought to be treated as such, but they do not have brains or nervous systems.

The abortion defender clarified that it is not the nervous system or brain itself that matters morally, but what it allows someone to do: experience pain and pleasure (i.e., have a kind of sentience, the capacity for pain/pleasure). But imagine again an alien race, this time one that -- though in every other way like us -- cannot experience feelings. (Think, to use an imperfect example, of the Vulcans of Star Trek.) Or imagine a person whose brain has been surgically altered to prevent the experience of pain and pleasure. Or consider people with congenital insensitivity to pain, a real condition. If these people are nevertheless people, beings who ought not be killed without just cause, then sentience is not necessary for one to be a person with a right to life.

Moreover, many non-human animals (probably including some insects) have a capacity to suffer pain and enjoy pleasure, but that fact does not necessarily preclude killing them, for they do not have the moral status of persons. So sentience seems neither necessary nor sufficient for a being to have full moral worth.

In addition, some people have more sentience than others, and a person can become more or less sentient. As Christopher Kaczor observes, "The kung fu master can put his arms around a burning cauldron ... The proverbial princess cannot stand the pea under her multiple mattresses." If moral worth depends on sentience, then some people are more valuable than others, and a person can become more or less valuable and deserving of respect.

Consider a clear-cut example: A man gets in a car accident and suffers permanent brain damage, but not enough to prevent him from functioning as a typical member of society. Nevertheless, some of his mental faculties have been slightly diminished. If those mental faculties are what confer moral worth, then he has become less valuable and less deserving of protection from being killed.

If this conclusion is false -- as anyone committed to the basic equality of all persons must hold -- then it is not true that moral worth depends upon having sentience, much less a brain or central nervous system. (Go here to learn about the only rationally sustainable basis for moral worth.)

Planned Parenthood tells 17-year-old it doesn't offer prenatal care

2011-11-28T17:30:00.000-06:00

At the blog of Bound4Life, Susan Tyrrell tells the story of a 17-year old girl named "Addison" who became pregnant. Addison's parents sent her to Planned Parenthood, an organization they knew little about. (Presumably, it helps one "plan parenthood," right?) Tyrrell writes:

After a home pregnancy test told her she was pregnant, Addison and her fiancé headed to the Houston Planned Parenthood for a blood test. There were no freebies for uninsured Addison here; her fiancé had to pay $70 for the blood test, and they told her the charge first thing, she says. But that wasn't the part that drove her off.

After sitting in the waiting room for two hours, Addison was not allowed to have her fiancé come back with her for the test, despite telling them she was uncomfortable and hated needles. He had to stay in the front waiting room while Addison was taken to a back room, then an exam room where she waited another hour before a Planned Parenthood employee came in with a list of questions for her, asking how many sexual partners she had, details of her sexual relationship with her fiancé, and other things. Then she asked Addison the magic question.

"Do you want to have an abortion if you're pregnant?" When Addison told her no, the woman said: "Well, you are only seventeen. You really need to make sure you're ready for parenting and consider abortion."

But Addison was opposed to abortion, and it had ever even occurred to her to consider abortion.

When they called later to confirm she was pregnant, they said, "We know you said you didn't want an abortion in your visit today, but we wanted to make sure that is still the case?"

"I said I did not want an abortion and hung up," Addison says. But she called back for help:

"The same day I called them and told them that I had a blood test and it confirmed pregnancy, and I needed to see if I could see a doctor about prenatal care and what I could and couldn't do, and what would keep the baby healthy. They then told me that unless I had a sexually transmitted disease or wanted an abortion that they could no longer help me. I said so y'all do not help pregnant women? They told me no that they didn't have doctors for pregnant women."

Sadly, Addison discovered that the 6-story building that advertised itself as a women's health center and claimed to care for uninsured women was really there for abortion, STD treatment and birth control.

She says she thought to herself, "I thought this was Planned Parenthood, not once-you're-pregnant-we-can't-help-you."

Ultimately, she ended up at a hospital with cramps, and found out she was 10 weeks along instead of the 4 she thought, but the baby didn't make it. Addison lost her baby to a miscarriage later that month.

Addison grew up fast last month. Not only did she find herself a pregnant college freshman at 17, but she found out behind the name Planned Parenthood were a bunch of folks who only wanted her to plan her parenthood if it meant killing her baby. All the ads about health care for uninsured women went right out the window. "Choice" to these workers really meant "Choose to abort your baby or choose to stop seeing us for treatment."

Read the entire story, which, Tyrrell points out, is far from an isolated event.

Regions Hospital in St. Paul to stop performing abortions

2011-11-26T12:15:00.000-06:00

Regions Hospital in St. Paul announced yesterday that it will stop performing abortions after Dec. 9. The hospital performed 545 abortions last year, according to the Minnesota Department of Health -- a number that has dropped in recent years consistent with a statewide trend of fewer abortions. From the Pioneer Press story:

Regions said the closure is consistent with a broader trend of moving services to non-hospital settings. Hospital spokesman Jeff Shelman said he would not comment on whether the hospital bowed to pressure from anti-abortion groups that have protested the service at Regions over the years. ...

"A lot of folks within the pro-life community would not access the good things that Regions does, because (the hospital is) also involved in abortion," said Scott Fischbach, executive director of Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life, a group that opposes abortion rights.

This is clearly great news, even though other abortion providers will try make up the difference. Planned Parenthood, in particular, is set to open a huge new abortion center in St. Paul. From the story:

"Community-based providers are available for women seeking confidential abortion care services," said Chris Boese, vice president of patient care at Regions, in a news release. "We're confident that patients will find the care they need from providers in our community."

The closure comes as Planned Parenthood of Minnesota -- the state's largest abortion provider last year -- is scheduled to open a new facility next month on University Avenue in St. Paul. The decision by Regions should not create an access problem for local women, said Jen Aulwes, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood.

"We're really confident that women are going to be able to get the services they need," Aulwes said.

In addition to its new abortion center, Planned Parenthood has begun doing "webcam" abortions at its Rochester, Minn., clinic -- another means of increasing abortions and counteracting the pro-life trend in our state.

Why pro-lifers should be thankful

2011-11-22T16:31:00.000-06:00

President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving an official national holiday on Oct. 3, 1863. In the midst of the horror of the Civil War, precipitated largely by the great evil of slavery, Lincoln (quite amazingly) wrote:

The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. ...

No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American people.

I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and union.

Despite the continuing scourge of abortion and occasional setbacks to our cause, pro-life advocates have every reason to be thankful on this Thanksgiving. We should be grateful for many lives saved, hearts and minds changed, and pregnant women in need helped. We should "commend to His tender care" unborn children and all those affected by the tragedy of abortion, and "fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it ... to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and union."

And we should give thanks for the breathtaking privilege of working for the great cause of justice of our time. We stand for human rights and equality and against the unjust killing of more than one million innocent human beings in our nation every year. It is an honor.

Geron abandons embryo-killing FDA trials

2011-11-18T15:41:00.001-06:00

By Scott Fischbach

We live in such a loud and noisy world that sometimes the news that is most important gets lost. In recent weeks some major developments have been taking place in the battle to protect living human embryos from so-called scientists who want to dissect and kill them.

If you remember back to the last Minnesota legislative session, officials with the University of Minnesota released a phony report claiming that creating and killing human embryos would become a great cash cow for our state. I laughed out loud when I read the U of M's phony claims, but there were some in the media and a few in the Legislature who actually believed them!

The U of M's scheme to fame and riches was to dissect and kill living human embryos and clones, own the patents to the genetic material and sell them at great profit to grow a whole state industry built on the deaths of the innocent embryos. In addition to fame and riches, the U of M claimed it would create cures for just about anything and everything that has ever afflicted humankind. Honestly, the story the U of M spun rivaled some of the best that Disney has ever offered.

Enter reality. No one has ever been cured of anything by killing human embryos. Killing human embryos kills human embryos — that is all it does. No cures, no cash, no fame and no glory … just dead human embryos. Four days ago the first FDA-approved clinical trial on stem cells derived from killing human embryos was abandoned! Not only did the company, Geron, abandon the clinical trials, it is giving up its entire stem cell program! The New York Times reported on it here.

A little more reality. The new U.S. Patent Law just enacted prohibits the patenting of any human organisms; embryos, clones, cells, etc., are all off limits. The "cash cow" of royalties from patents? Gone!

The global reality. The European Union judicial system just echoed the new U.S. Patent Law when it decreed that there would be no patenting of human genetic materials in the EU, either.

We can only hope that the U of M and its so-called researchers who support the creation and killing of human embryos will come out of the lab long enough to get a healthy dose of reality. Creating human life just to kill it will bring them no fame, no money, no cures, no royalties — just dead, innocent human beings.

A Catholic-Mormon dialogue on embryo rights and stem cell research

2011-11-17T16:48:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I attended an event titled "Embryo Rights and Stem Cell Research" at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis. The highly distinguished speakers were Carter Snead, a law professor and Director of the Center for Ethics & Culture at Notre Dame, and Lynn Wardle, a law professor at Brigham Young University. Both have dealt extensively with bioethics. (Snead, in particular, formerly served as general counsel for the President's Council on Bioethics and as permanent observer for the U.S. government with the Council of Europe's Steering Committee on Bioethics, and he is currently serving on UNESCO's International Bioethics Committee.)

Prof. Snead at St. Thomas, Nov. 16

The speakers approached the topic from two different religious perspectives. Prof. Snead, a Catholic, noted the Catholic position and explained how it is affirmed by principles accessible to people of any or no faith, apart from any special revelation. Snead explained that modern embryology shows that the human embryo is a human being, a living member of the human species; moreover, human dignity requires respect and protection for human beings at all developmental stages. He noted that attempts to distinguish human beings who are "persons" (and therefore deserving of respect) from those who are "nonpersons" (who may therefore be instrumentalized and killed) utterly fail and are radically inconsistent with the normative principles of equality and justice.

Research that requires the killing of embryonic human beings -- namely, embryonic stem cell research -- is unjust and should not be allowed or funded, Snead concluded. This position is correctly taught by the Catholic Church and many other religious traditions, but it is grounded in science and reason. Ethical alternatives to embryo-destructive research, including research with adult stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells, should be encouraged. (For more from Snead, see his excellent essay "Protect the Weak and Vulnerable: The Primacy of the Life Issue.")

Prof. Wardle, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS), discussed Mormon views concerning prenatal human life. The official Mormon position on abortion, he said, has consistently been one of very strong opposition, except in a few rare circumstances. Most Mormons embrace the sanctity of human life, he said. There is certainly a diversity of views and practices among LDS members, as there is among members of almost any religious tradition, but the Church teaching on abortion is clear.

The official Mormon position on embryonic stem cell research, however, is "no position," Wardle explained, and he offered some possible reasons for -- and defended -- the Church's reluctance to weigh in on the matter. But Wardle himself opposes embryo-destructive research, as he opposes abortion, and agreed with the pro-life view articulated by Snead. He said that adult stem cell research is "far more promising" in its potential for producing medical benefits, and suggested that it should be favored over embryonic research even just on utilitarian grounds.

Snead and Wardle help show that the pro-life movement is a broad coalition of groups and individuals from diverse perspectives, united in affirming the self-evident truth that all members of the human family are equal and endowed with an inalienable right to life.

Update: For some reflections on yesterday's event, see this post from Elizabeth Schiltz.

Study: Unborn child affected by mother's psychological state

2011-11-17T16:20:00.000-06:00

A Nov. 11 story in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal:

Science has learned that a developing fetus receives messages from the mother, everything from hearing mom's heartbeat to the music she might direct toward her belly. But a new study in the journal Psychological Science suggests that the fetus can pick up on signals and respond to a mother experiencing depression.

Researchers at the University of California-Irvine recruited pregnant women and checked them for depression before and after the mothers delivered their babies. They also tested the babies after delivery to see how their development was progressing.

What appeared to matter most, according to their finding, was a consistent environment. The babies who fared best were those born to mothers who were either not depressed both before and after birth, or those who were depressed both before and afterwards. When mothers' moods shifted from to depression to healthy or from healthy to depression, the change appeared to slow development of their babies.

Authors said the finding should not be taken as an indication that depressed mothers should be left that way during pregnancy, but rather that they should be treated when they first show signs of depression.

"We believe the human fetus is an active participant in its own development and is collecting information for life after birth," said Curt A. Sandman, one of the authors and an emeritus professor of psychiatry and human behavior at UC-Irvine. "It's preparing for life based on messages the mom is providing."

Does the prevalence of early miscarriage cast doubt on the status of human embryos?

2011-11-16T21:06:00.000-06:00

An abortion-related discussion recently popped up at National Review Online, mostly pertaining to a statement by Robert VerBruggen suggesting that the prevalence of early spontaneous miscarriage, or natural embryo loss, casts doubt on whether human embryos are in fact bearers of basic rights.

The argument is somewhat common, but it simply doesn't work. First, the estimates often cited of the percentage of embryos who die naturally are probably much too high. Many early "miscarriages" appear to involve the product of a faulty fertilization, such as a complete hydatidiform mole (a kind of disordered growth), rather than a new embryonic organism. In such cases, no actual human embryos are lost. (George and Tollefsen cite embryology textbooks to support this claim on p. 137 of Embryo.)

Second, regardless of how many embryos die from miscarriage, that fact does not justify abortion or embryo-destructive research. It does not follow that if some unborn human beings die by natural causes, it is therefore permissible to ourselves intentionally cause the death of unborn human beings. For example, the fact that a natural disaster, such as an earthquake, claims the lives of thousands of people does not justify a massacre. The fact that my father could die from a heart attack at any moment does not justify his murder.

Indeed, the reality of miscarriage simply has no bearing on the moral status of human embryos (i.e., how they ought to be treated), just as the reality of high infant mortality throughout most of human history (probably higher than today's rate of miscarriage) had no bearing on the moral status of infants. Nor does the high rate of death from AIDS in Africa call into question the worth and dignity of those affected by that terrible disease. In fact, as Francis Beckwith points out, a full 100 percent of people die at some point in time, but they are people nonetheless, and ought to be treated as such.

Third, VerBruggen and some others say that if pro-lifers really believed that embryos are valuable human beings, they would promote research to find ways to prevent early miscarriage. But at best this shows that pro-lifers are inconsistent; it does nothing to refute the pro-life position that human embryos deserve full moral respect. Moreover, society does try to stop miscarriage insofar as it might be possible. Yuval Levin notes:

A great deal of medical research (much of it funded by the NIH these days) has also gone into better understanding the causes of early miscarriages and finding ways to prevent them. Almost all early embryo deaths happen before the mother even knows she's pregnant, so it wouldn't really be possible to do much to prevent them, but those that occur later are very often found deeply regrettable by the families involved, to put it mildly, and a huge amount of effort and money are spent (by individuals and by our society as a whole) trying to prevent them.

In addition, natural death is morally different than unjust killing, and our obligations to prevent unjust killing may not be equivalent to our obligations pertaining to natural death. As Beckwith writes, VerBruggen's argument "confuses our obvious prima facie moral obligation not to commit homicide (that is, to intentionally kill an innocent human person) with the questionable moral obligation to interfere with natural death of a human person in every instance." Christopher Kaczor adds:

Just as there is no moral requirement to make extraordinary efforts to attempt to restore health to elderly human beings, we need not make extraordinary efforts to attempt to restore health to human beings in their embryonic state. An affirmation of the dignity of all human life simply does not imply that one must always make every effort to save every human life, regardless of the burdens involved or the likelihood of success. Even though every human life has intrinsic value ... it does not follow that every proposed treatment is worthwhile or valuable. ...

If we did [emphasis added] know exactly who was going to have a miscarriage and when, and if we had effective and nonburdensome ways to save this endangered life [we obviously do not currently], then the pro-life view would entail that we would have a prima facie obligation to try to save the human being in utero, and indeed a great many people would vigorously try to do this—including many people who suffer from infertility problems.

So it seems clear that the pro-life movement is not acting inconsistently. Regardless, defenders of abortion and embryo-destructive research will have to do the hard work of actually showing that embryonic human beings do not merit basic moral respect and thus may be killed for the convenience or theoretical benefit of others. Appealing to miscarriage does absolutely nothing to support their view.

Next 24 hours only: Double your gift, help save lives

2011-11-16T00:01:00.000-06:00

Today, Nov. 16, is Give to the Max Day in Minnesota. All donations to MCCL through GiveMN.org over the next 24 hours (until 12:00 a.m., Nov. 17, central standard time) will be doubled (up to $25,000), thanks to some very generous matching donors. Please go here to give right now.

Other benefits of giving today include:

A $1,000 Gold Ticket will be given to a random donor's charity every hour. You can increase our odds by donating several times throughout the day. They do not need to be large donations!

GiveMN.org will draw the name of one lucky donor to win the Grand Gold Ticket — adding $10,000 to their donation.

Your donation could help put MCCL on the Leader Board to win $7,500, $10,000 or even $15,000 for the most dollars donated.

Every donation today will further the work of ending the unjust killing of innocent human beings (on a breathtaking scale) and restoring respect and protection for human beings at all developmental stages and in all conditions. Few issues or concerns in our society today are more important than this.

Please help us with this crucial mission. Thank you.

A unique visualization of human development before birth

2011-11-15T11:35:00.000-06:00

In the video embedded below (also viewable here), Alexander Tsiaras, a renowned medical imaging expert, presents a unique visualization of human development from conception until birth. Note how often he uses words and phrases like "beyond our comprehension," "marvelous," "incredible" and "the magic of us." Tsiaras says that the complexity of prenatal human development is "beyond any comprehension of any existing mathematics today."

Facial expressions in the womb

2011-11-11T17:27:00.001-06:00

"Whatever the fetus is feeling, at 20 weeks she is certainly capable of demonstrating lots of facial expressions. 4D scans have revealed babies not only grimacing but also seeming to smile and even laugh." -- Peter Tallack, In the Womb (National Geographic)

These images are from the Endowment for Human Development (which is not a pro-life organization). See more fetal facial expressions here.

On Nov. 16: Double your gift, save lives

2011-11-10T16:11:00.001-06:00

Dear Friend of Life,

Wednesday, Nov. 16, is Give to the Max Day. For the third consecutive year, you will have a unique opportunity to maximize your support of MCCL's life-affirming work.

Last year, pro-life Minnesotans raised $40,000 for MCCL in just 24 hours, thanks to many dedicated pro-life individuals and a very generous $20,000 matching gift from an MCCL donor. This year we have an opportunity to do even more for life!

Through the generosity of several partner leaders in giving, all gifts given to the MCCL Education Fund through GiveMN.org on Wednesday, Nov. 16, will be matched — up to $25,000!

Give to the Max Day can amplify your giving impact in other ways as well:

Win a Golden Ticket. $1,000 will be given to a random donor's charity every hour. You could be that donor! Increase our odds by donating several times throughout the day.

Be the lucky donor to win the Grand Golden Ticket! GiveMN will draw the name of one lucky donor — adding $10,000 to their donation.

Put us on the Leader Board. Your donation on Nov. 16 will help to put MCCL on the Leader Board to win $7,500, $10,000 or even $15,000 for the most dollars donated.

To further our pro-life work and to increase the impact of your donation, Give to the Max! Visit MCCL's page at GiveMN.org on Wednesday, Nov. 16, and make your lifesaving contribution. Thank you!

Leo F. LaLonde
President

UN General Assembly told that every nation must legalize abortion

2011-11-03T11:55:00.000-05:00

New report from the Special Rapporteur on Health makes false claims in support of expanding abortion

By Paul Stark and Jeanne Head

On Oct. 24 the United Nations' Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, Anand Grover, presented his latest report to the Third Committee of the UN General Assembly in New York. Mr. Grover’s report explicitly calls for every nation to "decriminalize abortion" on the grounds that abortion restrictions violate the right to health protected "by international human rights law." The report drastically exceeds the Special Rapporteur's mandate and is fraught with inaccuracies.

Mr. Grover had bypassed the Human Rights Council in Geneva by sending his report directly to Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, who transmitted it to the General Assembly, stating that he had the "honour" of doing so.

After the Special Rapporteur's presentation at the Oct. 24 meeting, the report was praised by the European Union countries, Norway, South Africa and the United States. Several pro-life countries strongly objected: Chile, Swaziland, Egypt, Honduras and The Holy See.

Egypt's delegate criticized Mr. Grover's "systematic attempts to reinterpret internationally agreed conventions." The delegate from Swaziland noted that the report largely ignores the Special Rapporteur's mandate. Rather than concentrating on health-related issues such as hunger and disease, the report focuses on a "non-existent right to abortion."

The Holy See said the report is simply wrong in claiming that abortion restrictions violate the right to health. In fact, the delegate explained, "the very opposite is the case: abortion is itself a violation of the right to health both of the unborn child and of the mother." Chile's delegate emphasized the importance of recognizing the right to life of all human beings, including the unborn.

It would be a mistake to assume from the number who intervened in opposition to Mr. Grover's report that every other country supports it, particularly those whose laws provide protection for unborn children. Since the meeting last week, contacts made so far with delegates from more than 35 of the pro-life countries revealed that all disagree with the new document.

In his report, Mr. Grover claims: "Criminal laws penalizing and restricting induced abortion are the paradigmatic examples of impermissible barriers to the realization of women’s right to health and must be eliminated." The report goes even further by condemning a number of modest regulations of abortion, including informed consent laws, parental involvement requirements, bans on government funding of abortion, and protections of the conscience rights of pro-life health care workers. These measures "serve to reinforce the stigma that abortion is an objectionable practice," Mr. Grover complains.

The report also alleges that legal restrictions do not significantly influence the incidence of abortion, and that they serve only to make the procedure less safe, leading to health complications and death for many women.

The Special Rapporteur and his supporters are wrong on all counts. An important new document called the San Jose Articles, drafted by international experts and introduced at the UN headquarters in New York on Oct. 6, notes with extensive evidence that "there exists no right to abortion under international law, either by way of treaty obligation or under customary international law." Mr. Grover is blatantly wrong to suggest otherwise.

On the contrary, international law protects the dignity of every human being, including the unborn. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states, "Every human being has the inherent right to life." The Convention on the Rights of the Child says children require "appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth." The science of embryology shows that the human embryo or fetus is a distinct, living and whole organism of the human species; therefore, he or she is due the same respect and protection as every other member of the human family. The killing of unborn human beings by abortion should not be permitted.

Mr. Grover's report is also mistaken about the effect of abortion laws on the incidence of abortion: Legalizing abortion has the clear consequence of increasing the number of abortions that occur. Moreover, worldwide evidence shows that legalized abortion does nothing to solve the problem of maternal mortality, which can only be addressed by improving maternal health care—a crucial goal that the Special Rapporteur only mentions in passing. Women in developing countries need better medical care throughout pregnancy, at delivery and postpartum. They do not need abortion.

Abortion, in fact, poses serious physical and psychological risks to pregnant women, whether it is legal or illegal. These risks are exacerbated in countries where basic health care is lacking; the legalization of abortion in such countries—triggering an increase in demand—will likely lead to more women suffering and dying from abortion. The above facts are explained in more detail in "Why legalized abortion is not good for women's health," produced by Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life Global Outreach and the National Right to Life Educational Trust Fund.

Rather than focusing on ways to improve maternal health, Mr. Grover and others at the United Nations are pushing a radical agenda to promote and expand abortion all around the globe. This agenda must be opposed for the sake of women and their unborn children.

Paul Stark is Communications Associate for Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life Global Outreach (MCCL GO). Jeanne Head, RN, is Vice President for International Affairs and UN Representative for National Right to Life. This article was first published at National Right to Life News Today.

MCCL's legislative vote scoring explained

2011-11-02T16:31:00.001-05:00

Many people recently have had questions about MCCL's legislative vote scoring. With the completion of our most recent (2011) Legislative Accountability Rating (LAR), this seems an opportune time to explain our scoring system, including why we score votes and how we decide which votes to score.

MCCL has been using the LAR since at least 1981. Its purpose is simple—to compile an easy-to-decipher record of how each legislator voted on issues of importance to the pro-life movement in order to hold legislators accountable for their votes. The audience for the LAR is MCCL members, the pro-life individuals who generously give to MCCL because they believe that LIFE is the most important issue.

MCCL has consistently scored various life-related issues including abortion and end-of-life legislation, as well as issues that affect the ability of MCCL to be successful, such as campaign finance changes.

We recognize that in order to successfully pass legislation into law, it is important to follow the entire legislative process. Therefore, in addition to scoring final passage votes, we also score committee votes, amendments and procedural votes. Before each scored vote, MCCL lobbyists make every effort to inform legislators of their intent to score the vote and, of course, to provide an explanation of why the vote is important to pro-lifers. Because we can't always anticipate what will be happening, it isn't always possible to reach every legislator prior to a vote, but we have always prided ourselves on being forthcoming with legislators about these important issues.

Success in the legislative process also demands strategic thinking and strategic action on the part of legislators. For this reason, MCCL has at times scored votes on legislation that does not include pro-life language, but, with sufficient legislative gumption, could be used as a fitting vehicle for pro-life legislation. An example of this occurred in 1998, when MCCL asked legislators to vote against a conference committee report, resulting in the bill being sent back to committee where abortion reporting requirement language was added that became law. This law has since been used to ascertain accurate abortion numbers and the circumstances which lead to abortion—information that was used to show the need for the hugely successful and life-saving Positive Alternatives grant program.

Holding legislators accountable, even in difficult circumstances, can prove to be life-saving for the unborn and vulnerable.

At times, legislators become frustrated at the high standard reflected in the LAR. As a single-issue organization, MCCL has the luxury of looking at legislation through just one lens—a luxury that elected officials do not possess. The standard that MCCL holds is one that our members insist on—it is why they are MCCL members—and that standard is to always prioritize life. Thus, in order for legislators to have a 100% pro-life score on the LAR, they must make life their number-one priority on every vote they cast.

A mark of less than 100% does not mean that a lawmaker is not pro-life, but it does mean that he or she took one or more votes that did make life the first priority.

Our LAR doesn't play "gotcha" politics with legislators or political parties. It is an honest look at who voted with the unborn and other vulnerable human beings as their top priority at every opportunity. The pro-life movement has had many friends who haven't achieved the perfect 100% standard at times—friends who, because of their efforts, have saved the lives of many.

But when they don't achieve 100%, we don't provide excuses and we are deeply disappointed. These individuals remain our friends, but when life isn't the top priority, lives are lost, and the consequences are deadly serious.

We look forward to the opportunity to work with them again to pass life-saving, pro-life legislation and hold out hope that the next time they are asked to make life the #1 priority, they will.

0-for-history: The track record of 'human non-personhood'

2011-11-01T11:05:00.000-05:00

Defenders of abortion and embryo-destructive research argue that unborn human beings do not bear a right to life -- that is, to use the popular term, they are not "persons," beings deserving of basic moral respect, like you and me.

There are many (decisive, it seems to me) reasons against supposing that only some members of the human species are "persons" (and, as such, ought not be killed except arguably in very narrow circumstances, such as just war or self-defense) and other members of our species are not (and thus may be killed for the convenience or possible benefit of others). But here is an additional consideration.

Often throughout human history some human beings have classified other human beings as "non-persons" who may therefore be treated without the dignity and respect that is owed to persons. Blacks, Native Americans, Jews, women and many more groups have at times been excluded from the human family and mistreated (or worse), their fundamental rights as persons denied. And every single such occurrance in history -- every instance of deciding that some human beings are not persons bearing basic rights -- is now almost universally considered a horrific moral mistake that led to utterly horrific consequences. Every single time, without exception.

Really?

But pro-choice bioethicists and philosophers think that the streak has finally ended, for they have at long last, against all odds, found some human beings who don't count as persons and whom we may kill and discard for our convenience, or if we think harvesting their parts might be interesting or useful.

Really, people? (They are people, I take it.) History should give them more than a little pause.

'The unheralded gains of the pro-life movement'

2011-10-31T19:23:00.000-05:00

In a cover story for the Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes writes about the state of the pro-life movement. Some excerpts:

That the pro-life movement is bigger is a given. It's also younger, increasingly entrepreneurial, more strategic in its thinking, better organized, tougher in dealing with allies and enemies alike, almost wildly ambitious, and more relentless than ever.

All that is dwarfed by an even bigger change. Pro-lifers have captured the high moral ground, chiefly thanks to advances in the quality of sonograms. Once fuzzy, sonograms now provide a high-resolution picture of the unborn child in the womb. Fetuses have become babies.

Abortion advocates were among the first to understand how this would alter the debate. Two pro-choice leaders, Kate Michelman and Frances Kissling, acknowledged three years ago that "antiabortionists" had gained a significant advantage. Supporters of abortion, they wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "have had a hard time dealing with the increased visibility of the fetus." To "regain the moral high ground," they must deal with "a world that is radically changed from 1973," when the Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion nationwide.

Pro-life groups, unlike advocates of easy access to abortion, have proved adept in accommodating to this new world. They've begun piling up successes. In 2011 alone, 24 states have enacted 52 new restrictions on abortion. Five now require an ultrasound before an abortion, two insisting that the screen be viewable by the mother. Four bar abortions after the baby is able to feel pain (at approximately 20 weeks). Eight have opted out of Obamacare. Five ban abortions by webcam (in which a doctor, not in person but videoconferencing with the mother, prescribes pills to induce abortion). Six trimmed or eliminated funds for Planned Parenthood, the nation's largest abortion provider. Texas led with a $64 million cut. ...

Three pro-life trends have spiked in 2011. The first is the rise in opposition to abortion among young people. The under-30 cohort was the most pro-choice in the 1970s, second most in the 1980s and 1990s. Now they're "markedly less pro-choice" than any other age group, scholars Clyde Wilcox and Patrick Carr have written. "Clearly, something is distinctive about the abortion attitudes of the Millennial Generation of Americans."

Indeed there is. Millennials haven't grown more religious, politically conservative, or queasy about gay rights. Nor do they go out of their way to vote for pro-life candidates. But they tend to see abortion as a human rights violation. Thus their resistance to abortion is gradually increasing.

You can see a manifestation of this generational shift at the March on Washington each January 22, the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade ruling. For years, the marchers were geezers, initially Catholics, then aging Protestants too. In the past few years, the march has been dominated by teenagers and people in their 20s, often carrying infants.

The second trend is the explosive growth of refuges for pregnant but unmarried women. These safe houses go by a multitude of names: Crisis Pregnancy Center, Pregnancy Resource Center, Pregnancy Health Center, Pregnancy Care Center, or simply Pregnancy Center. ...

They all do the same thing, nurturing single women during their pregnancy and recommending against abortion. The results are one-sided: 80 to 90 percent of the women who have sonograms at pregnancy centers choose to have their baby.

Today there are nearly three times as many of these centers (2,300) as abortion facilities (800 to 850). One reason for the disparity is that women stay for months in pro-life centers, but only briefly in abortion clinics. The Care Net network reflects the growth: 550 centers in 1999, 1,130 today. ...

[L]anguage gymnastics and euphemisms reflect the forlorn condition of the pro-choice flock. They're worn out. Many are in despair. Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, told Newsweek of her anguish as she watched last year's March on Washington. "I just thought, my gosh, they are so young," she said. "There are so many of them, and they are so young." Today, zeal and confidence and perseverance in the abortion battle are all on the antiabortion side. "There are more pro-lifers now, and they're more determined," says Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life. ...

Fetal pain is another issue that has invigorated the pro-life movement in recent years. Improved ultrasound revealed to doctors that at around 20 weeks an unborn child reacts visibly to pain. "All the neurological equipment is present at 20 weeks," according to Teresa Collett, a professor at the University of St. Thomas Law School in Minnesota and an expert on fetal pain. Fetal pain was recognized, Collett says, as an "independent basis for a state to protect the life of a child." In Nebraska last year, the first law was passed barring abortions after an unborn baby begins to sense pain. Mary Balch of National Right to Life (NRL) played a key role in drafting the Nebraska statute. ... Fetal pain laws focus on the suffering of the baby ... And who in the pro-choice lobby is eager to gainsay the pain experienced by an unborn child? Dispute it and you'll come across as cruel. ...

[R]eal gains have been achieved by the pro-life movement and many, many lives have been saved—in 2011 alone. And bigger gains are bound to come as more babies are spared the abortionist's knife.

Read the entirety of Barnes' piece.

MCCL Fall Tour Special Edition: Help save lives

2011-10-28T14:00:00.000-05:00

The 2011 MCCL Fall Tour has ended after 39 pro-life educational meetings in towns all across the state of Minnesota. If you were unable to attend a meeting, the MCCL News special edition for Fall Tour attendees is now available to our members online.

The issue includes an outline of the Fall Tour presentation, a message from MCCL President Leo LaLonde, stories of pregnant women helped by the Positive Alternatives program, a calendar of 2012 events, and an extensive action list of ways that you personally can make a difference and help save lives from abortion, euthanasia and embryo-destructive research.

If you are not a member, you can join MCCL today by making a donation to our lifesaving work. To donate, go to our website or contact MCCL at MCCL@mccl.org or 612-825-6831. Thank you.

The most important political issue in America today

2011-10-27T15:23:00.000-05:00

If the pro-life position is true, then abortion is the most important political issue in America today. There's no getting around it. But I believe many pro-life voters do not properly recognize or understand this clear implication of their own view.

In the case of abortion, our government has legalized and sanctionedthe intentional killing of a class of innocent human beings. At stake,then, is the equal fundamental dignity and right to life of every member of the human family. This isunlike any other issue or concern in American society today (exceptingthe other right-to-life issues of embryo-destructive research andeuthanasia). In no other area are some human beings placed outside theprotection of the law and allowed to be killed for any reason.

Moreover,abortion is the leading cause of human death in the United States.About 1.2 million innocent human beings are unjustly (yet legally)killed by abortion every year. So both the gravity and scale ofthe abortion problem make it the most important (domestic, at the very least)political issue. This conclusion is inescapable if thepro-life position is true.

Voters should prioritize accordingly.

Video: Fact, not opinion, about RU486 abortion

2011-10-26T16:45:00.000-05:00

The following video shows a fictional consultation between a doctor and a woman seeking an RU486 (chemical) abortion. Unlike most such consultations, this abortionist is honest and factually accurate. The nonprofit educational organization behind the video, the Human Development Resource Council, has provided medical documentation backing up every statement the abortionist makes.

(HT: Josh Brahm)

David Frum's confusion over the legal question of abortion

2011-10-25T17:16:00.000-05:00

David Frum, author, commentator and former aide to Pres. George W. Bush, writes:

But the political debate over abortion is not a debate over morality. It is a debate over legality.

Today's pro-life movement goes beyond arguing that abortion is immoral to argue that abortion should be punishable. Morality and punishability are two very different categories. ...

It is the demand that abortion be punished that divides America so passionately.

Of course, it is true that what is rightly kept legal is not necessarily ethical, and that what is rightly prohibited is not necessarily unethical. But it is also obvious that the legal question of abortion is hugely dependent on the ethics of abortion. If abortion is a morally trivial act, then it is difficult to see why government should interfere (beyond regulations for the health of women, etc.). But if abortion is the unjust killing of an innocent human being -- like, say, the intentional drowning of a toddler in the bath tub -- then abortion is precisely the sort of practice that almost everyone agrees should not be permitted by law. Indeed, prohibiting abortion would be necessary to fulfill perhaps the most foundational and uncontroversial purpose of government: protecting innocent people from unjustified homicide.

So Frum is wrong: It is not really the legal question of abortion that "divides America so passionately," but the ethical question. For if an ethical consensus was truly reached, a legal consensus would follow naturally.

Frum thinks the pro-life movement should stop trying to prohibit abortion, and instead focus on reducing the number of abortions without the force of law. Of course, we will continue working to reduce abortions using education, persuasion and compassionate assistance. But Frum does not seem to understand that the pro-life position, properly understood, is necessarily political, just as the movements to end slavery, bring about women's suffrage, and ensure civil rights for black Americans were necessarily political. Basic justice requires that human beings not be treated as property; that women, who are equal in fundamental human dignity to men, be equal participants in democracy; and that people not be discriminated against on the basis of skin color. It is not enough to try to use persuasion to reduce the incidence of some people enslaving other people under a legal regime that permits slavery; even if slavery did not in practice exist, such a legal regime would be gravely unjust, for it says that human beings may be treated as property for the benefit of others.

So it is with abortion. The truth of the pro-life position entails that we work to restore legal protection for innocent human beings at all developmental stages, including the unborn. It is a matter of justice.

Planned Parenthood brings 'webcam' abortions to Minnesota

2011-10-21T12:01:00.000-05:00

Minnesota, apparently, was next in line for Planned Parenthood's webcam abortion expansion.

MCCL reported on Aug. 30 that Planned Parenthood had begun performing RU486 chemical abortions at its Rochester (Minnesota) clinic. It was the first time that Planned Parenthood in Minnesota -- the leading performer and promoter of abortion in our state -- had expanded its abortion operation beyond its St. Paul abortion center.

We then learned and reported in the Sept.-Oct. issue of MCCL News that these RU486 abortions in Rochester are being done via webcam. This is a very troubling development.

So-called "webcam" or "telemedicine" abortions were pioneered by Planned Parenthood in Iowa. Rather than meeting the abortionist in person, a pregnant woman converses with him long-distance via webcam before receiving the abortion drugs. (RU486 abortions are a two drug process: the first is mifepristone, or RU486, which kills the developing human being in utero; the second is a prostaglandin that expels the dead child.)

The webcam method allows Planned Parenthood to bring RU486 abortions to more women, especially in rural areas, who no longer have to travel to meet with a doctor in person. Women at the Rochester clinic talk with an abortionist who is located at Planned Parenthood's St. Paul center. The predictable result is more abortions performed and more revenue for Planned Parenthood.

Explains Dr. Randall K. O'Bannon of National Right to Life:

Webcam abortions generate buzz and open up a whole new customer base in locations where Planned Parenthood can't afford to post an abortionist. It gives some of their smaller offices a chance to bring in a very profitable product without having to make a lot of changes or buy a whole lot of new equipment.

Webcam abortions also pose serious dangers to women. RU486 itself is a particularly dangerous abortion method for pregnant women: Fourteen women are known to have died from RU486 in the United States since 2000, according to the FDA, and thousands of women have suffered complications. Moreover, the webcam technique means that women can receive RU486 in areas in which there may be no doctors (or no doctors familiar with the RU486 abortion process) available in the event of such complications.

It is true, of course, that many legitimate medical procedures are offered via telemedicine, as a means of helping more people, especially in emergency situations; but abortion is not a legitimate medical procedure. It is an elective procedure that kills young members of the human family and risks the health of women. Webcam abortion expands destruction, not health care.

Planned Parenthood's webcam abortion operation in our state must be opposed because it will increase the number of unborn human beings who are unjustly killed, and because it needlessly endangers pregnant women, who deserve care and support, not chemical abortion with little medical supervision.

Aristotle, the poor pregnant mom, and true happiness

2011-10-20T14:35:00.000-05:00

From a new interview Kathryn Jean Lopez conducted with philosopher Christopher Kaczor, author of the recent book The Ethics of Abortion: Women's Rights, Human Life, and the Question of Justice:

LOPEZ: What does Aristotle have to do with the poor mom who feels as if she has no alternatives when she realizes she is pregnant? The desperate teenager? The single professional who can't both do her job and have this child?

KACZOR: I believe that everyone, including the poor mom, the desperate teenager, and the single professional, desires to find true happiness. I also believe that Aristotle, and even more fully Thomas Aquinas, showed that the way to true happiness consists in activity in accordance with virtue. There can be, therefore, no authentic happiness found in activity that is unjust. Aristotle's perspective has found a powerful analogue in the findings of contemporary positive psychology, which emphasizes the concept of flow in activity, strong relationships with others, and forgiveness.

I know that many women face unbelievably difficult circumstances in their pregnancy. For this reason, I think that all people of good will have an obligation to help them, to celebrate their heroism when they choose life, and to love them even when they do not. I can think of one case in particular: a young student, not yet finished with her education, who found herself pregnant with a man she did not know well. With so many responsibilities, both to her extended family and to her studies, she felt desperate, alone, and trapped. It was truly an act of heroism for that woman to decide to place that child for adoption. I know the woman in the story very well. She is my birth mother. I feel such an enormous debt of gratitude to her. Even though her choice was unbelievably difficult, I know and she knows that she made the right decision not to end my life. I don't think there is any woman who in the long term regrets, even in the most difficult of circumstances, making the choice for life. But I know there are many thousands of women who still remember and mourn, even decades later, the date that their baby would have been born.

Read the rest of the interview here.

International law protects the dignity of every human being

2011-10-20T05:05:00.000-05:00

The following is taken from the footnotes of the recently-introduced San Jose Articles. To learn more, go here.

The preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states: "Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world," and UDHR Article 3 states, "Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person."

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) Article 6 states: "Every human being has the inherent right to life. This right shall be protected by law. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life." The preamble to the ICPPR likewise states: "In accordance with the principles proclaimed in the Charter of the United Nations, recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world[.]" The ICCPR preamble also recognizes that "these rights derive from the inherent dignity of the human person." The ICCPR also implicitly recognizes the human rights of unborn children by providing in Article 6 that capital punishment "shall not be carried out on pregnant women."

The Declaration of the Rights of the Child and the preamble to the Convention on the Rights of the Child both state that "the child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth."

Likewise, the American Convention on Human Rights stipulates in Article 4.1: "Every person has the right to have his life respected. This right shall be protected by law and, in general, from the moment of conception. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life."

See also the preamble to the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights which states: "[R]ecognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world[.]"

Adult stem cells increasingly used to treat sports injuries

2011-10-19T15:35:00.000-05:00

ESPN The Magazine has a story in its Oct. 17, 2011, issue about the use of stem cell therapies to help professional athletes heal from injuries:

Doctors in athletic circles are particularly optimistic about a specific [stem cell] line called mesenchymal stem cells, which they can extract in sizable numbers from fat and bone marrow. When properly cultivated and injected into an injured body part, the cells might be able to repair a banged-up jock's cartilage, bones, tendons and muscles dramatically faster than conventional surgical methods.

Clinics around the world report amazing results using these minimally invasive cellular procedures to repair torn ACLs. ...

In Europe, healthy top-level soccer players are already having their stem cells harvested and grown into lines of bone and connective tissue in case of injury.

The story is critical of FDA safety requirements in the United States that have caused some athletes -- among them superstar quarterback Peyton Manning -- to travel overseas for experimental procedures, which may or may not prove therapeutically successful. Yankees pitcher Bartolo Colon received an FDA-approved stem cell injection in 2010, which seems to have significantly improved his right shoulder and elbow following rotator cuff surgery.

The most notable feature of the ESPN article? It does not mention unethically-derived embryonic stem cells even once. Such cells have never benefited a single patient. The buzz surrounding the use of stem cells for sports injuries is focused entirely on the only stem cell type that has successfully treated patients (and saved lives), and the only type that promises much more therapeutic success in the future: ethical and uncontroversial adult stem cells.

Does rape justify abortion? Three points

2011-10-14T10:35:00.000-05:00

"Having lived through rape, and having raised a child 'conceived in rape,' I feel personally assaulted and insulted every time I hear that abortion should be legal for rape and incest. I feel that we're being used to further the abortion issue, even though we've not been asked to tell our side of the story." -- Kathleen DeZeeuw, quoted in Victims and Victors

Abortion defenders frequently appeal to cases of pregnancy resulting from rape. Surely abortion should be allowed in such tragic and unfair situations, they argue. What can one say in response?

Rape is a truly horrifying crime. Rapists should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. Victims of rape should be supported and treated with enormous compassion. But rape as an argument for the permissibility of abortion fails completely and decisively. Here's why.

(1) The vast majority of abortions have nothing to do with rape. Less than one percent of abortions end pregnancies that are a result of rape or incest. Thus, rape cannot justify the standard pro-choice position (and current legal regime in the United States) of abortion on demand. Pro-choice advocates must offer reasons to think that the other 99-plus percent of abortions are permissible. Appealing to rape is very often a red herring.

(2) Even in the cases of pregnancy resulting from rape, abortion is impermissible. Why? Because abortion is the unjust killing of an innocent human being (as I argue elsewhere), and the circumstances of sexual assault pregnancies do not change the ethics of such killing. Consider the following.

First, the fact that one has been the victim of a horrible crime does not justify inflicting a similar injustice against another innocent person. If abortion is such an injustice, then abortion in cases of rape is clearly wrong, for two wrongs do not make a right. An innocent child may not be put to death for the crime of her father.

Second, the circumstances of someone's conception have no bearing on his or her moral status as a human being. The people alive today who were conceived in rape (many of whom are now pro-life activists) may not be killed on those grounds. To argue for the permissibility of abortion in cases of rape -- indeed, to argue for the permissibility of abortion in all other cases -- one must show that the unborn (the embryo or fetus) who is killed by abortion is not a valuable, rights-bearing member of the human family, like you and me. The circumstances of conception are obviously irrelevant.

Third, we many not kill valuable, rights-bearing members of the human family in order to relieve or prevent emotional or psychological distress. The reasons for having an abortion after rape do not justify the killing of human persons. So, again, if the unborn is a valuable person, then abortion in cases of rape is not justified.

Finally, an abortion defender might argue that because a woman who is pregnant as a result of rape didn't consent to the sex that led to pregnancy, she has no obligation to let the unborn human being "use" her body as a "life-support system" (as a defender of the argument might put it). But a lack of special obligation does not justify intentional and direct killing, which most abortions entail. And not all of our obligations are voluntarily assumed. For more, see my critique of the bodily autonomy argument famously proposed by Judith Jarvis Thomson.

None of this is to deny that a woman who is raped is brutally victimized, and that she is further wronged if she subsequently becomes pregnant, unfairly tasking her with the gestation of a child (who is also an innocent victim, having come into existence in such a terrible way, through no fault of her own). Carrying to term a child conceived in rape is a heroic act, but sometimes heroism is the only acceptable course of action. Explains philosopher Christopher Kaczor:

The weight of philosophical discussion from Plato through Kant up to such twentieth-century writers as Dietrich Bonhoeffer urges us to do good and avoid doing evil, even when the personal cost is great, even if we are forced to choose between the morally impermissible and the morally heroic in cases where the merely permissible is not available due to the evil choices of others.

Fortunately, pregnancy care centers all across the state and nation stand ready to help women suffering after sexual assault. They are not alone.

(3) Research shows that abortion does not benefit women who have been victimized by rape. The rationale for rape victims getting abortions in the first place -- it will spare them emotional or psychological pain -- is simply not true in the real world. In their book Victims and Victors: Speaking Out About their Pregnancies, Abortions and Children Resulting from Sexual Assault, David C. Reardon, Julie Makimaa (herself conceived in rape) and Amy Sobie document the cases of women who became pregnant as a result of sexual assault. They write:

It is a little known fact that the vast majority of sexual assault victims do not want abortions. In addition, when sexual assault victims do have abortions, the long term, and even short term, psychological effects are devastating. Most of these women describe the negative effects of abortion on their lives as even more devastating than sexual assault.

Sexual assault is actually a contraindication for abortion. A doctor treating a pregnant sexual assault victim should advise against abortion precisely because of the traumatic nature of the pregnancy. ... [B]oth the mother and the child are helped by preserving life, not by perpetuating violence. ...

Abortion only adds to and accentuates the traumatic feelings associated with sexual assault. Rather than easing the psychological burdens, abortion adds to them.

Abortion and rape are both wrong because they are the unjust, brutal, dehumanizing treatment of innocent human beings. Abortion when pregnancy is a result of rape makes no moral sense. Notes Kaczor in his recent book The Ethics of Abortion: Women's Rights, Human Life, and the Question of Justice:

Unfortunately, nothing, including having an abortion, can undo a rape. However, to bear a child conceived in these most difficult of circumstances is to perform an act that is in complete contradiction of what takes place in a rape. In rape, a man assaults an innocent human being; in nurturing life, a woman protects an innocent human being. In rape, a man undermines the freedom of another; in nurturing life, a woman grants freedom to another. In rape, a man imposes himself to the great detriment of another; in nurturing life, a woman makes a gift of herself to the great benefit of another. While, unfortunately, rape once perpetrated can never be undone, the rationalizations, maxims, and motives of rape are never so completely rejected as when someone chooses life in the most difficult circumstances, circumstances that make such a choice heroic.

Breast cancer, abortion, and Susan G. Komen for the Cure

2011-10-12T20:01:00.000-05:00

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Americans rightly want to help breast cancer victims and prevent future suffering and death from the terrible disease. Why? Because we recognize the dignity of our fellow human persons, who deserve our care, regard and compassion.

Tragically, one major breast cancer organization -- Susan G. Komen for the Cure -- actively supports Planned Parenthood, the nation's leading performer and promoter of abortion. Many of the group's affiliates award grants to the abortion chain. In 2010 18 Komen affiliates gave a total of more than $569,000 to Planned Parenthood; affiliates gave almost $4 million from 2004 to 2010. It does not appear that the Minnesota Komen affiliate gives to Planned Parenthood.

Support for Planned Parenthood contradicts the very same principle of human dignity that undergirds our commitment to helping breast cancer victims in the first place. Abortion is the unjust killing of young human beings, whose age, size, ability (or inability) and dependency do not disqualify them from the respect and protection that is owed to every member of the human family.

Komen says the money it gives to Planned Parenthood does not go toward abortion. But the money is fungible, and any funding supports Planned Parenthood's continued existence and work, which is centered on abortion. To subsidize Planned Parenthood is to subsidize the abortion industry, effectively increasing the number of abortions that take place. Moreover, breast-related care is better provided by other organizations and programs. Planned Parenthood does not even perform mammograms -- women must go elsewhere for serious health care. (Learn more about Planned Parenthood and the debate over its funding here.)

Komen's support for Planned Parenthood is tragically ironic in a second way: A large body of evidence suggests that abortion increases a woman's risk of breast cancer. Dr. Gerard Nadal explains:

For a half-century now, well over a hundred studies have indicated a link between abortion and breast cancer, with increased risks being upward of 50% for abortions before a first full-term pregnancy, with many showing increased risks above 100%.

The biological explanation for this link is very simple and has been demonstrated repeatedly in animal studies. Prior to a first full term pregnancy a woman's breasts are not fully developed, with her lobules made up of immature and cancer-prone Type 1 and Type 2 cells. When she conceives a child, estrogen levels rise dramatically, along with the pregnancy hormone HCG, which stimulate the lobules to undergo massive cell proliferation, roughly doubling in number. These first trimester events leave the woman with twice as many cells where cancer can start.

At the end of the second trimester, the baby begins to protect the mother by secreting the hormone human placental lactogen. This hormone matures the lobule cells into cancer-resistant Type 4 cells, which will produce milk. By the end of the pregnancy 85% of the lobule cells will have undergone this differentiation. The remaining 15% will undergo differentiation to Type 4 Cells during breastfeeding and subsequent pregnancies.

As animal studies bear out, if pregnancy is ended by abortion the woman is left with twice as many immature, cancer-prone cells where cancer can start, but she does not derive the protective effect of the third trimester.

Learn more about the link between abortion and breast cancer here and here.

San Jose Articles refute claim of international right to abortion

2011-10-07T17:23:00.002-05:00

The San Jose Articles were introduced in a press conference yesterday at the United Nations headquarters in New York. Drafted by a large group of experts in law, medicine and public policy, the Articles refute the claim that there is a right to abortion under international law that all nations must accept. They also show that international documents actually recognize the rights of unborn human beings.

Austin Ruse explains the problem:

It is commonplace now for UN officials and American law professors to tell foreign governments that they are required by international law to liberalize their abortion laws. Just last month the UN Special Rapporteur on Health issued a report making this claim. The Secretary General endorsed his report. Shortly thereafter the UN High Commission on Human Rights said the same thing.

Pro-life activists have been saying for years that this is a false assertion. Even so, some governments have started to listen and to liberalize their laws. The High Court of Colombia changed their abortion laws based on these assertions from a UN committee. Two judges on the Mexican High Court have made these assertions also.

Jeanne Head, UN Representative for National Right to Life, notes:

Ireland is the latest target of UN "human rights" bodies which are pressuring countries to legalize abortion. The treaty-monitoring bodies are particularly notorious in this regard.

For example, the monitoring committee of the CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women) has gone beyond its mandate, pressuring more than 90 countries to liberalize abortion laws despite the fact that there is no mention of abortion or even "reproductive health" in the treaty.

Joseph Rees, former US Ambassador to East Timor and one-time US representative to the UN Economic and Social Council, spoke of his own experiences at yesterday's press conference:

When I was in Timor I witnessed first-hand a sustained effort by some international civil servants and representatives of foreign NGOs to bully a small developing country into repealing its pro-life laws. The problem is that people on the ground, even government officials, have little with which to refute the extravagant claim that abortion is an internationally recognized human right.

That's why the San Jose Articles were written. According to Professor Robert P. George of Princeton, who also spoke at the press conference, "The Articles will support and assist those around the world who are coming under pressure from UN personnel and others who say falsely that governments are required by international law to repeal domestic laws protecting human beings in the embryonic and fetal stages of development against the violence of abortion."

Read the Articles here, and see the detailed footnotes here.

Abortion advocates at the United Nations and elsewhere seek to legalize and expand abortion into every corner of the globe. People and governments around the world must know that legal abortion is in no way an international mandate.

They must also know, as MCCL Global Outreach has explained in "Why legalized abortion is not good for women's health" (produced jointly with the National Right to Life Educational Trust Fund), that the right to life of unborn human beings must be protected as a matter of basic justice; that abortion poses serious risks to women, especially in developing countries; and that legal abortion does nothing to solve the problem of maternal mortality, which can only be addressed by improving medical care for women.

U.S. House to take up Protect Life Act on Oct. 13

2011-10-07T15:18:00.000-05:00

The following is from National Right to Life (NRLC).

WASHINGTON (October 6, 2011) — The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to take up the NRLC-backed Protect Life Act (H.R. 358) on or about Thursday, October 13, 2011. This bill would correct the numerous abortion-expanding provisions of the federal health care law ("ObamaCare") enacted in early 2010. The bill, sponsored by Congressman Joe Pitts (R-Pa.), is similar to the "Stupak-Pitts Amendment" which initially passed the House in 2009, but which was kept out of the final health care law due to opposition from pro-abortion Democratic senators and President Obama.

Please click here to send a message to your representative in the U.S. House of Representatives, urging him or her to support the Protect Life Act and to oppose all attempts to weaken the bill. You can modify the suggested message as you see fit.

To read the October 6 letter sent by NRLC to House members in support of the bill, click here. To read detailed testimony by NRLC Legislative Director Douglas Johnson, presented to a House subcommittee in February 2011, about why H.R. 358 is needed, click here.

Celebrating International Day of Older Persons

2011-10-06T19:26:00.000-05:00

The following is a news release from MCCL GO.

Today, Oct. 6, 2011, has been declared the International Day of Older Persons by the United Nations. It is a day to focus on the issues of aging and demographics and to celebrate the treasures that older persons are in every society around the globe.

According to the July 2011 United Nations Report of the Secretary General, Follow-Up to the Second World Assembly on Aging:

"The composition of the world population has changed dramatically in recent decades. Between 1950 and 2010 life expectancy worldwide rose from 46 to 68 years, and it is projected to increase to 81 by the end of the century.

"For the first time in human history, in 2050 there will be more persons over 60 than children in the world. Almost 700 million people are now over the age of 60. By 2050, 2 billion people, over 20 percent of the world’s population, will be 60 or older."

With this demographic information in mind, some are beginning to question the worth and dignity of older persons. It has even been suggested that older persons are a "burden" to societies.

"Nothing could be further from the truth," said Scott Fischbach, Executive Director of Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life Global Outreach (MCCL GO). "Older persons ought to be protected with the full weight of national laws ensuring their right to life."

Older persons face greater challenges today than ever before, as is highlighted in a U.N. press release quoting the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health Anand Grover.

"As we take note of the International Day of Older Persons, let us together find ways to ensure that our older persons have the legal rights and protections they need to live out their natural lives," Fischbach added.

A breakthrough in embryo-destructive research?

2011-10-06T10:48:00.000-05:00

The journal Nature reported yesterday that scientists have derived embryonic stem cells from abnormal cloned human embryos. Here's some background and explanation.

Organisms can be cloned through a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), in which the nucleus of a somatic cell from the patient to be cloned is inserted into an enucleated egg, which is then stimulated, resulting in a new embryonic member of the species who is genetically virtually identical to the patient. Researchers have long tried, unsuccessfully, to develop cloned human embryos to the stage at which the derivation of stem cells (thereby killing the embryo) is possible.

In the new research, published in Nature, a team of scientists tinkered with the standard SCNT technique. They inserted the somatic cell nuclei into eggs that had not had their nuclei removed. Thus, the resulting cloned embryos each had 23 extra chromosomes. They were "triploid," a genetic abnormality that prevents a human being from living very long (at most, triploid babies live for some months after birth).

The "breakthrough" is that the researchers successfully derived stem cells from those triploid embryos (destroying the embryos in the process, of course). But those stem cells are useless because they are triploid, so the scientists are hoping in the future to somehow remove the extra set of chromosomes.

Even if they succeed, the merit of this approach is questionable. The main purpose of human cloning research has been to create patient-specific pluripotent stem cells. But we can do that already, and do so ethically, by using direct reprogramming to create induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). Making iPSCs is also much more efficient. According to the Wall Street Journal story, "The [new] technique [reported yesterday] is very inefficient. Dr. Egli and his colleagues said they started with 270 eggs and created 13 early-stage embryos. From these, they obtained only two viable stem cell lines."

Moreover, human pluripotent stem cells -- whether iPSCs or embryonic stem cells derived from either cloned embryos or embryos resulting from in vitro fertilization -- have not been therapeutically useful in any way. Every successful stem cell treatment has used ethically-derived adult stem cells.

Most importantly, the new research is deeply unethical. First, human cloning is wrong in itself, and these researchers are using it to create new human organisms to then kill for their useful parts, which is even worse. In fact, as scientist-blogger Rebecca Taylor writes, "These scientists intentionally created human lives that they knew would have a devastating genetic condition and then destroyed them for cells that they knew could never be used to treat anyone. This is beyond morally offensive, it is downright evil."

Second, egg harvesting poses a real risk to women, and according to the Washington Post:

The research [announced yesterday] was possible because for the first time scientists paid women for their eggs for human embryonic stem cell research, stirring worries about women being exploited and putting their health at risk. At the same time, the researchers made the cells by producing and then destroying mutant embryos, whose moral status immediately became a matter of sharp debate. ...

A political cross section of scientists, women's health advocates and bioethicists also expressed concern about paying women for the millions of eggs that would be demanded if the work ever led to treatments for common diseases. Egg donation requires risky hormone injections.

For more on this latest development in embryo-destructive research, see comments from Wesley J. Smith and Dr. David Prentice. Learn why human cloning is wrong here, and learn more about the dangers of human egg harvesting here. Learn more about ethical adult stem cell research -- the only kind that is actually helping patients and saving lives -- here.

Latest issue of MCCL News now available

2011-10-03T14:42:00.000-05:00

The September-October issue of MCCL News has just been mailed to MCCL members, and is also available to members online. Contact us to start or renew a subscription.

The contents of the current issue include:

Planned Parenthood brings 'webcam' abortions to Minnesota

Using dangerous new technique, abortion giant now performing abortions in Rochester

2011 Fall Tour informs, motivates citizens to save lives

Still time to attend a meeting

Local infanticide case highlights importance of Safe Place for Newborns law

Baby girl found abandoned in Mississippi River near Winona

What you need to know about stem cell research and human cloning

Excerpts from recently-updated MCCL brochure

The moral status of unborn human beings: Part Two

Why 'personhood' criteria fail to justify excluding the unborn

U.K. Journal: Abortion increases women's mental health risk by 81%

Landmark analysis exposes falsehood of abortion industry's no-risk claims

Join pro-lifers for MCCL's one-day, $50,000 fundraiser

On Give to the Max Day, maximize your gift in defense of vulnerable human life

Students: Write a winning pro-life essay

National essay contest will challenge you to articulate pro-life position

National Geographic: In the womb

2011-10-03T05:15:00.000-05:00

Missing the point about the beginning of life

2011-09-30T15:51:00.000-05:00

At the Statesman Journal's science blog, Susie Bodman (an editor at the paper) responds to the pro-life contention that life begins at conception:

As a biology student, I'm sorry, but the stipulation that "life begins at conception" is laughable to me. However, it's not for reasons you might assume — that I'm a godless scientist-in-the-making, a stereotypically liberal journalist, a pro-choice protagonist, a fire-breathing feminist or whatever else you might conjure up.

It comes from how biologists define life and distinguish it from inanimate things, such as rocks. Living organisms are characterized by having the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity and continual change.

A single cell is a form of life, and guess what eggs and sperms are. Yep, that's right. They are CELLS.

If eggs and sperm are already alive, well, then to a biologist life exists BEFORE conception.

Also, if those egg and sperm cells are made by you, and you were at one time conceived from egg and sperm cells arising from a couple who were conceived from egg and sperm cells and so on, so long as you're not at the end of an extinct lineage, life really is CONTINUOUS until you get back to the very first cell that formed on Earth.

Therefore, life doesn't just begin at conception. It's more like life BEGAN with the first cell 3.8 billion years ago.

Bodman really, laughably, misses the point. When we say "life begins at conception," we mean (obviously, I thought) that the life of an individual human being begins at conception. Biological life in general is continuous, as she notes; even the sperm and egg are "living." But the sperm and egg are mere parts of larger organisms, not human beings themselves. When they unite a new single-celled organism (the zygote) is formed -- a member of our species at the earliest stage of development -- who (given an adequate environment and nutrition) will actively develop himself or herself toward maturity. The textbook Human Embryology & Teratology explains: "Although life [defined broadly] is a continuous process, fertilization is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is thereby formed."

In short, Bodman apparently has yet to learn how biologists distinguish organisms (e.g., you, me, an embryo) from biological entities that are not organisms (e.g., sperm, egg, a strand of my hair).

That a distinct, living and whole (though immature) human organism comes into existence at conception is a matter of biological fact. Embryology textbooks and leading experts overwhelmingly confirm this:

The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology: "Human development begins at fertilization when a male gamete or sperm (spermatozoon) unites with a female gamete or oocyte (ovum) to form a singe cell—a zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell marked the beginning of each of us as a unique individual."

Langman's Embryology: "The development of a human begins with fertilization, a process by which the spermatozoon from the male and the oocyte from the female unite to give rise to a new organism, the zygote."

Before We Are Born: Essentials of Embryology and Birth Defects: "Human development begins when an oocyte (ovum) from a female is fertilized by a sperm (spermatozoon) from a male. … This cell [the zygote], formed by the union of an oocyte and a sperm, is the beginning of a new human being."

Dr. Jerome LeJeune, discoverer of Down syndrome chromosome: "To accept the fact that after fertilization has taken place a new human has come into being is no longer a matter of taste or opinion. The human nature of the human being from conception to old age is not a metaphysical contention; it is plain experimental evidence."

Dr. Micheline Matthews-Roth, Harvard University Medical School: "It is scientifically correct to say that an individual human life begins at conception, when egg and sperm join to form the zygote, and this developing human always is a member of our species in all stages of its life."

Learn more here.

The Bible and abortion: Nine truths

2011-09-29T17:28:00.000-05:00

The pro-life movement is comprised of people of many faiths and no faith. So is MCCL. Ours is not a "religious" position. The facts of science (showing that the unborn is a living human organism) combined with sound moral reasoning (showing the equal dignity of every member of the human family) confirm the pro-life position that abortion unjustly takes the life of an innocent human being. This truth -- like the truth that slavery is wrong, or that killing homeless people is wrong, or that kindness is good and praiseworthy -- is accessible to everyone, regardless of religious conviction. (See, for example, SecularProLife.org and GodlessProlifers.org.)

Having said that, Christians who embrace the Bible have additional reason to reject abortion and accept the pro-life position. From the Christian perspective, what we know from "general revelation" (science, natural law) is even further confirmed by "special revelation" (the teaching of Scripture). Below are the biblical truths most relevant to abortion, as best as I can discern them. These points should matter for anyone who believes the Bible is true or authoritative, and perhaps also for those who believe the Bible contains at least some truth or wisdom.

(1) Human beings are created in the image of God.

"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them" (Genesis 1:27).

It seems highly likely that we bear the image of God by nature -- by virtue of the kind of creature we are, one made in God's own likeness, with an inherent capacity (whether actualized or not) for reason, deliberation, love, etc. -- and thus we bear that image at all stages of our lives. There is no biblical basis for thinking that human beings can gain or lose their status as divine image-bearers due to accidental characteristics or stage of development, or that some members of our species are made in the image of God but not others.

(2) It is morally wrong to intentionally take the life of an innocent human being.

The fact that human beings are created in the image of God is the biblical grounding for human dignity and rights. This is made explicit in Genesis 9:6, which prohibits taking innocent human life on that basis. "Do not murder" (Matthew 19:18). See also Exodus 20:13 (the sixth commandment), Exodus 23:7, Proverbs 6:17.

Given the scientific facts of embryology -- which show that the life of a human being begins at conception -- it seems that the biblical prohibition on killing must include the killing of unborn human beings. Still, one could try to argue (as some have) that unborn humans are not meant to be included -- that by "man" or "persons" (those who ought not be killed) the Bible means only more developed members of our species (perhaps those who can exercise higher mental functions), not those at the earliest stages of life. So consider point (3).

(3) There is a continuity of personal identity throughout the life of a human being, beginning at conception and including the embryonic and fetal stages of development.

"Surely I was ... sinful from the time my mother conceived me" (Psalm 51:5). "From my mother's womb you have been my God" (Psalm 22:10). "[Y]ou knit me together in my mother's womb" (Psalm 139:13). "Did not he who made me in the womb make them? Did not the same one form us both within our mothers?" (Job 31:15). "Before I was born the Lord called me ... [he] formed me in the womb to be his servant" (Isaiah 49:1,5). "Before I [God] formed you in the womb, I knew you" (Jeremiah 1:5).

Writers in both the Old and New Testaments use the same word to refer to unborn and already-born children (the Hebrew word yeled and the Greek word brephos, respectively). There is no distinction between them -- children are children, whether born or unborn.

During Rebekah's pregnancy in Genesis 25:22, "the babies [Jacob and Esau] jostled each other within her." When Jesus is conceived through the Holy Spirit, Mary is said to be "with child" upon conception (Matthew 1:18). In Luke 1:41-44, the unborn John the Baptist (probably near the end of his second trimester in the womb) "leaped for joy" in his mother's womb when he entered the presence of the unborn Jesus (who was probably a several-days-old embryo at the time).

Thus, according to the Bible, each of us was once an embryo and a fetus. Moreover, God cares for unborn human beings just as he cares for everyone else. He knows them and has plans for their lives. So it is almost inconceivable that the prohibition on killing innocent human beings is not meant to include the killing of unborn human beings. To have killed the embryo I once was would have been to kill me, a human being loved by God and fashioned in his image.

We can put our reasoning like this: The Bible prohibits the killing of innocent human persons; the Bible regards the unborn as innocent human persons; therefore, the Bible prohibits the killing of the unborn. Alternatively, we can say that the Bible clearly assumes that what/who each of us is began at conception; moreover, the Bible teaches that we have dignity and a right to life (grounded in the fact we are made in God's image) by virtue of what/who we are; therefore, we have our dignity and right to life from the beginning of our existence at conception.

(4) Children are a blessing.

"Sons are a heritage from the Lord, children a reward from him" (Psalm 127:3). See also Matthew 18:14, Matthew 18:10, Deuteronomy 30:19. Child sacrifice is a particularly heinous form of murder (Leviticus 18:21, 20:1-5; Deuteronomy 12:31; Ezekiel 16:20-21, 20:31).

The biblical perspective is completely at odds with autonomy arguments for the permissibility of abortion, which claim that we have no obligations to our unborn offspring.

(5) Governments exist (in part) to protect innocent human beings from unjust killing.

"For the one in authority is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God's servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer" (Romans 13:4). See also 1 Peter 2:14.

Abortion -- the killing of innocent, unborn human beings -- should be prohibited by law.

(6) We ought to speak out on behalf of the oppressed.

"Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy" (Proverbs 31:8-9). "Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering toward slaughter" (Proverbs 24:11). "Defend the weak and the fatherless; uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked" (Psalm 82:3-4).

Thus, we should not stand idly by while innocent human beings who cannot speak for themselves are killed by abortion.

(7) We ought to help those in need.

"And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth" (1 John 3:16-18).

We should care about pregnant women who are facing difficult circumstances, not just as a means of reducing abortions, but for their own sake. The work of pregnancy care centers is vitally important.

(8) We ought to work to make our laws more just.

"Hate evil, love good; maintain justice in the courts" (Amos 5:15). "Seek justice. Defend the oppressed" (Isaiah 1:17). We should be involved in politics and legislation in order to help restore legal protection for unborn children.

(9) God offers forgiveness through his son, Jesus Christ.

"In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace" (Ephesians 1:7). If you have been involved in an abortion (fathers, mothers, grandparents, abortionists, abortion clinic workers, etc.), the Bible says there is a solution. As Franklin Graham puts it: "[I]f a person is guilty of having an abortion, God will forgive them and will cleanse them, if they're willing to come to him and ask for his forgiveness and receive his son Jesus Christ, by faith, into the heart."

Conclusion

Gathering these nine truths together, here's what the Bible tells us regarding the abortion issue, as far as I can discern: Abortion is a serious moral wrong and ought to be prohibited by law (this follows from points 1-5). Consequently, we should work to protect unborn children, to help pregnant women and others in need, and to make our laws more just (points 6-8). Finally, abortion is a symptom of a fallen world. All of us are sinners, and the only answer is the gospel of Jesus Christ (point 9).

It seems that one cannot consistently give the Bible much credence while also failing to be pro-life and, indeed, taking some sort of action on behalf of the pro-life cause.

Pres. Obama's dedication to abortion providers

2011-09-23T19:24:00.001-05:00

Learn more here.

How much do you know about 'the worst human rights abuse in the world today'?

2011-09-22T06:05:00.000-05:00

That's what Congressman Chris Smith of New Jersey calls China's coercive one-child-per-couple policy. From his 2009 remarks before a U.S. House human rights commission:

Few outside of China understand what a massive and cruel system of social control the one-child policy entails. As the U.S.-China Commission summarized, the system is "marked by pervasive propaganda, mandatory monitoring of women's reproductive cycles, mandatory contraception, mandatory birth permits, coercive fines for failure to comply, and in some cases, forced sterilization and abortion."

The price for failing to conform to this system is staggering. A Chinese woman who becomes pregnant without a permit will be put under mind-bending pressure to abort. She knows that "out of plan" illegal children are denied education, health care and marriage, and that fines for bearing a child without a birth permit can be up to 10 times the average annual income of both parents, and those families that can't or won't pay are jailed or their homes are smashed in or their young child is killed.

If the brave woman still refuses to submit, she may be held in a punishment cell, or if she flees, her relatives may be held and, very often, beaten. Group punishments will be used to socially ostracize her. Her colleagues and neighbors will be denied birth permits. If the woman is, by some miracle, still able to resist this pressure, she may be physically dragged to the operating table and forced to undergo an abortion.

Her trauma is incomprehensible. It is a trauma she shares, in some degree, with virtually every woman in China, whose experience of intimacy and motherhood is colored by the atmosphere of fear created by the government, by government threats and determination to intrude itself in deadly fashion in the most private aspects of her life. The World Health Organization reports over 500 female suicides per day in China.

China is the only country in the world where female suicide rates are higher than male, and according to the Beijing Psychological Crisis Study and Prevention Center, in China the suicide rate for females is three times higher than that of males. The result of this policy is a nightmarish brave new world with no precedent in human history, where women are psychologically wounded and girls fall victim to sex selection abortion. ... [M]ost children grow up without brothers or sisters, aunts or uncles or cousins. ...

I, and we, appeal to President Obama to seriously raise the plight of Chinese women who are every day cruelly and systematically assaulted by population control police. China's population control policy is violence against women and violence against children by the hundreds of millions.

It is the worst violation of women's rights in human history. I believe it is outrageous that the Obama administration lavishly funds, to the tune of $50 million, organizations including the U.N. Population Fund that partner with China's National Population Planning Commission. Let me note very strongly that this is not a partisan issue.

Go here to read the personal testimony of one woman (among millions) victimized by China's forced abortion policy. She and her family suffered physically, psychologically and emotionally; her baby was killed by the government, and she could do nothing.

In a new Weekly Standard article, Jonathan Last explains the one-child policy, traces its history, and notes the many ways in which it is "an epic disaster" that so many of us in the Western world are either clueless about or willing to ignore or even support. He writes:

Under One-Child, couples wanting a baby were required to obtain permission from local officials first. (In 2002, the government relaxed this provision; you can now have one child without government clearance.) After having a child, urban residents and government employees were forbidden from having another, with some exceptions. In rural areas, for instance, couples were often allowed to have a second baby five years after the first. There are a total of 22 exceptions which allow Chinese to have a second child, but they tend to be narrow: 63 percent of couples are bound to a single child. Any more than two—even for the lucky exceptions—and the government institutes penalties. Sanctions range from heavy fines to confiscation of belongings to dismissal from work. There are reports of violators having the roofs of their houses removed, or their doors and windows walled shut.

And then there were the forced abortions and sterilizations. On this score, the Chinese government had help from the West. In 1979, as China prepared to roll out One-Child, the government signed an agreement with the United Nations Population Fund, which pledged $50 million to help control births—a euphemism that in practice meant groups of government workers rounding up pregnant women and forcing them to have abortions. The U.N.'s presence opened the door for other Western organizations, including the Ford Foundation and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, which poured resources into China in an effort to kill babies. These groups were not unaware of what was happening. The IPPF's Benjamin Viel wrote admiringly, "Persuasion and motivation [are] very effective in a society in which social sanctions can be applied against those who fail to cooperate in the construction of the socialist state." ...

All of which brings us to the practical problems of One-Child. ... [T]he country is now on the brink of radical population shrinkage. By 2050, China will be losing, on net, 20 million people every five years.

And whatever effect One-Child had on China's fertility rate, it also produced two unexpected changes in the country’s demographic profile.

First, One-Child created an enormous sex imbalance in the population. In nature, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. But in China (and other Asian countries) there is a strong cultural preference for sons. Once Chinese were limited to one or, at most, two children, it became enormously important to parents that their one child be a male heir. The combination of ultrasound technology, which allowed sex-determination in utero, with industrial-scale abortion created an atmosphere in which it was thoroughly routine for mothers to abort female babies. This practice has become so widespread in China that there are a mind-boggling 123 boys born for every 100 girls. ...

China's sex imbalance means that the country has a large cohort of men for whom marriage will be a statistical impossibility. By the late 2020s nearly one in five Chinese men will be "surplus males." This has all sorts of cultural consequences—increased violence and political instability historically attend gender imbalances. But from a demographic standpoint, it means that China's already low fertility rate is functionally lower than it looks—because of the sex disparity among children who are born, many fewer than half will be females who have the opportunity to reproduce.

The other unintended consequence is that One-Child has radically altered China's age structure, giving it many more old people than young. In 2005, the country's median age was 32-years-old. By 2050, it will be 45-years-old, and a full quarter of the populace will be over 65. That means 330 million senior citizens, most of whom will have little or no family to care for them.

China has no pension system to speak of and will have only 2 workers per retiree—which isn't much of a tax base from which to build one. The age ratio may cause a labor shortage, too: In the next 10 years, the number of Chinese aged 20 to 24 will drop by 45 percent. All age-cohorts will shrink, except among the elderly. It is a looming demographic catastrophe—[Demographer Nicholas] Eberstadt calls it a "slow-motion humanitarian tragedy." All of these problems are as obvious as they are unavoidable; yet they are rarely acknowledged in the West.

Read all of Last's piece.

Human embryos cannot be patented

2011-09-21T13:48:00.000-05:00

The following news release was issued today, Sept. 21.

A ban on the issuing of U.S. patents on human embryos was enacted into law on Friday, Sept. 16, 2011. The pro-life policy was enacted as part of the "America Invents Act" bill (H.R. 1249) and could have a direct impact on researchers involved in clone-and-kill activities at the University of Minnesota and other institutions. The bill, which runs 58 pages in its final form, makes numerous changes to laws that govern the granting of patents in the United States, which is a function of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), a division of the Department of Commerce.

A patent is a government-conferred property right that gives an inventor exclusive rights to manufacture or use his invention for a defined period, usually 20 years. The patent holder can license others to employ his patent for a fee, called a royalty.

"During the 2011 state legislative session, the University of Minnesota and others who support human cloning issued the laughable claim that the state would lose $48.4 million if they were unable to receive taxpayer funding for human cloning," said Scott Fischbach, Executive Director of Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life (MCCL). With the new patent law in place, researchers cannot receive royalties from creating and killing young members of our species.

When it became clear that Congress was likely to take up a sweeping revision of the patent laws, MCCL, working in concert with National Right to Life in Washington, D.C., insisted on inclusion of language to codify a previously enacted temporary prohibition on any patents being issued on human embryos. The previously enacted provision was the 2004 Weldon Amendment that required yearly reauthorization. President Obama signed the bill codifying the Weldon Amendment into law last Friday.

The key language, as it appears in Section 33 of the enacted measure, reads as follows: "Notwithstanding any other provision of this title, no patent may issue on a claim directed to or encompassing a human organism."

The powerful Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) lobbied strenuously against enactment of the ban.

The substantive scope of the Weldon language was explained by then-USPTO Director James Rogan in a letter dated Nov. 20, 2003, as follows: "The USPTO understands the Weldon Amendment to provide unequivocal congressional backing for the long-standing USPTO policy of refusing to grant any patent containing a claim that encompasses any member of the species Homo sapiens at any stage of development ... including a human embryo or human fetus … [which] applies regardless of the manner and mechanism used to bring a human organism into existence (e.g., somatic cell nuclear transfer, in vitro fertilization, parthenogenesis)."

"Scientists who want cures for people are focused on adult stem cell research and not on the creation and destruction of human embryos," Fischbach said. "Currently 72 adult stem cell treatments are helping people every day, whereas killing human embryos has resulted in nothing but dead human embryos."

Peyton Manning gets adult stem cell procedure

2011-09-19T16:34:00.000-05:00

Superstar quarterback Peyton Manning -- who has suffered from a neck injury -- has reportedly received an adult stem cell transplant using his own stem cells. Adult stem cells are ethically-derived and have successfully treated many patients; embryonic stem cells, on the other hand, require for their derivation the destruction of embryonic human beings, and have yet to benefit a single human patient. From Dr. David Prentice:

Manning has had three surgeries on his neck in the last 19 months. Little detail was available, but the information indicates that the [stem cell] procedure may have used adipose (fat) derived adult stem cells from Manning's own body; this autologous procedure (using your own adult stem cells) bypasses any problems of transplant rejection and is relatively safe. Manning's adult stem cells may have then been injected around the site of his problem vertebra in the neck, to assist healing and help with spinal disc fusion. In that respect, it sounds similar to the procedure that Texas Gov. Rick Perry received in Houston, Texas, for his back problem. ...

[T]here are actually over 2,200 FDA-approved adult stem cell clinical trials ongoing or completed, most of which in this list are in the U.S. That includes several adult stem cell trials using adult stem cells for spinal fusion, and even a couple of adipose-derived adult stem cell trials in Indianapolis. Maybe Peyton realized that only adult stem cells had real potential for safe and ethical treatment of patients. Hopefully, he will talk about his experience so more people understand the difference between embryonic and adult stem cells.

Manning could join many other awesome people -- most notably Jack Bauer -- in benefiting from ethical stem cell research.

Local infanticide case highlights importance of Safe Haven law, tragedy of abortion

2011-09-16T14:42:00.000-05:00

The Mississippi River baby, named Angel by local authorities, was wrapped in this T-shirt.

From a story last week in the Pioneer Press:

The body of a newborn baby girl was recovered Monday from the Mississippi River near Winona, the fourth time since 1999 that an infant has been found dead in a stretch of the river south of the metro area.

The Winona County sheriff's office said an infant weighing about 7 pounds was found floating downstream in a plastic bag about 2:20 p.m. and was taken to the Dakota County medical examiner's office in Hastings for an autopsy.

Each of the babies was found four years apart. The other three were all discovered along the river's banks in Goodhue County, about 60 miles to the north. Their deaths remain unsolved.

A boater discovered the first infant in 1999 near a Red Wing marina. The little girl was wrapped in a towel, and her umbilical cord was still attached.

A newborn boy turned up in 2003, floating along the edge of Lake Pepin's Methodist Beach in Frontenac.

In 2007, dock workers at Treasure Island Resort and Casino found a baby girl floating in the casino's marina. ...

Under the state's Safe Place for Newborns law, enacted in April 2003 [actually 2000], a mother or immediate family member of a newborn can place the unharmed child into the hands of a hospital employee on hospital grounds with complete anonymity during the first three days of the child's life.

A horrific tragedy. (Recent developments here.) As the story notes, Minnesota (and other states) has a law in place to help prevent newborn abandonment. From the Minnesota Department of Health:

Safe Place for Newborns Law—Minnesota Statutes 145.902—The law allows a mother to leave her newborn baby, within seventy-two hours of birth, at any hospital in the state. The newborn must be unharmed and left with a hospital employee on the hospital premises. The hospital cannot inquire as to the identity of the mother and cannot notify the local social services agency of the newborn until the mother has left the hospital. This law was passed for mothers of newborns who are in crisis and at risk for abandoning their baby. Additional information can be obtained at www.safeplacefornewborns.org or call 1-877-440-BABY (2229), a 24-hour toll-free crisis hotline.

It is important that pregnant women who feel that they are in desperate circumstances know that this option exists. The abandonment or killing of newborn babies should never, ever happen. Learn what you can do to spread the word here, and learn more details about the law here.

Stories like this also provide an opportunity for pro-life advocates to make the case against abortion. Everyone (well, almost everyone) knows that dumping a newborn baby in the river is wrong. But there is no morally relevant difference between a newborn baby and her younger, unborn self; both are living members of our species, and human beings deserve respect and protection irrespective of age or stage of development. Moreover, infanticide cases effectively put the lie to sophisticated bodily autonomy arguments for abortion (see my discussion here)—our obligations to these little human beings are so obvious!

Infanticide is tragic. But it can help clarify for us the tragedy of abortion, which is ongoing and happening on a much, much larger scale.

Three ploys for assisted suicide

2011-09-14T17:19:00.000-05:00

Massachusetts is threatening to join Oregon and Washington in legalizing physician-assisted suicide. In a new essay, Faulkner University professor Adam J. MacLeod writes:

People quite naturally recognize that life is better than death, that the deliberate destruction of life is an evil to be avoided, and that the state has a role to play in preventing suicides. It follows logically from these uncontested (and incontestable) observations that state laws prohibiting euthanasia and assisted suicide are just and efficacious. But, like magicians who use distractions to remove the important object from view, proponents of legalized death have shrouded the inviolability of human life in a mist of confusion. Exposing their ploys is the first step in defeating their efforts to advance the culture of death.

MacLeod then refutes three popular "ploys" used by advocates of assisted suicide.

(1) The Alleviation-of-Suffering Ploy

"In public, proponents of assisted suicide most commonly characterize assisted suicide as the only hope of relief for 'suffering patients' who are afflicted with serious illnesses," MacLeod writes. The problem? "Assisted suicide is neither necessary, nor actually used, for the alleviation of pain. Indeed, the data show a wide gulf between the public justifications for assisted suicide and its actual use in practice."

Moreover, "A much more common motivation than pain management appears to be simple clinical depression. In 2006, the Royal College of Physicians released a statement revealing that patients who want to die will change their minds—will choose life—after they are treated for depression in 98% to 99% of cases. "

(2) The Unnecessary Prolongation Ploy

"A second favorite ploy, related to the first, is to conflate prohibitions against assisted suicide with extreme measures to keep people alive." The problem? "Though legalization proponents trade on fears of being artificially sustained after one’s time has come, prohibiting assisted suicide is not the same as forcing people to live beyond their time. To affirm that life is always worth defending from attempts to destroy it is not to claim that one should always make efforts to lengthen life."

MacLeod continues:

Nor does respect for human life entail that the terminally ill must bear up stoically under extreme pain. Showing respect for all persons regardless of their condition or circumstances means providing needed medical care, including palliative care, when the terminally ill are in their final weeks and hours. That some forms of palliative care hasten impending death is not a reason to condemn its administration. The purpose of administering palliative care is not to kill but to relieve pain. ... The line that we must ask a physician not to cross is the line at which he adopts the patient’s death as his purpose.

(3) The Personal Autonomy Ploy

"The most common motivation for assisted suicide patients is a desire for personal autonomy, to control the time and manner of one’s own death." The problem?

Proponents of legalization invoke a radical conception of personal autonomy. The idea is that each individual person makes the value of her own life by choice. When an individual ceases to value her own life, when she no longer prizes those treasures that life enables her to enjoy, she ought to be free to end her life.

People do not make their lives valuable merely by choosing to live. If this were the case, then the lives of small children and senile adults would have no value and would be unworthy of protection in law. As a matter of fact, myriad laws protect human life at various stages of human development, even in states—Oregon and Washington—that permit assisted suicide for the terminally ill. These laws do not discriminate against the very young or the very old, or against those who ascribe the least value to their own lives. States invest resources in suicide prevention and privilege citizens to prevent suicidal acts, by force if necessary. None of these laws provides for weighing the instrumental value of the life being saved.

So even in states that permit assisted suicide, the law reflects our understanding that life has value, regardless of the conditions in which it is lived. Laws preventing suicide preserve the communities of which the suicidal person is a part. The personal autonomy ploy rests upon the deception that suicide affects only the one who commits it, and that this individual alone should have a say in the matter. But suicides are not purely autonomous acts. Just as the family and neighbors of each person recognize the intrinsic value of that person, the family and friends of a suicide realize the irremediable loss that suicide causes.

Suicide should not be inflicted upon anyone. To assist its commission is to do violence to the very fabric of civil society. For the sake of doctors, their sick patients, and the communities in which doctors and patients live, Massachusetts and Montana should strengthen their legal commitments to protect the sick and suffering.

Be sure to read the entirety of MacLeod's piece.

A personal testimony regarding China's practice of forced abortion

2011-09-13T16:48:00.000-05:00

The following is excerpted from a statement by a Chinese woman, Wujian (an alias), before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission of the U.S. House of Representatives on Nov. 10, 2009.

My name is Wujian. I was born in a small village in northern China. ...

It was the spring of 2004 when I found out that I was pregnant. It was beautiful to sense this life growing inside of me: what a miracle! Meanwhile, I was also very fearful since I did not have the permit for pregnancy or the birth permit, which means, according to Chinese law, this baby was not allowed to be born into this world. During that time in my hometown, this was the law decided by the Chinese family planning policy ...

Pretty soon, my lower stomach began to bulge. In order to protect my baby, I had to hide myself in a very old, shabby house in a remote area. There was no electricity at all in the room ... Fear and loneliness filled me every day, but as long as I could have my baby, I could stand anything. ...

Eventually, the family planning government officials found out about my pregnancy. So they searched all over trying to arrest me, and while they could not find me, then they caught my father instead. They put my father into the detention center and beat him every day. On the fourth day after they caught my father, one neighbor came and told me that my father was dying: they would continue beating my father -- even to death -- until I went to the local hospital to get abortion. ...

Very soon after this, the worst thing happened: when several family planning government officials broke into the house where I was hiding, and without any words, they drug me into their van.

As soon as I got into the van, I found that another mom was already inside the van. She told me she was carrying her first baby, and that she was 28 years old. She did not have the permit of pregnancy or the birth permit, and she was 7 months pregnant. She was so eager to keep this baby that she was fighting with the government officers in the van. Suddenly, one government official in his 20's slapped her on the face and immediately her mouth began to bleed. Being thus insulted, she screamed like a lion and fought with the family planning government officials.

About one hour later, the van stopped in the hospital. As soon as I was drug out of the van, I saw hundreds of pregnant moms there -- all of them just like pigs in the slaughterhouse. Immediately I was drug into a special room, and without any preliminary medical examination, one nurse did an oxytocin injection intravenously. Then I was put into a room with several other moms.

The room was full of moms who had just gone through a forced abortion. Some moms were crying, some moms were mourning, some moms were screaming, and one mom was rolling on the floor with unbearable pain. ...

I was pulled into another small room. One nurse pulled out one big, 8-inch long needle for the intramuscular injection. ...

At that moment, I was the only mom in the room. I began begging the nurse while I cried, "I have already had the oxytocin injection, please let me go; I will go as far away as possible and I will not tell anyone else what you had done for me and I will be grateful for you for the rest of me life." The nurse did not respond to my begging -- she looked like wood.

Then I kept saying to her, "You are an angel, as a nurse or a doctor who is helping people and saving people's life; how could you become a killer by killing people every day?" ... Soon she became very angry at what I said, and told me that I talked too much. She also told me that there was nothing serious about this whole thing for her. She did these all year. She also told me that there were over 10,000 forced abortions in our county [county, not country] just for that year, and I was having just one of them. I was astonished by her words and I realized that my baby and I were just like a lamb on the cutting board. Finally, she put the big, long needle into the head of my baby in the womb. At the moment, it was the end of the world for me and I felt even time had stopped. ...

After the injection, my baby became very quiet for a whole day. I was so naive that I thought I could leave the hospital because I had finished the forced injection. I wondered if perhaps my baby was lucky enough that she could survive.

To my great surprise, the next evening I was drug into a surgical room. ... While I was lying down on the surgical table I found that there was bloody fingerprints on the wall, left by other moms during their surgery of a forced abortion.

One doctor told me that I brought too much trouble to them already because my baby was supposed to flow out by itself after the injection. Since it did not come out as expected, they decided to cut my baby into pieces in my womb with scissors, and then suck it out with a special machine.

What had I done in my life that made me deserve this kind of punishment? What evil thing was this all about? Even a wild animal like a tiger will give her life to save her own baby tiger. As a mom and a human being, could I not even protect the life of my baby? ...

I could hear the sound of the scissors cutting the body of my baby in my womb. ... I preferred to die together with my baby at that moment. ...

Eventually the journey in hell, the surgery was finished, and one nurse showed me part of a bloody foot with tweezers. Through my tears, the picture of the bloody foot was engraved into my eyes and into my heart, and so clearly I could see the five small bloody toes. Immediately the baby was thrown into a trash can. ...

Finally, I was allowed to go home from the hospital. I did not eat anything, or even drink any water, for several days. I barely talked with anyone. From time to time at home, I could hear the mourning of my father. He was released after I was caught, but he had been beaten terribly; it took him over a month to recover physically. Looking at my father, thinking of my dead baby, I cried day and night, and frequently the picture of the little bloody foot came up in my mind. Physically I recovered after about one month, but psychologically and spiritually -- never! ...

I know that there are millions of Chinese sisters who are suffering and will suffer the same thing that I suffered. Who can help them? Who can save them? The one-child policy and forced abortion policy have killed millions of innocent lives in China. How can this inhumane crime be stopped? When can this inhumane crime be stopped?

Do I matter simply for being me?

2011-09-09T15:31:00.000-05:00

The following two claims seem awfully difficult to deny:

(1) I am intrinsically valuable and a bearer of rights by virtue of being me. So, for example, if you decide you want to kill and eat some living entity, and if that living entity turns out to be me, then you are poised to commit a very serious moral wrong. Regardless of my condition or circumstances, the fact that the entity in question is me is what matters morally. I matter simply for being who I am -- for being me.

(2) I was once an embryo and fetus, just as I was once a newborn, toddler and adolescent. This truth is confirmed by intuition and sound philosophical analysis informed by the scientific facts of human development. Therefore, to have killed the fetal human being in my mother's womb 26 years ago would have been to kill me.

From these two claims, it follows that it would have been wrong to kill the unborn human being I once was. By extension, it is wrong to kill all unborn human beings, who are the same beings as their future adult selves, and who have a right to life simply by virtue of who and what they are.

A defender of the moral permissibility of abortion will probably have to deny either (1) or (2). Which one, and on what grounds? It is an unenviable task.

'When having a choice diminishes family solidarity'

2011-09-09T12:14:00.000-05:00

Here is the abstract of a forthcoming journal article by Prof. Richard Stith of Valparaiso University School of Law:

This Article explores a little-noticed dimension of abortion and assisted suicide (or voluntary euthanasia): how choosing to reject those options can have a negative impact on the legally authorized choosers. Women who refuse abortion may be blamed for their choice by boyfriends, neighbors, employers, and others. Similarly, infirm or dying persons may find family and other caregivers upset by their refusal to agree to assisted suicide when voluntary death seems the sensible option. Finally, the author questions whether a life chosen as an option can ever have the dignity of a life simply accepted, i.e., whether the child a mother once chose not to abort suffers from her having been able to choose otherwise, and whether the severely disabled but suicide-rejecting person suffers from having to justify her continued existence.

Here's a bit more explanation of three main points, from the article's introduction:

"[A] woman's free choice for life may diminish what is called here the 'causal' basis of solidarity, relieving a father of his erstwhile responsibility for bringing about a birth."
"[Regarding the] 'sympathetic' basis of solidarity between parents (and with others) with regard to the burdens of childcare, ... compassion is significantly lessened by a belief that the mother voluntarily chose to be in her plight; similarly, the debilitated grandmother may receive less sympathy if she appears for no good reason to reject assisted suicide or voluntary euthanasia."
"[C]hoosing to let someone exist (or continue to exist) tends to reduce that someone (who may even be oneself) to a thing, thus sharply undercutting the 'personal' basis of solidarity with a newborn child or with an aged parent."

These problems arise because the unjust killing of abortion and assisted suicide are offered as legitimate options. They shouldn't be.

Notes Stith (page 27), "Making life optional harms even those who choose and affirm it, for its very optionality means that someone's life is no longer a necessity that all must accept as a given, but rather a contingency that might have been avoided by the legally empowered chooser. The chooser is thus to blame for that life's burdens. The only logically possible way to undo this blame is to reconvert contingency into some form of necessity."

The 45-page article can be read here.

Awkward family moment

Attend a pro-life meeting near you

2011-09-08T16:26:00.000-05:00

The MCCL Fall Tour begins this Sunday, Sept. 11. Pro-life educational meetings will be held at 39 locations all across Minnesota through the middle of October. If you live in Minnesota, please find the meeting nearest you and plan to join us.

The presentation is titled, "What Would You Do to Save a Life?" In addition to informing attendees about Obamacare, abortion trends, human cloning legislation, Planned Parenthood and more, MCCL staff will equip you to make a difference and save lives.

The stakes are too high not to get involved.

Who counts? The question of membership

2011-09-07T14:26:00.001-05:00

"At bottom, the 'life issues'—including especially the conflicts over abortion and embryo-destructive research—involve the deepest and most fundamental public questions for a nation committed to liberty, equality, and justice. That is, the basic question in this context is who counts as a member of the human community entitled to moral concern and the basic protection of the law? Who counts as 'one of us'? Equally important is the related question of who decides, and according to what sort of criteria? These are not narrow concerns commanding only the attention of a small number of highly motivated activists at the fringes of our society. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a public matter that is more important than this 'question of membership.'

"The stakes could not be higher. 'Persons' have human rights and are owed the moral respect and forbearance of others. 'Nonpersons' live at the mercy of others, and are routinely instrumentalized, manipulated, or even destroyed in the name of the individual or collective interests of those who are indisputably persons. We, as a nation, must get this question of membership right. ...

"The pro-life movement offers the only answer to the question of 'who counts' that is consistent with America's grounding norms of equality and justice. ...

"[E]ach human being is intrinsically equal in basic dignity simply because of who he or she is as a member of the human family. Each human being is valuable and irreplaceable, regardless of her age, size, location, race, sex, usefulness (or burdensomeness) to others, her possession or lack of certain favored physical or mental capacities, or the worth assigned to her by others. ...

"The pro-life movement rejects the notion that there are pre-personal (e.g., embryos and fetuses) or post-personal (e.g., cognitively disabled patients) human beings. Indeed, the pro-life movement sees such competing approaches as inverting our best moral traditions, effectively privileging the claims of the strong over those of the weak. The pro-life movement believes that these frameworks for contingent personhood produce monstrous practical results (including, for example, a sliding scale of moral and legal standing for people based on their cognitive ability, usefulness, strength, and so on). Instead, the pro-life movement takes its bearings from Hans Jonas's injunction that 'utter helplessness demands utter protection.' ..

"The pro-life movement holds that the only coherent (non-self-destroying) understanding of human equality is one that encompasses all human beings, without discrimination on the basis of accidental characteristics such as age, size, condition of dependency or vulnerability, circumstances, or the esteem of others. It is anathema to the norm of equality to permit a part of the polity to set exclusionary criteria that disqualify other living human beings from moral regard and the most basic forms of legal protection. True respect for equality dictates that if anyone counts, everyone must count. Conversely, to treat any human being as sub-personal is to commit a grave injustice."

-- O. Carter Snead

Analysis shows strong link between abortion and mental health problems

2011-09-06T16:38:00.000-05:00

A new study -- "the largest quantitative estimate of mental health risks associated with abortion available in the world literature" -- is getting mainstream media attention.

The meta-analysis was published by Dr. Priscilla Coleman on Sept. 1 in the British Journal of Psychiatry. Notes Dr. Randall K. O'Bannon of National Right to Life:

Coleman examined 22 of the best designed studies on abortion and mental health over the years 1995-2009 which tracked outcomes for 877,181 women, 163,831 who had experienced abortion. Coleman found that aborting women showed an 81% increased risk of mental health problems, with particular risks (e.g., substance abuse, suicide) even higher.

Moreover, Coleman's meta-analysis showed that 9.9% of the incidence of mental health problems in the population group of aborted women was directly attributable to abortion. This also included 34.9% of suicides in this group.

By anyone's definition, this is a substantial risk.

Dr. Coleman says:

I firmly believe women deserve an accurate appraisal of the best available evidence and they should be making truly informed decisions. Applying basic methods of science, this quantitative review easily provides an objective depiction of the state of knowledge ... Women considering an abortion should know abortion may increase their risk of experiencing mental health problems as opposed to being told that there are no risks or very minimal risks, which seems to be common practice.

Taxpayer funding of human cloning offers no benefits to Minnesotans

2011-09-01T12:46:00.000-05:00

The following news release was issued today, Sept. 1, 2011.

Since July 1, 2011, Minnesota state law has permitted the use of taxpayer funds for human cloning. Such research is unethical, deeply unpopular among the people of Minnesota, and offers very little potential for therapeutic benefits, in contrast to ethical stem cell research that is already saving lives.

During the regular 2011 legislative session, the House and Senate passed a measure to continue the existing (2009-2011) prohibition on state funding of human cloning (in addition to passing a second measure to prohibit cloning outright). Gov. Mark Dayton vetoed the pro-life provision (and all other pro-life measures), and it was subsequently excluded from the special session compromise in a deal struck between Dayton, Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch and Speaker of the House Kurt Zellers.

The measure would have simply prevented state funding of human somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), the process by which organisms are cloned. SCNT produces a new human organism at the earliest stages of development who is genetically virtually identical to an already-existing human organism.

The University of Minnesota, among some others, vigorously opposed the prohibition on human cloning funding, despite admitting that its scientists are not currently pursuing the research. The University explained that it might want to pursue SCNT in the future in order to create cloned human embryos to then kill for research (so-called "therapeutic cloning"). No therapeutic benefits have resulted from cloning research; continuing success with ethical adult stem cell research, and the breakthrough of ethical induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) research, seem to make cloning therapeutically obsolete.

Writing in the Star Tribune, University researcher John Wagner dishonestly claimed that legislation banning human cloning was "a full-scale assault on stem cell research" and would "criminalize lifesaving work at the University of Minnesota." The bill would not have affected any stem cell research—or any other current work—at the University.

"University of Minnesota scientists and spokespersons shamelessly misled Minnesotans about the nature of SCNT, the result of SCNT (an organism at the embryonic stage), its relation to stem cell research, and its therapeutic potential," notes Scott Fischbach, Executive Director of Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life (MCCL). "In addition, never did the University offer an ethical defense of creating young members of our species by cloning in order to kill them for research purposes."

MCCL has launched a new feature on its home page (www.mccl.org) tracking the time elapsed since state funding of human cloning was legalized and the resulting benefits for Minnesotans. There have been no benefits.

Polling confirms that most Americans oppose human cloning. "It is indefensible that our tax dollars can now be used to clone human beings," states Fischbach. "The next state Legislature must rectify this unjust and wasteful policy."

MCCL is Minnesota's oldest and largest pro-life organization with more than 70,000 member families and 240 chapters across the state.

Visit MCCL at the State Fair

2011-08-31T20:25:00.000-05:00

Visit MCCL at the Minnesota State Fair in St. Paul through Monday, Sept. 5. We are located on the first floor (main floor) of the grandstand building near the west end.

The MCCL booth at the State Fair this morning (Aug. 31, 2011).

What follows from being pro-life?

2011-08-30T19:40:00.001-05:00

From the truth of the pro-life position (i.e., the equal fundamental dignity and right to life of every member of the human family), and the factual reality of abortion (which is widespread and common), euthanasia and embryo-destructive research in American society (as extreme violations of human dignity), what follows about what each of us morally, indeed rationally, ought to do?

Obviously one ought not to have, perform, participate in or encourage an abortion, nor may one support in any way euthanasia, assisted suicide or the destruction of embryonic human beings for research.

But it also seems that we ought to take meaningful steps to help make a difference in light of the sheer gravity and scale of the injustices that are occurring. The role each of us plays will vary and depend upon circumstances, ability and other factors. But like a 19th century American (or Briton) living in an age of human slavery, we ought to do something.

You can find some ideas here. I divide the actions we can take into three broad categories: compassionate assistance (e.g., for the pregnant woman in need who is at risk of abortion), education and persuasion (revealing the truth of human dignity and the reality of abortion, etc.), and political and legislative action (to secure just protection for those who are now unprotected, and to save lives).

Even a single human life matters. So does a single changed mind, or a single touched heart.

As philosopher William Lane Craig writes, our pro-life position "is a philosophically and scientifically informed ethical concern" -- a fact I tend to emphasize on this blog. "But there's a better word for it," notes Craig. "It's called compassion. God help us if our hearts have grown so cold that we cannot weep for these little ones who perish daily by the thousands."

How the health care debate is about human equality

2011-08-30T17:09:00.000-05:00

From a new essay by Yuval Levin regarding health care policy and the 2012 presidential race:

Centralized management of the health-care sector inevitably invites an explicitly utilitarian approach to comparing the worth of different people's lives as a matter of public policy. Deciding what treatments to cover for which patients involves the government's determining whose lives are worth living and whose are not. Princeton's Peter Singer, an unabashed advocate of such public rationing, explained in the New York Times a few years ago that such an approach would, for one thing, require the government to value the lives of the disabled less than those of everyone else—a quadriplegic, for instance, should be valued at roughly half the worth of a healthy active person. "Some will object that this discriminates against people with disabilities," he wrote, but that's only because we begin from the premise that all human beings are equally valuable. That can't be true, Singer argued, since the very fact that we seek cures for illnesses and disabilities proves that we believe such conditions make life less worth living. He concluded: "Disability advocates, it seems, are forced to choose between insisting that extending their lives is just as important as extending the lives of people without disabilities, and seeking public support for research into a cure for their condition."

This kind of embarrassing sophistry is precisely where public control of the health-care system, and the resulting public rationing of treatment, must lead—to a rejection of human equality as a principle guiding government policy. Centralized bureaucratic administration of coverage decisions leaves no room for moral diversity (so, for instance, Obamacare compels everyone to fund abortion, despite some cheap tricks employed to make it seem as though money is not fungible). It leaves no room for individual decisions, and fewer ways for families to weigh their priorities and make unavoidable but difficult judgments humanely and compassionately.

Read the rest.

Planned Parenthood now performing abortions in Rochester

2011-08-30T13:18:00.000-05:00

The following news release was issued today, Aug. 30, 2011.

In a rare public admission, Connie Lewis, Vice President of External Affairs for Planned Parenthood Minnesota, stated, "In recent months, we have begun providing a limited number of medicinal abortions at the Rochester clinic." Lewis was quoted in the Aug. 21, 2011, edition of the Rochester Post Bulletin.

"It is disturbing that Planned Parenthood is now killing unborn children in Rochester using deadly RU486, a drug combination that is so dangerous that is has been banned in many countries, including Canada," said Scott Fischbach, Executive Director of Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life. "At least 14 women are known to have died in the U.S. from this abortion drug."

The RU486 drug cocktail kills the unborn baby by cutting off nutrients from the uterine wall that the baby needs to survive. Once the unborn child is suffocated, a second drug is taken to induce contractions strong enough to expel the dead baby.

The Minnesota Department of Health just released its 2010 Abortion Report showing that the state now has its lowest abortion rate on record, and the lowest number of abortions performed on women in Minnesota since the early 1970's. Both pro- and anti-life forces hailed the report as good news.

The 2010 Abortion Report data included the fact that Planned Parenthood was the only abortionist in Minnesota that increased its abortions performed statewide last year. Now Planned Parenthood Minnesota has expanded its abortion operations to a second location for the first time, and the state's low abortion rate is sure to increase.

"The expansion of chemical abortions to Rochester is further proof that Planned Parenthood is abortion obsessed," Fischbach said. "Planned Parenthood's focus is to make as much money as possible by killing as many unborn children as possible, any way it can. This expansion of abortion in Minnesota is a tragedy."

Why is abortion still legal?

2011-08-29T15:12:00.000-05:00

By Priscilla Lundquist

During a promotional event at the pregnancy care center where I was interning, a foreign exchange student came into the office asking what our purpose was on campus. When I told him that we were reaching out to women facing unplanned pregnancies who are at risk of aborting their babies, he was astonished that abortion was legal in the United States.

As I look back over the years since the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade I also am shocked and astonished. My heart breaks that abortion is still legal in the United States. All of the efforts made by lawmakers and pro-life organizations and all of the advancements in science and technology proving that the unborn is human have not kept millions of babies from being killed. (Although many lives have been saved by our efforts.)

How can a country that extols freedom and justice sacrifice millions and millions of its children in the name of women's rights?

Even at the time of Roe v. Wade, with its comparatively outdated science and technology, early ultrasound technology and prenatal science demonstrated the unborn as alive and as such, deserving of protection from being aborted. Many states backed this evidence up with laws that prohibited abortion. Despite this, the members of the Supreme Court declared that the unborn were not persons protected under the Fourteenth Amendment. They passed over growing scientific evidence in favor of the unborn deserving protection and delivered a decision that has resulted in the slaughter of countless human lives.

Progress in science and technology has only made their error more obvious.

One of the goals of most pregnancy care centers is to persuade those women who have positive pregnancy tests to come back in for ultrasounds. Over 90 percent of those who see the ultrasounds of their babies choose life. Advancing ultrasound technology shows clearly that it is just as much a human life inside the womb as outside of it. When an expecting mother looks at the screen, they see not an indistinct mass of tissue, but an intricately formed, beautiful baby. It becomes clear that abortion is not a decision to simply "terminate" the pregnancy but rather a decision to end a life.

Science has also helped our cause, showing just how early an unborn baby's heart starts beating, bones and features develop, and brain waves are detectable. "Prior to the earliest abortions, the unborn already has every body part she will ever have," Randy Alcorn writes in his book ProLife Answers to ProChoice Arguments.

How long will our nation ignore the mounting pile of evidence of the unborn's right to life and continue to sanction and fund this shocking practice?

Dayton, Klobuchar and Planned Parenthood

2011-08-26T14:24:00.000-05:00

Scandal-plagued abortion giant Planned Parenthood will hold a fundraiser with Sen. Amy Klobuchar on Aug. 29. Planned Parenthood is the leading performer and promoter of abortion in Minnesota -- managing to increase its abortion totals even as abortions overall decline -- and has come under intense scrutiny nationwide after undercover investigations exposed the group's willingness to cover up underage sex abuse, misinform pregnant women and break the law.

The event will also "honor Tina Smith for her passion and commitment to Planned Parenthood." Smith is a former Planned Parenthood executive who is now Gov. Mark Dayton's Chief of Staff.

Teardrop baby

2011-08-25T16:29:00.001-05:00

This remarkable photograph shows a human being at about the stage when most abortions are performed. She had to be removed from her mother due to an ectopic pregnancy.

Reflecting on Judith Thomson's violinist analogy and the argument from bodily autonomy

2011-08-23T14:52:00.000-05:00

A recent symposium at the University of Colorado commemorated the 40th anniversary of what may be the most famous essay in contemporary moral philosophy (so most people have never heard of it): Judith Jarvis Thomson's 1971 "A Defense of Abortion." The event included David Boonin, a defender of Thomson's approach who is among the best philosophical defenders of abortion today, and Francis Beckwith, a critic of Thomson's argument and a leading pro-life philosopher, as well as Don Marquis and John Martin Fischer. Beckwith shares some of his remarks from the discussion here.

The argument from bodily autonomy

Most thinkers have agreed that the permissibility of abortion depends upon the moral status of the unborn human being who is killed. Thomson pioneered a different approach, sometimes called the Good Samaritan argument or the sophisticated argument from bodily autonomy. She argues that abortion is morally permissible even if the unborn is a full-fledged, rights-bearing "person," like you and me. Why? Because a person's right to life, she says, does not entail a right to the use of someone else's body for life support.

Thomson offers this famous analogy:

You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, "Look, we're sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you -- we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it's only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you." Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it?

Unplugged

Thomson believes this example is relevantly analogous to an unwanted pregnancy. Because (she assumes) you are not morally required to remain connected to the violinist in Thomson's story, a pregnant woman is not required to let the unborn child remain connected to her. So "unplugging" the child is permissible.

Three points

I wish to make three points in response to this and other versions of the sophisticated bodily autonomy argument.

(1) Almost all instances of abortion are direct, intentional killing, often by dismemberment. This is a gaping hole in the violinist analogy. "Unplugging" and allowing a natural death as an unintended side effect is not the same as intentionally killing and tearing into pieces. Even if a pregnant woman has no special obligation to the unborn, the active, intentional killing of abortion is not permissible.

(2) A pregnant woman does have a special obligation to the unborn. First, the pregnant woman has consented to an activity naturally oriented toward procreation, and so she (along with the father) bears responsibility for the consequence of her action: the coming into existence of a new human being who is dependent and needy by nature. That's why, as many have noted, the violinist analogy only seems relevant when a woman has become pregnant as a result of rape (a circumstance that accounts for less than one percent of Minnesota abortions). (I contend that abortion in cases of rape is still clearly wrong, for the other reasons listed here.)

Second, parents have obligations to their dependent offspring that they do not have to strangers (such as the famous violinist). Consider that deadbeat fathers are required to pay child support, even if they never desired to be fathers. Consider that if I abandon and let starve to death my two-year-old daughter, I will go to prison -- it simply does not work to say that my daughter is not entitled to my care and resources. If (as Thomson concedes for the sake of her argument) the unborn is a valuable person, like a two-year old, then the same parental responsibility that applies after birth seems to apply before.

Third, an unborn human being belongs in her mother's womb. Her location and condition are the same as that of every human being at that stage of life. She is dependent by her very nature. That is, she is not artificially "hooked up" to another person, but is developing naturally toward maturity in the only place she can -- this is how human procreation necessarily works. It seems very plausible to say that the unborn human has a rightful claim to the womb in which she grows. As philosopher Stephen Schwarz puts it, a mother "does have an obligation ... to let her [unborn child] live in the only place where she can now be protected, nourished, and allowed to grow, namely the womb."

Fourth, more broadly, as Francis Beckwith explains:

Human beings are persons-in-community and have certain obligations, responsibilities, and entitlements as members of their community that arise from their roles as mother, father, child, sibling, citizen, neighbor, etc. These roles are informed by institutions and ways of life that arose over time to account for, among other things, one's proper relationship to others, which depends on a person's degree of development (i.e., whether or not one is a child or an adult), the geographical proximity of those with whom one shares a common life, and what we owe those who cannot care for themselves due to age or infirmity. This also includes one's responsibility for protecting and nurturing vulnerable and defenseless human beings who come into being as a result of one engaging in generative acts that have the intrinsic purpose of bringing such beings into existence.

Because of these institutions and ways of life -- that have existed for generations and do not require one's consent in order to have normative force -- we often find ourselves in a network of relationships in which we are called upon to love those who sometimes can offer us very little in exchange for the good we provide to them.

Patrick Lee and Robert George articulate a deeper basis for this understanding:

[W]e are by nature members of communities. Our moral goodness or character consists to a large extent (though not solely) in contributing to the communities of which we are members. We ought to act for our genuine good or flourishing (we take that as a basic ethical principle), but our flourishing involves being in communion with others. And communion with others of itself -- even if we find ourselves united with others because of a physical or social relationship which precedes our consent -- entails duties or responsibilities. Moreover, the contribution we are morally required to make to others will likely bring each of us some discomfort and pain. This is not to say that we should simply ignore our own good, for the sake of others. Rather, since what (and who) I am is in part constituted by various relationships with others, not all of which are initiated by my will, my genuine good includes the contributions I make to the relationships in which I participate. Thus, the life we constitute by our free choices should be in large part a life of mutual reciprocity with others.

For the above reasons, even in the extremely rare cases when an abortion is not intentional killing (see (1), above), abortion (causing the death of the child) is impermissible on account of our obligations toward unborn human beings. For such obligations must at the very least preclude causing a great harm to the child (death) in order to avoid a significantly lesser harm for oneself (the burdens of pregnancy, however great).

Defenders of the bodily autonomy argument often object that obligations must be voluntarily assumed. But the first reason given for my second point (namely, men and women freely choose to have sexual intercourse, which is procreative by nature) seems sufficient to ground responsibility for the resulting child. Moreover, it is clearly false that obligations are always voluntarily assumed. Judge John T. Noonan relates the story of a Minnesota court case that makes this point well:

On a January night in Minnesota, a cattle buyer, Orlando Depue, asked a family of farmers, the Flateaus, with whom he had dined, if he could remain overnight at their house. The Flateaus refused and, although Depue was sick and had fainted, put him out of the house into the cold night. Imposing liability on the Flateaus for Depue's loss of his frostbitten fingers, the court said: "In the case at bar defendants were under no contract obligation to minister to plaintiff in his distress; but humanity demanded they do so, if they understood and appreciated his condition. ... The law as well as humanity required that he not be exposed in his helpless condition to the merciless elements." ... The American Law Institute, generalizing, has said that it makes no difference whether the person is a guest or a trespasser. He has the privilege of staying. His host has the duty not to injure him or put him into an environment where he becomes nonviable. The obligation arises when one "understands and appreciates" the condition of the other.

Thus, we seem to have some obligations as members of a community to persons who are weak, vulnerable and defenseless -- even if we are not related to them and are not responsible for their existence. It is far from clear how expelling an unborn child from the womb (leading to death), like expelling Depue from the Flateaus' house, could be permissible even if there is no consent to gestating the child (such as when the woman is a victim of rape).

Finally, while mothers have unique responsibilities, it must be emphasized that fathers do as well. Lee and George write:

[The father's] duty does not involve as direct a bodily relationship with the child as the mother's [this is a function of biology], but it may be equally or even more burdensome. In certain circumstances, his obligation to care for the child (and the child's mother), and especially his obligation to provide financial support, may severely limit his freedom and even require months or, indeed, years, of extremely burdensome physical labor. Historically, many men have rightly seen that their basic responsibility to their family (and country) has entailed risking, and in many cases, losing, their lives. Different people in different circumstances, with different talents, will have different responsibilities. It is no argument against any of these responsibilities to point out their distinctness.

(3) Many thinkers have proposed thought experiments that are much more analogous to pregnancy and/or abortion than Thomson's violinist story (which simply fails to capture the nature of pregnancy). These analogies highlight some of the key points mentioned above in (1) and (2), demonstrating why abortion is impermissible. I recently ran across this (student?) paper (via Life Report) that offers two excellent analogies that strongly support the conclusion that abortion is a grave moral wrong. Other thought experiments and real-life examples reveal implications of Thomson's view that are clearly unacceptable. Indeed, it seems to me that the criticism of the argument from bodily autonomy is extensive, powerful and decisive.

Final thoughts

If the unborn is an intrinsically valuable, rights-bearing human being, like a two-year-old, then she is owed the same basic care and regard as that which is owed a two-year-old. The bodily autonomy approach fails. In fact, arguably, the unique circumstances of pregnancy (e.g., the utter neediness and dependency of the unborn child) -- which Thomson thinks make abortion a justifiable form of homicide -- work to make abortion morally worse than other forms of wrongful homicide.

For more, see this earlier post, in which I also discuss the argument from bodily autonomy, and posts here and here, which cover debates involving the bodily autonomy argument (David Boonin was a participant in both).

For lengthy critiques of Thomson's argument, see Christopher Kaczor's The Ethics of Abortion (Chapter 7), Patrick Lee's Abortion & Unborn Human Life (Chapter 4) and Beckwith's Defending Life (Chapter 7).

Send comments to blog@mccl.org.

The most important issue in the 2012 presidential race

2011-08-22T14:32:00.000-05:00

"Why should it matter whether the 2012 candidates for president are pro-life," asks Notre Dame law professor O. Carter Snead in a new essay at Public Discourse, "especially given the vast array of other pressing issues facing the United States, including (though certainly not limited to) crushing national debt, widespread unemployment, existential fiscal strains on the social safety net, multiple wars, and the continuing menace of terrorism? Aren't the American people tired of the intractable bickering of a handful of extremist combatants in what seems to be an endless culture war? Unless you're a radical leftist or a right-wing Christian, why should any serious person in the public square waste time on these issues when there are so many real matters at stake at this moment in our nation's history?"

"These questions reflect an attitude that seems to be widely shared in certain circles of our polity," Snead continues. "But I would respectfully submit that such questions reflect a badly misguided and inadequate understanding of the moral, cultural, legal, and political dispute of which the pro-life movement is a part."

Snead articulates the pro-life position (i.e., the equal dignity of all human beings), explains how those current matters in which human equality is rejected (particularly abortion and embryo-destructive research) are intrinsically of greater moral significance than the other political issues of our day, discusses the power of the presidency to affect these issues (contrasting President Obama's abortion-expanding record with the pro-life accomplishments of his predecessor), and lays out a pro-life game plan by which the next president can save lives and guide society closer to the requirements of basic justice.

Snead's essay is excellent and well worth reading. I may highlight sections from it in future posts, for as Snead concludes, "Literally millions of lives hang in the balance."

Women's health after abortion

2011-08-19T15:45:00.001-05:00

Abortion is wrong because it is the unjust killing of innocent, unborn human beings. But it can also have devastating consequences for the other persons involved.

Women's Health after Abortion: The Medical and Psychological Evidence is a 2003 book published by the deVeber Institute. Authors Elizabeth Ring-Cassidy and Ian Gentles provide an excellent and thorough analysis of research regarding the effect of abortion on women's health -- both physical and psychological, short- and long-term.

The entire book is available online here. Individual topics are easy to access, and there are helpful summaries of the findings.

'The state's greatest failure to be the state'

2011-08-15T18:55:00.002-05:00

"A fundamental concern of law is the protection of the weak against the strong and powerful. Such weakness is vividly seen in the utter helplessness of the unborn baby. The unborn have no voting rights and no physical power to avert their destruction. If their interests are to be served and protected, it must be by adults in general and by government in particular. The Supreme Court decided that the state has no compelling interest in the fetus until viability. (One wonders at what point the fetus has a compelling interest in the state.) By denying the unborn the fundamental right to live, the state has reneged on its solemn duty.

"The Roe v. Wade decision has provoked the most serious ethical crisis in the history of the United States. This is the nadir in American jurisprudence, the moment of the state's greatest failure to be the state."

-- R.C. Sproul

The late John Stott on abortion

2011-08-11T19:30:00.001-05:00

"How can we speak of the termination of a pregnancy when what we really mean is the destruction of a human life? How can we talk of therapeutic abortion when pregnancy is not a disease needing therapy and what abortion effects is not a cure but a killing? How can we talk of abortion as a kind of retroactive contraception when what it does is not prevent conception but destroy the conceptus? We need to have the courage to use accurate language. Abortion is feticide: the destruction of an unborn child. It is the shedding of innocent blood, and any society that can tolerate this, let alone legislate for it, has ceased to be civilized.

"One of the major signs of decadence in the Roman Empire was that its unwanted babies were exposed, that is, abandoned to die. Can we claim that Western society is any less decadent because it consigns its unwanted babies to the hospital incinerator instead of the local rubbish dump? Reverence for human life is an indispensable characteristic of a humane and civilized society. ...

"The Bible has much to say about God's concern for the defenseless. And the most defenseless of all people are unborn children. They are speechless to plead their own cause and helpless to protect their own lives. So it is our responsibility to do for them what they cannot do for themselves.

"I now turn ... to the Christian church. ... We need to provide much more support for overburdened mothers -- personal, financial, social, and medical support -- both before and after their child is born. We need to ensure that children who may be unwanted and unloved by their parents will be welcomed and loved by others in society and especially by the church. ...

"And, finally, we must not stand in personal judgment either on the women who have resorted to an abortion or on the men whose lack of sexual self-control is responsible for so many unwanted pregnancies. Instead, we must tell them that there is forgiveness with God. ..."

-- The late John Stott, June 25, 1983

Recent study confirms MCCL GO white paper report

2011-08-11T17:08:00.000-05:00

The following was released today, August 11, 2011.

A study released this week by Human Rights Watch, entitled "Stop Making Excuses: Accountability for Maternal Health Care in South Africa," highlights nearly the same facts that a MCCL Global Outreach white paper ("How South Africa is failing women and children") stated back in January.

Human Rights Watch is confirming what we have long known: Good quality health care, and not abortion, is what will decrease maternal mortality rates for the populace. The Human Rights Watch 66-page report details situations in which pregnant women were actually abused by the very medical staff from which they sought help.

While the study does make reference on page 56 to a "Right to Life," the citation is made for the life of the woman and notes that this right is to be interpreted in a "restrictive" manner. The right to life of the unborn child is not mentioned in the report.

"When government officials and health care advocates spend their days pushing abortion on women, you are going to get more abortions," said MCCL GO Executive Director Scott Fischbach. "If they change focus and push quality health care, women and babies can live. It's pretty simple."

Abortion was made legal in South Africa with the implementation of the Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act of 1996. In the year prior to the legalization of abortion, 1,600 abortions were performed in the country. Since the law was changed, reported abortions have increased to more than 80,000 per year, according to the most recent statistics from the South African Office for National Statistics.

MCCL GO has called for a renewed emphasis on improving health care for women as the only sure means of reducing maternal mortality. Better medical care, including antibiotics, sterile gloves and equipment, improved obstetric and prenatal care, access to doctors and hospitals, availability of birth attendants and better communications, is the answer to problem of maternal mortality.

"Legal abortion only leads to more abortions, and, as a result, more abortion-related complications for women," Fischbach said.

MCCL GO is a pro-life global outreach program of the Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life Education Fund with one goal: to save as many innocent lives as possible from the destruction of abortion. Learn more at www.mccl-go.org.