Abortion before Roe

It is often assumed that, by striking down state abortion laws, the US Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion decision accomplished what the states on their own were doing. In other words, Roe did not impose its legal will on the states. Yet, as the philosopher Russell Hittinger points out, the push to legalize abortion had peaked before Roe v. Wade. The Court got both America and the law wrong.

"A few weeks before the 1972 referendum in Michigan, the polls showed that 56 percent of the people in Michigan supported the proposal to repeal laws against abortion. However, when the votes were counted, 61 percent voted down the repeal proposal. This was the last statewide test of abortion on demand before the Supreme Court imposed its own solution, and it represented an overwhelming rejection of the idea that individuals are answerable to no one other than themselves in the matter of abortion. As the 1964 Congressional civil-rights legislation indicates, these same citizens supported repeal of segregation and racial discrimination. The fact remains, however, that they would not willingly do the same for sexual 'rights.' Provided a level playing field, without any intervention by federal courts, citizens in almost every state and region rejected the absolute claims of sexual liberty. Remarkably, into the 1970s, the sexual revolution notwithstanding, citizens voted on these matters more or less the same as had their grandparents." The Free Library, Lifewatch (p. 1)

Editor: This is a fascinating journey through recent American history. Don't miss it!

Professor barred from helping with oil spill for pro-family views

One week after the Energy Department summoned Jonathan Katz to an elite crisis team, Secretary Steven Chu kicked him off the project for his objections to homosexuality. Katz, a Washington University physics professor, had written extensively on his blog about the health risks of same-sex behavior. According to an Energy Department statement, "Some of Professor Katz's controversial writings have become a distraction from the critical work of addressing the oil spill. Professor Katz will no longer be involved in [our] efforts." FRC

Principal put on leave over fetus dolls for students

A Virginia elementary school principal was placed on administrative leave Friday as school officials investigated why life like, 4-inch-long plastic fetus dolls were given to dozens of third-, fourth- and fifth-grade students. On Thursday, the school staffer thought to be responsible for handing out the dolls was placed on leave. Pilot Online

The Body as Gift, Resource or Commodity? Heidegger and the Ethics of Organ Transplantation

Three metaphors appear to guide contemporary thinking about organ transplantation. Although the gift is the sanctioned metaphor for donating organs, the underlying perspective from the side of the state, authorities and the medical establishment often seems to be that the body shall rather be understood as a resource. The acute scarcity of organs, which generates a desperate demand in relation to a group of potential suppliers who are desperate to an equal extent, leads easily to the gift’s becoming, in reality, not only a resource, but also a commodity. The claim is made that a successful explication of the gift metaphor in the case of organ transplantation and a complementary defence of the ethical primacy of the giving of organs need to be grounded in a philosophical anthropology which considers the implications of embodiment in a different and more substantial way than is generally the case in contemporary bioethics. Heidegger’s phenomenology offers such an alternative, with the help of which we can understand why body parts could and, indeed, under certain circumstances, should be given to others in need, but yet are neither resources nor properties to be sold. The phenomenological exploration in question is tied to fundamental questions about what kind of relationship we have to our own bodies, as well as about what kind of relationship we have to each other as human beings sharing the same being-in-the-world as embodied creatures. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, by subscription only

Bulgarian psychiatrist, 62, has IVF twins

According to reports, Bulgaria is debating a cap on the age for motherhood in Bulgaria after a 62-year-old woman gave birth to IVF twins. The woman, psychiatrist Krasimira Dimitrova, gave birth to the twins prematurely by caesarean section. They have been said to be healthy despite weighing in at less than a kilogram each at birth. BioEdge

Related stories:
More blunders put spotlight on IVF watchdog
Surrogacy: Profession or exploitation?
Should drug addicts be sterilized?
Autism linked to fertility drugs
India: Surrogacy bills looks to child's interests

Craig Venter’s synthetic bacteria

It was described as a scientific earthquake, but Craig Venter was just a fraction more modest in summing up his team’s biotechnology milestone in May. His synthetic bacterium was, he said, “the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer.”

The company’s ultimate goal is to create a stripped-down cellular chassis with just enough biological machinery for independent life. Non-essential DNA regions from the synthetic genome will be whittled away until it is as concise as possible to sustain life. The result will be “a new vision of cells as understandable machines comprised of biological parts of known function.”

Some bioethicists interpreted this ambitious vision as a “God is dead” moment. Julian Savulescu, of Oxford University, declared breathlessly that Venter was becoming “a god: creating artificial life that could never have existed naturally, creating life from the ground up using basic building blocks.” And the best-known bioethicist in the US, Arthur Caplan, ranked it with Darwin and Copernicus. “Venter’s achievement would seem to extinguish the argument that life requires a special force or power to exist,” he said. “In my view, this makes it one of the most important scientific achievements in the history of mankind.” BioEdge, WSJ

See also: The Perils of Creating Synthetic Life
President issues a letter re: Synthetic life
Venter not the first scientist to "play God"

War of the Worldviews, part 2

Video from Answers in Genesis

Why are more Americans calling themselves pro-life?

Pro-choice and pro-life activists have competing theories of their own about why Gen Y in particular is tilting away from choice. Some pro-choicers attribute the shift to abstinence-only sex education. Alternatively, the young pro-life activists I spoke to wonder if they have more support because of improved ultrasound technology. "My generation has seen ultrasound photos of ourselves and our siblings," Kelsey Hazzard, the president of secularprolife.org, says, "so it's sort of hard to put the 'fetuses are just a clump of tissues' line past us." Slate

Get to Know: SecularPro-Life.org

If you are pro-life because abortion violates the Constitutional right to life, science shows that human life begins at conception, abortion hurts women, or for any other non-religious reason: make yourself at home! Here you will meet like-minded atheists, theists, and agnostics who are eager to save lives and fight the media portrayal of pro-lifers as "religious extremists." SecularPro-Life.org

Beneficent Persuasion: Techniques and Ethical Guidelines to Improve Patients’ Decisions

Physicians frequently encounter patients who make decisions that contravene their long-term goals. Behavioral economists have shown that irrationalities and self-thwarting tendencies pervade human decision making, and they have identified a number of specific heuristics (rules of thumb) and biases that help explain why patients sometimes make such counterproductive decisions. Annals of Family Medicine

Elle Examines Efforts To Increase Male Reproductive Rights

In Elle magazine on Monday, writer Stephanie Fairyington examined efforts to expand men's legal rights in cases where a partner becomes pregnant and the two disagree on whether to carry the pregnancy to term or have an abortion. Medical News Today

Living Together: Myths, Risks, and Answers

Living together is an option many people choose to give marriage a “trial run,” but it’s a practice that’s decreasing the marriage rate and increasing the divorce rate at the same time. How does God’s plan for marriage really does produce the strongest relationships? Mike McManus and his wife, Harriet, are the founders of Marriage Savers, a ministry designed to better prepare, enrich and restore marriages. Audio file: For Faith & Family

Pope: Answer to Secularism is to Re-Evangelize World

Pope Benedict said during his recently concluded trip to Portugal that "vast effort at every level" is needed to answer the threats of growing secularism in Europe, of which abortion and homosexual "marriage" are among "today's most insidious and dangerous." What is needed, he said, is "a vigorous Catholic outlook ... in fidelity to the magisterium ... a strong prophetic dimension without allowing yourselves to be silenced." LifeSiteNews

Bishop Says Nun is Automatically Excommunicated for Rubberstamping Hospital Abortion

The Catholic hospital in Phoenix, AZ, has two directives relating to abortion. The first says that physicians cannot perform direct abortions under any circumstances, including for such reasons as to save the life of the mother. A second directive adds, however, that "operations, treatments and medications that have as their direct purpose the cure of a proportionately serious pathological condition of a pregnant woman are permitted ... even if they will result in the death of the unborn child." This directive is based on the Catholic philosophical principle of double effect, which says that if the treatment sought addresses the direct causes of the woman’s health condition (such as radiation treatment for cancer), but never intends to kill the unborn child (even though that may happen as a secondary, but unintended, effect of the lifesaving treatment), then it is morally licit.

Hospital officials claimed that they were following the second directive by aborting the baby. Dr. Paul A. Byrne, Director of Neonatology and Pediatrics at St. Charles Mercy Hospital in Toledo, Ohio, disputes the claim that an abortion is ever a procedure necessary to save the life of the mother, or carries less risk than birth. “I don’t know of any [situation where abortion is necessary to save the life of the mother]. I know that a lot of people talk about these things, but I don’t know of any. The principle always is preserve and protect the life of the mother and the baby. . . . The only reason to kill the baby at 11 weeks is because it is smaller,” which makes the abortion easier to perform, he said, not because the mother’s life is in immediate danger. LifeSiteNews

Teens who go to church have less trouble!

Teens receive much bad publicity. Newspapers and television highlight youth drug and alcohol problems, teenage suicides, vandalism, gang violence, teen pregnancies, and an increase in the number of street kids.

In Australia in the 1990s, results of a four-year study of the social and religious attitudes of 310,000 church attenders showed encouraging signs among youth. The results showed that 62 per cent of churchgoing Australian teenagers identified with the statement “I do not believe in evolution. God created the world in seven days as described in the Bible”.

The young people who believed so strongly in creation and rejected evolution also shone in other areas. They showed the strongest disapproval of sex outside marriage. They opposed racism. They had the highest assurance of everlasting life. Creation Tips

Are food and water 'extraordinary measures'?

There are several ethical principles relevant to assessing moral questions arising from persons said to be in the vegetative state: (1) Human bodily life, however burdened, is still a good of the person, integral to his or her being. (2) It is always gravely immoral intentionally to kill an innocent human being, i.e, to deprive him or her of the good of life itself. (3) Means chosen to preserve human life are morally obligatory if they are "morally" (not necessarily medically) "ordinary" or "proportionate." (4) Means chosen to preserve human life are not obligatory, and in fact their withholding or withdrawal may be morally indicated if they are "morally" (not necessarily medically) "extraordinary" or "disproportionate." (5) Means are extraordinary or disproportionate if the means chosen are either futile (=useless) or burdensome. Catholic.net

The humanist case against [legalized] euthanasia

When I tell people that I am deeply uncomfortable with the campaign for the ‘right to die’, and I am not convinced that assisted dying should be legalised, they give me funny looks. They instantly assume that I must be one of ‘Them’ – one of those religious people, one of those strange individuals who thinks human life is so sacred that no one should ever be allowed to die until God wants them to. But I’m not. I’m an atheist. And I consider myself a radical humanist. However, I am also very worried about the drive to legalise assisted dying. I think we need to start making the humanist case against this fashion for voluntary euthanasia. SpikedOnline

Fertility Treatment Gets More Complicated

Several recent rabbinic rulings on fertility treatment dictate that a child conceived in vitro is Jewish only if the egg came from a Jewish woman. WSJ

'Radically different' story emerges about Baptists detained in Haiti

Paul Thompson reads the media accounts describing the journey of him and nine other jailed Baptist volunteers in Haiti who are all now free, and scratches his head. He was there. What he reads is not what he experienced. Baptist Press

Steve Jobs: iPad Revolution Means ‘Freedom from Porn’

Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computers, says his company will not be a party to the pornography industry and hopes that the iPad and iPhone revolution will help lead to a porn-free world. When a critic questioned Apple's decision to disallow certain apps as infringing on users' freedom, Jobs responded, “Yep, freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom.” He pointed out that developers who do not comply simply go elsewhere. “We’re just doing what we can to try and make (and preserve) the user experience we envision. You can disagree with us, but our motives are pure.” LifeSiteNews

Brave New World in Ten Years, Researchers Boast

Researchers are bragging that within the next ten years, in vitro fertilization (IVF) technology will have advanced so far that it will perform "better than nature" and sex will no longer be necessary for human reproduction. "We are not quite at that stage yet, but it's where we're heading,' said Dr. John Yovich, co-author of the study, “Embryo culture: can we perform better than Nature?” published in the April 2010 issue of the journal Reproductive BioMedicine. LifeSiteNews

War of the Worldviews, part 1

Video from Answers in Genesis equips teens to stand firm on the authority of God’s Word, and each will equip and challenge them to activate their faith!

Didn’t the Curse Prevent Overpopulation?

If sin never entered the world, then there is no reason to assume God wouldn’t have said “stop reproducing” once humans had filled the earth. Remember in a world without sin, God’s relationship with mankind wouldn’t be tarnished; hence, open communication should still be there. . . . The basis for overpopulation comes from uniformitarianism and projecting current growth rates into the future. Uniformitarianism has failed in the fields of geology and radiometric dating while looking at the past. So, why trust the results of uniformitarianism here? AiG

Can Creationists Be “Real” Scientists?

Is a belief in particles-to-people evolution really necessary to understand biology and other sciences? Is it even helpful? Science works perfectly well without any connection to evolution. Think about it this way: is a belief in molecules-to-man evolution necessary to understand how planets orbit the sun, how telescopes operate, or how plants and animals function? Has any biological or medical research benefited from a belief in evolution? Not at all.

The rise of technology is not due to a belief in evolution, either. Computers, cellular phones, and DVD players all operate based on the laws of physics, which God created. It is because God created a logical, orderly universe and gave us the ability to reason and to be creative that technology is possible. How can a belief in evolution (that complex biological machines do not require an intelligent designer) aid in the development of complex machines, which are clearly intelligently designed? Technology has shown us that sophisticated machines require intelligent designers—not random chance. Science and technology are perfectly consistent with the Bible, but not with evolution. AiG

John Calvin on Abortion

"...for the fetus, though enclosed in the womb of its mother, is already a human being, and it is almost a monstrous crime to rob it of the life which it has not yet begun to enjoy. If it seems more horrible to kill a man in his own house than in a field, because a man's house is his place of most secure refuge, it ought surely to be deemed more atrocious to destroy a fetus in the womb before it has come to light." John Calvin (1509-1564), Commentary, Exodus 21:22 (posted on An Infant in A Cradle blog)

Pro-Life Caucus on shaky ground

A bitter fight over the Democratic health care overhaul has left a bipartisan group of antiabortion lawmakers with poor vital signs. Lawmakers say a dispute over whether the landmark legislation would allow federal funding of abortion seriously damaged relations among Democratic and Republican members of the House Pro-Life Caucus, once known for its ability to cross party lines. Some members say they're not sure whether the group will continue to function. Congress.org

Baby Bottle Boomerang? What's that?

Learn how your church can involve the whole family in raising funds for pro-life ministry -- through a Baby Bottle Boomerang campaign. It's fun!

Other people's kids, not mine

Many parents don't think their kids are interested in sex, but believe that everyone else's kids are, a new study reveals. These disillusioned parents are factually wrong, as there were 435,436 births to teens aged 15 to 19 in 2006, and 6,396 for those aged 10 to 14, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). And the dual thinking about teenage sex has its own consequences. By viewing their own children as holier-than-thou, parents shift the responsibility for potential sexual activity to others. LiveScience

Humans Anonymous

Hello. My name is Ben and I’m a speciesist, a member of Humans Anonymous. I confess that I’m addicted to the human species, and that I am uncontrollably addicted to being human myself. Furthermore, I have the audacity to believe that being a member of the species Homo sapiens entitles me to a whole bundle of privileges, responsibilities, and rights. . . . Believing as I do in the priority of the human species among all other animal species probably makes me, ironically, a dinosaur, but happily, I’m not alone. Center for Bioethics & Culture

What liberalism is missing

The worldview that underlies the majority’s resistance to liberalism . . . is sober and skeptical about human nature. This worldview too is called conservative . . . if only we remain mindful of its distinctive character and its difference from traditionalism. It has affinities with classical republicanism and classical political philosophy. . . . [T]he leading edge of liberalism is indeed at a height, that it is in touch with some of the greatest truths, but that it apprehends these truths only partially and interprets and applies them in ways that are correspondingly — that is to say, greatly — misguided. Hoover Policy Review

See also: Progressive or Liberal, They're United on Promoting Abortion
Progressivism is all-the-rage nowadays, with liberals having jettisoned the “liberal” label for the less maligned tag of “progressive.” . . . One of the only things we really know about progressives, and that they know about themselves and their ideology, is that they favor constant “change,” “reform,” an ever-shifting, ongoing “evolution,” or, yes, progression. And therein is an inherent, significant difficulty: progressivism offers no clear, definable end. The goal-post is always moving, forever pushed further away. Ends are never ends; they always “progress,” with culture and society, banking on the ludicrous assumption that the changes are always (or largely) good.

R.C. Sproul, Jr. on the Church’s silence on abortion

Why is it? He posits two reasons: 1) So many church members have abortions in their pasts, and 2) it’s like the doctrine of hell – too grim to look at for long. YouTube

Talking to your daughter about Miley Cyrus

Dannah Gresh of pro-modesty Secret Keeper Girl, has "offered positive thoughts about Miley... and encouraged forgiveness and a lot of second chances." However, after viewing Miley's latest video, she was compelled to write An Open Letter to Billy Ray and Tish Cyrus and How to Talk to Your Daughter About Miley Cyrus.

“I'm pro-life, but we just need to preach the Gospel”

I cannot tell you how many pastors throw this at me as an excuse for not getting involved with pro-life work or even talking about it from the pulpit. It actually surprises me that a pastor would even try to justify his apathy and lack of involvement in standing up for life. Obviously, our main focus is to spread the Gospel, but the idea that taking a stand for the almost 4,000 children that are being ripped limb from limb every day by surgical abortion is contrary to the Gospel is simply ludicrous. In fact, I would say that when we do not stand up for the voiceless or love our neighbor as ourselves, we are not truly preaching the Gospel. Bryan Kemper

Proper Palliative Sedation Not Same as "Terminal Sedation"

The assisted suicide movement is ever about blurring vital distinctions and deconstructing crucial definitions. One target has been the proper pain control technique known as palliative sedation, a rarely required procedure in which patients near death are sedated to control pain or other symptoms such as severe agitation or air hunger that cannot be alleviated in any other manner. Confusion about this–some of it intentionally sown by assisted suicide advocates–induced the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization to issue a statement clarifying the proper methods and purposes of sedation as a palliative technique. LifeNews

Kagan Donated to Pro-Abort Group

Mainstream media say not much is known about Elena Kagan, but the pro-life press seems to be able to ferret out lots of info. For instance, Americans United for Life reports Kagan has revealed her pro-abortion loyalties by contributing financially to the pro-abortion National Partnership for Women and Families. According to its website, NPWF works "to increase women’s access to quality, confidential reproductive health services and block attempts to limit reproductive rights and reverse hard-won gains." Abortion services are one of its top concerns. LifeSiteNews

Reproductive tourism nightmares

A German couple are still waiting to take home their twin sons after two years of legal wrangling. The children were caught in citizenship limbo after an Indian surrogate mother gave birth to them in February 2008. The couple's homeland has refused the children passports, as German nationality is determined by the birth mother. The case has now reached the highest court in India's slow-paced judicial system, where it continues to wrestle with the children's problematic citizenship status. Brisbane Times

BFL in Togo

Watch this video that describes our partnership with missionaries and nationals in Togo. You Tube

Adult stem cells (not embryonic) help MS patients

A groundbreaking new study published in the last week provides more good news for treatment of multiple sclerosis with adult stem cells. Researchers at the University of Bristol used patients’ own adult stem cells to treat their MS. LifeNews

What's up with the China kindergarten attacks?

Today's was the fifth such attack on school children in less than two months. The country has taken measures to boost campus security in recent weeks. Experts have blamed pressures caused by modern society for the string of attacks. Xinhuanet

Most of the recent school invasions have been blamed on people with personal grudges or suffering from mental illness, leading to calls for improved security. Accounts in China's state-owned media have glossed over motives and largely shied away from why schools have so often been targets. Yet experts say outbursts against the defenseless are frequently due to social pressures. An avowedly egalitarian society only a generation ago, China's headlong rush to prosperity has sharpened differences between haves and have-nots, and the public health system has atrophied even as pressures grew. Yahoo

Editor: A news report last night linked the child murders with China's one-child policy, saying how devastating it is when a family loses its sole progeny. Could there be another connection --abortions and infanticide of baby girls creating a dirth of women for young men to marry, and the lost prospect of having their own children? Wouldn't that be one reason for social instability?

The science of a happy marriage

A growing body of research is focusing on the science of commitment. Scientists are finding that while some people may be naturally more resistant to temptation, men and women can also train themselves to protect their relationships and raise their feelings of commitment. NY Times

Personhood measure’s support revived

In 2008, Colorado voters overwhelmingly opposed ballot language defining personhood as including any human being from the moment of fertilization. This year’s ballot question, known as Amendment 62, is written virtually the same. Instead of saying a human life begins at the moment of fertilization, it says life begins at the “biological development” of that human being.

The ultimate goal is to make abortion illegal, and the ballot means to do that by drawing what would almost certainly be a court challenge. Personhood supporters hope that inevitable lawsuit will lead to a reversal of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that led to legalized abortions.

In 2008, however, top GOP leaders said if the personhood measure ended up in court, it ran the risk of solidifying that court ruling rather than reversing it. The politics behind the ballot question, just like politics in general this year compared to 2008, are entirely different. That election was viewed as a big Democratic year, and polarizing GOP social issues such as abortion were unlikely to go anywhere. Daily Sentinel

Why Taxing Abortion Is Bad Policy

A pro-life Senator in the Kansas state legislature introduced a proposal to impose a sales tax on abortion in an attempt to possibly raise money and hopefully reduce abortions. While her intentions are good, taxing abortion is a horrible idea.

• A tax creates a revenue stream that politicians get addicted to – thus making the object of your taxation harder to eliminate.
• Taxing something also gives it legitimacy – almost as if being taxed gives you government approval.
• Governments should not profit from abortion – no matter how profitable. LifeNews

Three stories on the weird, wacky world of IVF

• High tech romantic triangle in UK falls apart - not what I'd consider "romantic"
• J-Lo’s real back-up plan didn’t include IVF - new movie reveals the pitfalls of IVF for single moms
• Accidental surrogate hands over baby after IVF mistake - American woman mistakenly impregnated with another couples embryo

The moral life of babies

A growing body of evidence suggests that humans have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life. With the help of well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life. Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone. Which is not to say that parents are wrong to concern themselves with moral development or that their interactions with their children are a waste of time. Socialization is critically important. But this is not because babies and young children lack a sense of right and wrong; it’s because the sense of right and wrong that they naturally possess diverges in important ways from what we adults would want it to be. NY Times

Group Backs Ritual ‘Nick’ as Female Circumcision Option

In a controversial change to a longstanding policy concerning the practice of female circumcision in some African and Asian cultures, the American Academy of Pediatrics is suggesting that American doctors be given permission to perform a ceremonial pinprick or “nick” on girls from these cultures if it would keep their families from sending them overseas for the full circumcision. But some opponents of female genital mutilation denounced the statement. NYTimes

The New Demography of American Motherhood

The demography of motherhood in the United States has shifted strikingly in the past two decades. Compared with mothers of newborns in 1990, today's mothers of newborns are older and better educated. They are less likely to be white and less likely to be married.

In 1990, there were more births to teenagers than to women ages 35 and older. By 2008, that had reversed -- 14% of births were to older women and 10% were to teens. Births to women ages 35 and older grew 64% between 1990 and 2008, increasing in all major race and ethnic groups.

Another notable change during this period was the rise in births to unmarried women. In 2008, a record 41% of births in the United States were to unmarried women, up from 28% in 1990. The share of births that are non-marital is highest for black women (72%), followed by Hispanics (53%), whites (29%) and Asians (17%), but the increase over the past two decades has been greatest for whites -- the share rose 69%. Pew Research Center

Psalm 139 project gives Florida sonogram to save lives

Celebrating the Sanctity of Human Life and demonstrating a tangible “proper response” to an enduring moral issue, Southern Baptists’ Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission gave the Florida Baptist Children’s Homes an ultrasound machine worth $30,000 as part of its Psalm 139 Project. FL Baptist Witness

Justice John Paul Stevens — The Practice of Medicine and the Rule of Law

Justice John Paul Stevens will be missed by physicians and patients. Stevens believes that the Constitution prohibits government from interfering in personal decision making, including medical decisions that belong in the hands of physicians and their patients, not politicians and regulators; it was for this reason that he was Justice Harry Blackmun’s staunchest ally in upholding the Roe v. Wade abortion-rights decision.

One clear articulation of this belief can be found in Stevens’s 1991 dissent in Rust v. Sullivan, in which the Court upheld the “gag” rule prohibiting government-funded physicians from discussing abortion with patients. In his dissent, Stevens wrote, “Roe v. Wade and its progeny are not so much about a medical procedure as they are about a woman’s fundamental right to self-determination . . . free from governmental domination.” Stevens’s approach to adjudication. And by paying close attention to the facts of cases, he learned about medical practice on the job.

Nominated by President Gerald Ford, Stevens was sworn in to replace Justice William O. Douglas in December 1975. Although his appointment came almost 3 years after Roe v. Wade, he was not asked a single question about that opinion at his confirmation hearing and was confirmed by the Senate 98 to 0.

When Blackmun retired, Stevens became the justice most knowledgeable about health care — and most concerned about government interference in and distortion of the physician–patient relationship. He showed great empathy for suffering patients and their physicians in the physician-assisted suicide cases, writing in a concurring opinion that although he agreed that patients have no constitutional right to physician-prescribed lethal drugs, he might change his mind if such a prescription was shown to be “the only possible means of preserving a dying patient’s dignity and alleviating her intolerable suffering.” NEJM

“We think the process is safe. Nothing is perfect”

Former Baptist minister turned New Age abortion prophet, Curtis Boyd operates an abortion clinic in the liberal state of New Mexico, where laws are lax and there is less likelihood for legal entanglements. As far as Boyd and his abortion staff are concerned, the fewer layers of accountability the better. Boyd’s Southwestern Women’s Options is not your average abortion mill. It is where abortions are available throughout all nine months of pregnancy. Operation Rescue

Centrality of the sanctity of human life

"If life is not sacred then nothing is -- all the [church] programs, small groups, etc. -- will have no impact. Until the church makes the defense of life a priority -- not just an aside once or twice a year -- we won't be credible [because] we can't talk about our Creator God and not passionately defend those created in His image." Lisa Stiefken, Executive Director, Pregnancy Resource Center of San Bernardino, CA

G8 Battle Breaks Out Over International Abortion Funding

The campaign to insert abortion funding into maternal health initiatives has dominated the media coverage leading up to the 36th annual G8 Summit, which will be held in Huntsville, Canada in late June. The host government, Canada, has come under considerable criticism from the United States, the United Kingdom, pro-abortion NGOs and the Canadian media for refusing to bring abortion into the debate. C-Fam

Russian Patriarch Calls for More Babies

The head of the Russian Orthodox Church has stressed the need for more children to solve Russia's growing demographic problems. The Russian population has declined by approximately 7 million since 1991, and the fertility rate in 2008 is approximately 1.5 children per woman, well below the replacement level of 2.1. LifeSiteNews

Meanwhile, Thousands of Women Forcibly Sterilized in Uzbekistan

Negotiations on Pro-Abort Kenyan Constitution Break Down

The leaders of Kenya’s National Council of Churches of Kenya, the Anglican Church of Kenya, the Catholic Church, and Evangelicals have recognized that the country needs a reformed constitution, but they say that they will vigorously oppose the adoption of the proposed constitution so long as the constitution threatens the right to life and establishes the parallel “Kadhi” [Islamic] courts, which they say would undermine religious equity. "We will instead focus energies on educating the people of Kenya on the meaning of the cardinal issues and on campaigning for the rejection of the draft," said Rev. Peter Karanja. Christian leaders pulled out of talks with the government on April 28 after negotiations went sour, saying they could not compromise on fundamental issues and that the government had not made a good faith effort to help resolve their concerns. LifeSiteNews

Sperm donor children share experiences in new research

Are sperm donor children interested in their biological father and half-siblings? How does the knowledge of their unusual conception affect them? An article published in the latest issue of the journal Reproductive BioMedicine Online, gives a few clues.

Get to Know: AAPLOG

The American Association of Pro-Life Ob/Gyns numbers 2,500 members and associates, and are recognized by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists as a special interest group within the College. "Our purpose is to reaffirm the unique value and dignity of individual human life in all stages of growth and development from fertilization onward." Their newly updated website looks fantastic!

Pro-choice side needs men to win

NARAL's Nancy Keenan says, "The perception is that men are the loud, boisterous, and ever-present faces of the anti-choice movement (Mike Huckabee, Randall Terry, Rick Santorum), while women are the leaders of the pro-choice movement. And yet, if we are to win in the political arena, we simply cannot move pro-choice legislation, defeat anti-choice attacks, and protect Roe v. Wade unless we engage both genders." Newsweek, LifeNews

Editor: It's their own fault. They always said abortion was a woman's issue, men need not apply. So now, according to them, it's okay for men to speak up for life!

A Psychiatrist Looks at the Effects of Abortion

Free download from FRC. The growing weight of scientific studies and the voices of women themselves tell the story of abortion as a life-changing, adverse experience for many. Relying on Dr. Martha Shuping's experience as a psychiatrist, we can describe the psychological impact of abortion through the lens of her clinical counseling and the emerging scientific literature.