Entries Tagged 'Life Issues' ↓

According to pro-life activist Gerard V. Bradley is John McCain.

McCain is not the only pro-life candidate in the Republican field. There are — and were — others. Kansas Senator Sam Brownback is rightly regarded as a champion of the unborn. He was no doubt the first choice of many ardent pro-life Republicans. But Brownback gave up his campaign for the Republican nomination months ago. Now he is backing McCain.

Of the remaining pro-life Republicans, none can match McCain’s record of opposing abortion. He has served in Congress for 24 years, and cast a lot of votes on abortion legislation during that time. His record is not merely exemplary — it is perfect. McCain’s votes on abortion really could not be better. A campaign advertisement in South Carolina says of John McCain: “Pro-life. Not just recently. Always. Never wavering.” The ad is true.

It is no criticism of any other pro-life candidate to say that McCain’s track record makes him the best of a small number of good choices. Mike Huckabee is a good man and solidly pro-life. I personally do not doubt the sincerity or depth of Mitt Romney’s present commitment to the unborn. But experience matters. Being battle-hardened in defense of life is a real plus. Twenty-four years of service at the national level — almost all of them in the Senate — make a big difference when we are talking about the next President, compared to candidates who have been small-state governors. There is no need to speculate or to rely upon promises or take matters on faith when it comes to McCain and abortion. He has demonstrated himself to be the best pro-life choice.

McCain’s only lapse was his openness to destroying “spare” embryos in fertility clinics that would not be implanted for their stem cells. Bradley here says that after he talked with him, McCain has changed his position and no longer supports that option.

Scientists have generated mature human embryos from cloned adult skin cells.

The scientists say they have no interest in bringing a cloned human being to term, which seems to placate people and the law. But it is the practice of destroying these embroyos that is the abomination! A cloned human being would not be, any more than identical twins, though the damage to the family is also a severe evil (since if you are cloned, your child would be your twin).

Anyway, we have discussed this point before. I would like to raise another question. What we have here is asexual reproduction. We have already separated sex from procreation. We have also separated procreation from sex. (Artificial insemination at least uses the sexual cells. This method dispenses with that, finding a skin cell sufficient.) Reportedly, an artificial womb will soon be feasible.

Do you think, in the future, that pregnancy will become obsolete? That, once we can generate children without child-bearing–with its accompanying morning sickness, 9 months of discomfort, labor pains, etc.–that this will catch on? Does this also mean that marriage and the family itself will become obsolete?

Yet another major breakthrough has taken place in generating stem cells without killing an embryo. Scientists have found a way to take one cell from an embryo and multiply it into human stem cells. The procedure does not kill the embryo, and, in fact, embryos that have had this cell haircut have been successfully implanted and brought to term. This method seems especially promising because, unlike other non-lethal approaches discovered recently that require more research, it already works in creating new lines of stem cells!

Confounding the anti-natalists we talked about recently, the fertility rate in the USA has reached 2.1 children per woman, which means that Americans are, at long last, replacing themselves.

This is good news, as other advanced industrial nations are struggling with low fertility rates that will have major bad economic consequences. Most of those countries are giving money to women who have babies and other benefits. The USA is doing nothing like that, but the higher fertility rate is taking place in all age groups and across all demographics. This is the first time the fertility rate has reached replacement level since the 1970s and the advent of birth control and legalized abortion. Read this article from USA Today. Excerpts:

The fertility rate among Americans has climbed to its highest level since 1971, setting the country apart from most industrialized nations that are struggling with low birthrates and aging populations.

The fertility rate hit 2.1 in 2006, according to preliminary estimates released by the National Center for Health Statistics. It’s a milestone: the first time since shortly after the baby boom ended that the nation has reached the rate of births needed for a generation to replace itself, an average 2.1 per woman.

“What matters is that the U.S. is probably one of very few industrialized countries that have a fertility rate close to or at replacement level,” says José Antonio Ortega, head of the fertility section at the United Nations’ Population Division.

A high fertility rate is important to industrialized nations. When birthrates are low, there are fewer people to fill jobs and support the elderly.

Fertility in the USA went up in every age group from 2005 to 2006, the biggest jump coming among those 20 to 24 years old. The U.S. population topped 300 million last year, and the Census Bureau projects growth to 400 million by around 2040.

Developed countries in Europe and Asia have launched several government initiatives to encourage more births, from financial bonuses and extended family leaves to subsidized child care.

The wide availability of birth control options and more career opportunities for women have caused fertility rates to hit low levels in Japan, South Korea, Italy, Germany and Russia. France, renowned for its family friendly policies, remains the exception with a fertility rate of 2.

“What is paradoxical is that the U.S. doesn’t have those (family friendly) policies and it has higher fertility,” Ortega says.

Fertility experts say that economic prosperity, immigration and better job security for working mothers contribute to more births.

“We do know that birthrates ticked up quite a bit among the most affluent,” says Stephanie Coontz, director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families. “Kids are luxury goods, and some of this uptick may be stay-at-home moms.”

It also has become easier for women to negotiate leaves from work to stay home with their children. “Women now feel much more entitled and much more confident, especially as they’re getting more education,” Coontz says.

U.S. fertility hit its low of 1.7 in 1976 after the introduction of the birth control pill in the 1960s. Another factor: the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that a woman has a constitutional right to an abortion.

“It’s not so much that abortion lowered the birthrate but abortion, coming on top of the birth control pill, really made it much more clear to women — and to men — that childbearing was a choice,” Coontz says.

You will notice that some people think of a big population as a liability (how will we feed so many? how will we get them jobs? what will they do to the environment?). Others see a nation’s population as its most important economic resource. Explain.

The Tower of Babel must have been build in the style of one of those Babylonian ziggurats with the spiraled ramps. I get that picture when I read about what scientists today are doing with the spirals of DNA.

From the “Washington Post” article Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms:

Scientists in Maryland have already built the world’s first entirely handcrafted chromosome — a large looping strand of DNA made from scratch in a laboratory, containing all the instructions a microbe needs to live and reproduce.

In the coming year, they hope to transplant it into a cell, where it is expected to “boot itself up,” like software downloaded from the Internet, and cajole the waiting cell to do its bidding. And while the first synthetic chromosome is a plagiarized version of a natural one, others that code for life forms that have never existed before are already under construction.

The cobbling together of life from synthetic DNA, scientists and philosophers agree, will be a watershed event, blurring the line between biological and artificial — and forcing a rethinking of what it means for a thing to be alive.
. . . . . . . . .

Today a scientist can write a long genetic program on a computer just as a maestro might compose a musical score, then use a synthesizer to convert that digital code into actual DNA. Experiments with “natural” DNA indicate that when a faux chromosome gets plopped into a cell, it will be able to direct the destruction of the cell’s old DNA and become its new “brain” — telling the cell to start making a valuable chemical, for example, or a medicine or a toxin, or a bio-based gasoline substitute.

Mark Steyn writes about a new convergence of “pro-choicers” and environmentalists, a movement he calls anti-natalism:

Here’s something new that took hold in the year 2007: A radical antihumanism, long present just below the surface, bobbed up and became explicit and respectable. In Britain, the Optimum Population Trust said that “the biggest cause of climate change is climate changers – in other words, human beings,” and professor John Guillebaud called on Britons to voluntarily reduce the number of children they have.

Last week, in the Medical Journal of Australia, Barry Walters went further: To hell with this wimp-o pantywaist “voluntary” child-reduction. Professor Walters wants a “carbon tax” on babies, with, conversely, “carbon credits” for those who undergo sterilization procedures. So that’d be great news for the female eco-activists recently profiled in London’s Daily Mail who boast about how they’d had their tubes tied and babies aborted in order to save the planet.

“Every person who is born,” says Toni Vernelli, “produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases and adds to the problem of overpopulation.” We are the pollution, and sterilization is the solution. The best way to bequeath a more sustainable environment to our children is not to have any.

What’s the “pro-choice” line? “Every child should be wanted”? Not anymore. The progressive position has subtly evolved: Every child should be unwanted.

By the way, if you’re looking for some last-minute stocking stuffers, Oxford University Press has published a book by professor David Benatar of the University of Cape Town called “Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence.” The author “argues for the ‘anti-natal’ view – that it is always wrong to have children … . Anti-natalism also implies that it would be better if humanity became extinct.”

Charles Krauthammer, who was a medical doctor before he became a pundit, says that the newly discovered way of making “pluripotent” cells from ordinary skin cells is going to be easier, cheaper, and better than harvesting stem cells from unborn children. He credits the pro-life policy of George Bush for pushing the research in this direction. High moral standards have actually HELPED science.

That human life begins at conception is an implicit, but foundational doctrine of Christianity, according to this LifeQuotefrom Lutherans for Life:

“To deny full humanity to a conceptus [embryo] is to deny full humanity to the Savior, ‘qui conceptus est de Spiritu Sancto, natus ex Maria virgine’ (Latin). We worship the coming Savior, we worship the ascended Lord, we worship the resurrected Son of Man, we worship the crucified Lamb, we worship the Boy in the temple, we worship the Babe in the manger, we worship the Conceptus in the womb of the Mother of God. Amen.” Posted on Cyberbrethren a Lutheran Blog.

This is brilliant, decisive, and theologically unanswerable. The Son of God was incarnate when, in the words of the Apostle’s Creed, He was “conceived by the Holy Ghost” and later “born of the Virgin Mary.” If the fetus becomes a human being at some later point–when the soul enters the body, or when the fetus shows brain waves, or some other point–how does that apply to the Incarnation without falling into some kind of modalism or other heresy? Anyone who confesses the Apostle’s Creed must be pro-life when it comes to abortion, embryonic stem cell research, and the rest of it.

And here is a fitting devotion during Advent: Adoring Christ the Embryo.

The “Washington Post” had a startling front-page headline this morning: Advance May End Stem Cell Debate. Two mainline scientific journals have published breakthrough and now accepted findings showing how ordinary skin cells can be turned back into stem cells. No embryos or human eggs are harmed in the making of these stem cells.

Says one scientist, “This is a tremendous scientific milestone, the biological equivalent to the Wright brothers’ first airplane.” Credit–and a future Nobel Prize–goes to James Thompson, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

I predict that Pro-deathers will STILL call for the “harvesting” of developing infants. They have been using the prospect of commodifying, industrializing, and desacralizing human life for this noble humanitarian cause to give moral legitimacy to abortion. They will find a way to continue that line of propaganda.

Meanwhile, this breakthrough, which eventually will save untold numbers of lives, is something else to be thankful for!

The National Right to Life Committee is endorsing Fred Thompson for president. That’s a good group, but I remain confused. He opposes a constitutional amendment barring abortion and he has even done consulting, earlier in his career, for a pro-abortion organization. His Senate record was pro-life, though, but it seems to me that his pro-life credentials are no better than anyone else’s in the race. Why endorse anyone under those circumstances? Why not hold everyone’s feet to the fire, then back someone when the field has narrowed?

The pro-life movement has a hero in Phill Kline, the former Attorney General of Kansas, who crusaded, among other things, against Wichita’s notorious abortion clinic that specializes in late-term, partial-birth abortions (that is to say, infanticide). Columnist Robert Novak tells about how the abortion industry targeted him for defeat:

That industry pumped an estimated $1.5 million into the 2006 campaign of Paul Morrison, the pro-choice Republican Johnson County district attorney who turned Democratic to run against Kline for attorney general. Tiller contributed $121,000 to his own ProKanDo PAC, which spent $322,680 in the campaign. An affiliated nonprofit group, Kansans for Consumer Privacy Protection, spent more than $400,000 on “educational mailings” obviously targeting Kline. Badly outspent, Kline relied on an old-fashioned handshaking campaign and was swamped at the polls.

Then came a bizarre event worthy of Shakespeare. Since Morrison had been elected district attorney as a Republican, under state law his replacement was selected by the GOP’s precinct committeemen. They chose Kline. The abortion lobby’s campaign against him had made him unelectable to any office, ruling out election to a full term as district attorney next year. With time short, he immediately set to work.

From this post in suburban Kansas City, Mr. Kline has opened up a new tactic in the abortion wars: going after the biggest abortion-cliinic franchiser, Planned Parenthood. Kline is charging the group with a multitude of offenses:

His 107 charges against Planned Parenthood include allegations of “unlawful late-term abortions,” “unlawful failure to determine viability for late-term abortion,” “making false information” and “unlawful failure to maintain records.” Antiabortion activists see Kline’s prosecution as the springboard for a national campaign. Forty other states have abortion laws similar to the Kansas statute that says abortion is legal only when the fetus cannot live independently outside the mother’s womb — that is, when it is not “viable.”

That is a big opening, since medical science is pushing back that time further and further. Phill Kline is a reminder that pro-lifers must never give up, that defeats may not be permanent and that new fronts in the battle are always opening up. And, I would add, that God has a hand in all of this.