Grizzly

 

“Even for researchers, the sight of an unborn child’s head in a delivery box is too grisly”

By Dave Andrusko
Each time you watch an undercover video released by the Center for Medical Progress, you ask yourself, “Can it get any worse?”

And, unfortunately, with each successive video in which Planned Parenthood officials or those running the companies that harvest and sell baby body parts from Planned Parenthood clinics tell their horrific stories, the answer is yes, it can.

Yesterday’s video, according to CMP, shows its team of investigators in separate conversations with “Dr. Katharine Sheehan, the long-time medical director of Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest until 2013; Perrin Larton, the Procurement Manager for ABR [Advanced Bioscience Resources]; and Cate Dyer, the CEO of rival fetal tissue procurement company StemExpress.”
The most ghastly quote comes from Larton (who is smiling and giggling her way through much of the conversation), talking about late abortions:

Yeah. The whole point is not to have a live birth. And so the doctors have all– unless it’s somebody who has had 6 pregnancies and 6 vaginal deliveries. ….[T]hey put lams [laminaria] in and she comes in the next morning and I literally have had women come in and they’ll go in the OR, and they’re back out in 3 minutes, and I’m going “What’s goin’ on?” “Oh yeah, the fetus was already in the vaginal canal whenever we put her in the stirrups, it just fell out.”

“It” being the intact aborted baby.
There is a great deal of discussion in the video, the ninth in the series, about ABR’s long-standing relationship with Planned Parenthood Pacific Southwest. We learn that ABR charges $340 to “procure” a second-trimester fetal tissue “specimen” and that there is considerable snipping between the rival procurement companies.

Number nine was proceeded last week by a jaw-dropping video that was deeply unsetting even as compared to what we’ve have seen the past couple of months. Dyer was a main figure once again.
Over lunch with undercover investigators from the CMP, she employed the kind of dehumanizing language that we’ve come to see is routine for people who traffic in intact baby body parts.
For example, asked by the investigator, “What would make your lab happy?” Dyer responded “Another 50 livers a week.”

The “buyer” responds, “Ok, you can handle that?” Dyer enthusiastically answers

Yea. Just so you guys know, on the collection side for us, we’re also- as you see Megan out there in the clinic, we’re working with almost triple digit number clinics. So, it’s a lot on volume and we still need more, than what we do. So, it’s a lot. So, I don’t think you’ll hit a capacity with us anytime in the next ten years. I think you’ll feel solid with that standpoint. So, I think, with that you’ll feel like doing an agreement with us. It will be consistent growth and our growth has been consistent, and it’s going to continue to grow from that standpoint.

(Later Dyer adds, “Planned Parenthood has volume, because they are a volume institution.”)
But we’ve not reached the bottom of the pit yet. Consider this exchange. It speaks volumes about everybody involved in this ghastly enterprise, including the academic labs that experiment on the tissues and organs of aborted babies.

Dyer: As you probably know, one of the issues with neural [brain] tissue, it’s so fragile. It’s insanely fragile. And I don’t even know—I was gonna say, I know we get requests for neural, it’s the hardest thing in the world to ship.

Buyer: You do it as the whole calvarium [skull].

Dyer: Yeah, that’s the easiest way. And we’ve actually had good success with that. … Yeah! [laughter] Tell the lab it’s coming!

Buyer: Yeah.

Dyer: So they don’t open the box and go, ”Oh God!” [laughter] So yeah, so many of the academic labs cannot fly like that, they’re not capable.

Buyer: Why is that? I don’t understand that.

Dyer: It’s almost like they don’t want to know where it comes from. I can see that. Where they’re like, “We need limbs, but no hands and feet need to be attached.” And you’re like? Or they want long bones, and they want you to take it all off, like, make it so that we don’t know what it is.

A moment later, Dyer says

And their lab techs freak out, and have meltdowns, and so it’s just like, yeah. I think, quite frankly, that’s why a lot of researchers ultimately, some of them want to get into other things. They want to look at bone marrow, they want to look at adipose- sort of adult human, kind of adult based sampling.

Indicating, as NRLC President Carol Tobias observed, that “even for researchers, the sight of an unborn child’s head in a delivery box is too grisly.”

CMP has explained that there are more videos to come. Just wondering but could Planned Parenthood’s noticeable decline in approval ratings have anything to do with the videos which show the unvarnished truth about the largest abortion provider in the United States?
If so–and remembering that the networks are virtually embargoing any further discussion of the videos–I wonder what might happen if not half the public knew about the videos (as one survey indicated was the case), but 75%?

Stay tuned.
Editor’s note. If you want to peruse stories all day long, either go directly to nationalrighttolifenews.org and/or follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/daveha

Source: NRLC News

Conscience Rights

 

National Post editorial supports the conscience rights of all physicians who oppose euthanasia and assisted suicide

By Alex Schadenberg, Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Dr. Jeff Blackmer, vice-president of medical professionalism for the Canadian Medical Association.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Mark Holleron

On August 26, delegates at the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) annual General Council meeting rejected a motion (79%) to support conscientious objectors who refuse to refer patients for medical aid in dying.

The CMA has not announced its final policy yet but many physicians want nothing to do with killing their patients by euthanasia or assisted suicide, even after the Supreme Court struck down Canada’s assisted suicide law and gave parliament 12 months to legislate on the issue.
Last Thursday, the National Post newspaper published an editorial titled: On physician-assisted suicide, respect the conscience rights of all. The National Post first examined the position of physicians.

According to a poll of 1,047 doctors by the Canadian Medical Association (CMA), released as part of the organization’s annual general meeting in Halifax, 63 per cent would refuse to provide so-called “medical aid in dying.” 29 per cent said they would consider killing a patient upon request, with 19 per cent saying that they “would be willing to help end the life of a patient whose suffering was psychological, not physical.”

The results suggest there remains strong opposition to assisted suicide among the membership of the CMA, which until recently was officially opposed to a loosening of anti-euthanasia laws in any form. At the same time, it suggests there are enough doctors willing to aid a patient to commit suicide to serve the demand. Unfortunately, that is not enough to settle the matter of just when and how physicians will be involved.

The National Post editorial then examines the effect on physicians:

Put yourself in the position of a doctor who believes euthanasia to be a deep moral wrong. This is not an antiquated or otherwise-dismissible position. The legalization of physician-assisted suicide is a revolution in medicine, which turns the role of doctors as a provider of care on its head and intrudes upon the Hippocratic Oath’s instruction to “not play at God.” It violates the traditional conception of medicine, beseeching the physician to do no harm. It is a new and relatively unchartered territory — altogether so here in Canada. It is imperative that the conscience rights of all be protected.

Any doctor should have the right to say, “I want nothing to do with this.” While this would obviously not allow him or her to interfere in the decision of another doctor to help a patient commit suicide, the conscientiously objecting doctor should equally be under no obligation to abet the killing of a patient in any way, whether directly or by referral to another doctor.

The Supreme Court’s finding … means there are limits on how far Parliament can restrict the practice. It does not — and should not — imply an obligation upon all doctors to participate in the new assisted-suicide regime.

The National Post ends the editorial by urging parliament to recognize conscience rights.

As the CMA poll suggests, there remains considerable hesitation on the part of Canada’s physicians to jump on the euthanasia bandwagon. Accordingly, Parliament’s new law should be explicit in affording the utmost protection to doctors who do not wish to participate in this new and morally troubling enterprise.

The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition recognizes that if euthanasia and assisted suicide become legal, the only way to protect people is by protecting the conscience rights of physicians.
When physicians have the right to say – I will not kill you – then they also have the right to say – I will protect you in your time of need.
Editor’s note. This appeared at alexschadenberg.blogspot.com and is reprinted with permission.

Source: NRLC News

ObamaCare

 

Looming health care reduction on horizon for millions of employer-insured Americans

By Jennifer Popik, JD, Robert Powell Center for Medical Ethics
One of Obamacare’s many mechanisms that is intended to drive down health care spending is facing a growing chorus of opposition.

Critics of the “excess benefit tax” include over half of Members of the House of Representatives (both Democrat and Republican), major unions, and even the top two Democratic presidential candidates.

The provision at the heart of the controversy is an enormous 40% excise tax on employer-paid health insurance premiums above a governmentally-imposed limit that does not allow for medical inflation. The excess benefits tax will have its intended result of effectively imposing a price control on health insurance premiums.

In the very near future, millions of Americans are going to start to see concrete reductions to the plans they once enjoyed as a part of their employment compensation.
In an August 31, 2015, Politico piece written by Brian Faler, “’Cadillac tax’ could wreck popular medical accounts.” Faler explains

While the Obama administration contends the tax would apply to only a relatively narrow slice of people — thus, the Cadillac tax nickname — it will hit a growing number of companies because it’s indexed to a relatively slow measure of inflation.

While the tax will not take effect until 2018, insurance plans prepare many years ahead of time and are trying to prepare employers now for the looming changes. There are estimates that 33 million Americans will feel the initial round of reductions. And if this tax is not rescinded, Faler explains,

By 2028, more than half of all employers could potentially face the tax, according to a report this week by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. The tax applies not only to traditional health insurance but to a swath of other benefits, including supplemental insurance plans, flexible spending accounts and, potentially, on-site clinics that employers set up for their workers.

The excess benefits tax will cap for the first time the value of tax free health care benefits employers may provide. Tax free health care benefits have allowed employers to stay competitive by offering employees the hard-earned benefits of generous health care coverage.
But without Congressional action, this is about to change dramatically.
As a result of the tax, insurance companies will be forced to impose increasingly severe restraints on policy-holders’ access to medical diagnosis and treatment–limits that will not prevent setting broken legs and giving flu shots, but will make it harder and harder to get the often-expensive medicines, surgery, and therapy essential to combat such life-threatening illnesses as cancer, heart disease, and organ failure.
David Nather, in his September 30, 2013, Politico article “How Obamacare affects businesses – large and small,” explained the coming phenomenon:

For one thing, the thresholds [at which the excess benefits tax will be imposed] were set in 2010, and even though the law has a method for raising them if there’s a lot of growth in health care spending, employers are still concerned that they’ll get busted for offering fairly standard plans… [Thresholds will] be linked to the increase in the consumer price index, but medical inflation pretty much always rises faster than that. Think of the Cadillac tax as the slow-moving car in the right lane, chugging along at 45 miles per hour. It may be pretty far in the distance, but if you’re an employer and you’re moving along at a reasonable clip in the same lane — say, 60 miles per hour — and you don’t slow down, you’re going to run smack into it.

Analysts predict that popular flexible spending accounts will be the first item on the chopping block. Faler writes,

Flexible spending accounts, which allow people to save their own money tax free for everything from doctor co-pays to eyeglasses, may vanish in coming years as companies scramble to avoid the law’s 40 percent levy on pricey health care benefits. “They’ll be one of the first things to go,” said Rich Stover, a health care actuary and principal at Buck Consultants, an employee benefits consulting firm. … That fact alone could dramatically alter the political equation surrounding Obamacare, potentially blindsiding middle-class voters who may be only vaguely aware of the Cadillac tax.

While President Obama would almost certainly veto any measure to eliminate the tax, this is sure to be an issue for the next President. Over half of U.S. House Members have co-sponsored either a Democratic or Republican bill that rescinds the tax. According to the Politico article,

Already, it’s become an issue in the Democratic presidential primaries, with Sen. Bernie Sanders vowing to junk the tax and Hillary Clinton saying she’s open to changes. “I worry that it may create an incentive to substantially lower the value of the benefits package and shift more and more costs to consumers,” she told the American Federation of Teachers. Republicans, meanwhile, invoke the tax as one of many reasons to repeal the entire Affordable Care Act. “Obamacare continues to overpromise and underdeliver,” said Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.), who also said he is working on legislation to address the issue.

Obamacare is slowly beginning the process of destroying much that is valuable in the health care system which has evolved to serve Americans.

It is wrong to suppose– as does Obamacare– that in order to provide health care to those with low incomes the government must limit health care for others, or that the government must “protect” ordinary Americans from using too many of their resources to save the lives of their family members by imposing arbitrary limits on what he or she is allowed to spend for health insurance and health care.

But that is just what the excess benefits tax intends to do–squeeze out plans that allow people access to sometimes expensive, but lifesaving, medical care.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, in the aggregate and over the long term we Americans can afford to devote an ever growing proportion of our income to saving our lives and promoting our health, because increasing productivity in producing other goods and services frees up resources that enable us to do so. See nrlc.org/uploads/medethics/AmericaCanAfford.pdf .

As more money is spent on health insurance by employers and individuals, cost-shifting keeps pace in making available health care for those who cannot themselves afford to pay its full cost. As NRLC has proposed, incorporating the cost of subsidies for growth in health care spending on behalf of those who genuinely cannot afford it into what employers and individuals pay for their own health insurance would result in a self-executing restraint on unsustainable growth in health care spending, while avoiding Obamacare-type arbitrary government limits that suppress what we are collectively able to, and desire to, spend to preserve the lives and health of our families.

Details can be found at nrlc.org/uploads/medethics/ObamacareAlternativeNRLC252015.pdf
For documentation on the way medical inflation exceeds the average rate given by the consumer price index (CPI), see nrlc.org/uploads/medethics/MedicalInflationOutpacesCPI.pdf .

Source: NRLC News

Not Fair/ Not Balanced

 

Another New York Times hatchet job on Justice Thomas

By Dave Andrusko

Justice Clarence Thomas

(A tip of the hat to Orin Kerr ,writing in the Washington Post.)
Given the New York Times’ biases, both in news stories and editorials, occupying the post of Public Editor (aka Ombudsman) can really be a full-time job.
Today Margaret Sullivan responded to a letter, representative of “many,” which gently critiqued a recent story about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
The gist of the complaint was that the headline for the story written by Adam Liptak–“Clarence Thomas, a Supreme Court Justice of Few Words, Some Not His Own”– came very close to suggesting Thomas was guilty of plagiarism but that if you read 15 paragraphs in, you’d see that he was guilty of nothing of the sort.
Sullivan gave Liptak ample space to defend his story. She then judged Liptak’s language to be “quite careful, and, from what I can tell, accurate,” but ended that “the overall impression it left may well have overstated the case.”

“Part of that was conveyed by the headline, ‘Clarence Thomas, a Supreme Court Justice of Few Words, Some Not His Own,’ which, while also accurate, seemed to suggest something close to plagiarism.”

“Accurate”? In a very limited, strained sense, yes, but, again, totally misleading.
It is true that words from the briefs filed by lawyers appeared in Justice Thomas’s opinions. So some of the words were “not” Thomas’s.
But this was true for all the justices. Some of the words in their opinions were “not” their own, either, but from briefs.

Okay, a possible fallback to “prove” that Thomas cannot think for himself would be that his majority opinions contained appreciatively more “language from the merits briefs,” to quote Kerr.
Kerr checked around, got the numbers for all the justices and found that Justice Thomas and Justice Sotomayor had virtually identical numbers.

The numbers seem at odds with Liptak’s claim. Yes, Thomas has the highest shared language percentage. But it’s bizarre to say that his numbers are “unusually high,” that Thomas “relies heavily” on outside language or that “many” of his words are “not his own.” All of the Justices share language from the briefs at roughly similar rates: about 7 to 11 words out of 100. And the difference between Thomas and Sotomayor is a rounding error. It’s only 2.5 words out of 1,000. In a typical majority opinion, that’s probably the difference between including a short parenthetical quote from a precedent and leaving it out. [My emphasis.]

Kerr went on to analyze two other studies Liptak used and concluded, “I don’t see how these studies support the Times’s presentation of Justice Thomas as an outlier.”
So why the not-so-subtle hints that Justice Thomas is not up to job? Kerr (a former clerk at the Supreme Court) put it this way.

“For the New York Times audience, it’s the kind of ideological catnip that is likely to make a lasting impression. No wonder it has been a main link on the Times homepage for most of the last day.”

The Times has despised Justice Thomas from the day he was nominated to the High Court. What a coincidence that Liptak would happen to be able to conclude that Justice Thomas was just as incompetent as the Times has always insisted he was.
Not exactly fair and balanced.

Source: NRLC News

Respecting the Elderly

 

Never A Burden

By Mary Prentis
As a twenty-four year old woman, I know it’s very rare to be blessed with three living grandparents. I have fond memories of special nights at their houses, exciting Florida days on their boat, and their support and attendance at various school functions and events. My grandparents have bandaged scraped knees, quieted my adolescent worries about the future, and continued to offer listening ears to my ever-changing quest in my twenties. Never once have I felt like my grandparents were a burden, or that my time spent with them has been a waste. Why? Unconditional love.

Yet increasingly we hear about misguided attempts to “love” our elderly relatives by helping them kill themselves, through physician assisted suicide. Though promoted as a way to relieve suffering, this is an unloving approach to a family member or friend. As a human family, we have a responsibility to see every person as a good, to love one another and show respect towards one another. That includes, first of all, respecting each other’s very lives.
My greatest fear about physician assisted suicide legislation is the way many proponents of this movement talk about it. They find that many people have turned to physician assisted suicide because they did not want to “burden” anyone or be a bother – and they think that’s perfectly acceptable.
It is bad enough that physician assisted suicide is now legal in some states for patients deemed to have a terminal illness. But the impact of that kind of message is far broader. Elderly people are extremely vulnerable to the message of those opposed to a culture of life.

In today’s busy and fast-paced world, the elderly may see technology and society expanding at staggering rates, and feel out of place or left out. What a terrible tragedy for those who have devoted their time generously and freely to their families, to believe that their family – even worse, all of society – sees them as an inconvenience and a burden. That message can easily infect their own attitudes about their personal worth, with deadly consequences – a process that some psychologists who work with seniors have called “acquiescent suicide.”
It is profoundly tragic to feel like little more than a burden to others. The elderly are our parents, grandparents, and great grandparents. They offer us valuable knowledge from their many life experiences.

There are many ways to show appreciation for them. Spending time together is a simple way to show someone your love and appreciation. Opportunities abound: a visit to a nursing home for a round of Bingo, a Saturday afternoon delivering food to those who can’t leave their homes, or conversation and assistance in the grocery store.
Our choices in how we interact with others go a long way and can greatly affirm others in their dignity and sense of worth. Patience and understanding when dealing with elderly grandparents – or acquaintances and neighbors – shows them they are just the opposite of “burdens” on society. They are individuals worthy of our love, appreciation and help.

Some say assisted suicide is the compassionate choice but I disagree. Real compassion means “suffering with” and supporting those in need. It is shown in affirming each person’s value as an individual. As St. John Paul II said in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae, that is “the way of love and true mercy” that each human being deserves.
Editor’s note. Mary Prentis is Staff Assistant for the Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. This appeared at usccb.org.

Source: NRLC News

Another Video

 

Another video, Another Low in the Dehumanization of Human Life

WASHINGTON –This morning The Center for Medical Progress (CMP) released their ninth video in a series exposing the gruesome business of baby-body-part harvesting and trafficking, often involving affiliates of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the nation’s largest abortion provider.
“Planned Parenthood now commands more than one-third of the total abortion ‘market’,” said Carol Tobias, National Right to Life president. “We fully support investigations into many aspects of this grisly business. Planned Parenthood equals abortion.”
Planned Parenthood is the nation’s largest provider of abortions – at least one-third of all abortions in the U.S. are performed at Planned Parenthood-affiliated facilities. According to their most recent annual report, Planned Parenthood received at least $528 million annually from the federal government or other levels of government.
Based on data from their own annual report from 2008-2009, nearly one in eight women walking through the door of a Planned Parenthood clinic has an abortion. A background memo from National Right to Life can be found here.
These videos by the CMP provide additional grounds for thorough investigation by congressional committees, and by appropriate authorities in affected states, as to whether infants are being born alive during abortion procedures, and then killed during the process of harvesting their organs.
The federal Born-Alive Infants Protection Act (BAIPA, Public Law 107-207) defines “born alive” as meaning “the complete expulsion or extraction from his or her mother of that member [of the species homo sapiens], at any stage of development, who after such expulsion or extraction breathes or has a beating heart, pulsation of the umbilical cord, or definite movement of voluntary muscles, regardless of whether the umbilical cord has been cut, and regardless of whether the expulsion or extraction occurs as a result of natural or induced labor, cesarean section, or induced abortion.”
The federal law says that any “member of the species homo sapiens” who is “born alive,” by this definition, is a “person” and a “child” for all federal law purposes. Note that BAIPA explicitly applies “at any stage of development” — i.e., whether or not the baby’s lung development has reached the point where long-term survival is possible (“viability”).
“These videos continue to highlight the need for legislation such as the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act and the Unborn Child Protection from Dismemberment Abortion Act,” said Tobias

Source: NRLC News

Sex Selection Abortion

 

Australia to ponder sex selection

By Michael Cook

Ian Olver, chair of the Australian Health Ethics Committee

Sex selection is on the agenda in Australia. The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) has called for public comment on new guidelines for IVF clinics. The most contentious change involves removing a ban on destroying embryos because they are not of the desired gender.
In an article in The Conversation the chair of the Australian Health Ethics Committee, Ian Olver, gives a number of reasons why this could be an appropriate change. He dismisses the notion of a slippery slope towards selecting for genes and creating designer babies:

“Aside from such choices not yet being medically possible, the slippery slope argument may falter because there’s no natural progression between approving non-medical sex selection and approving being able to select other characteristics. Sex selection is a discrete choice around which a definite boundary can be drawn.”

Australians are already selecting the sex of their children, but they are “forced” to go to overseas clinics, in places like the U.S. or Thailand. Professor Olver says that this could be risky, because “not all international clinics have the same standard of care that exists in Australia.”
Editor’s note. This appeared at www.bioedge.org and is reprinted with permission.

Source: NRLC News

A Great Look at End of Life

 

Dr. Oliver Sacks: choosing to live his last few months “in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can”

By Dave Andrusko
Editor’s note. One of the single most fascinating men you will ever encounter passed away yesterday at his home in Manhattan. Dr. Oliver Sacks was 82. We wrote about him last February on the occasion of an extraordinary essay he’d penned for the New York Times.

Prof. Oliver Sacks

In my opinion, my few comments and, far more importantly, what Dr. Sacks had to say, are worth revisiting. It is even more significant in light of the very disappointing pro-assisted suicide column written by George Wills which we discuss elsewhere today at National Right to Life News Today.
You may not know who Oliver Sacks is, but you may well be familiar with some of his work. He is a professor of neurology at the New York University School of Medicine and a prolific author.
You may have seen the movie “Awakenings,” starring Robert De Niro. That incredible film was adapted from Sacks’ book.

Or you may have heard a reference to “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” arguably Sacks’ most famous work. (My favorite was “Seeing Voices.”)
I mention Prof. Sacks because he penned a remarkable essay last week for the New York Times, “My Own Life: Oliver Sacks on Learning He Has Terminal Cancer.”
Please take my word on it, take five minutes and read the essay.
There is so much to take away from reflections which take up only 873 words. As he tells us in the first paragraph he is one of the “unlucky 2 percent.” Nine years ago Sacks had a rare tumor of the eye which was radiated and lasered. But he discovered a few weeks ago that the tumor had metastasized.
The essay is about what he did with that knowledge and what it means for the remainder of his life.
In the face of a cancer that now occupies a third of his liver, Sacks begins by expressing gratitude for those nine years of good health. Those were very productive years for him.
And then the pivotal paragraph:

It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can.

No bravado—he does not pretend to be without fear—just a determination to take counsel from some others (particularly philosopher David Hume) whose own deaths were, if not impending, close at hand. This allows him to step outside, at least somewhat, his immediate situation.

For instance, Sacks tells us that although “Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts,” by no means does this signal that “I am finished with life.”
On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.

Sacks is attending to those essential interconnections that he has made in his life. At the risk of stating the obvious (to our readers), none of this would be possible if Sacks chose assisted suicide.
Consider this paragraph which comes near the end of the essay and how it aligns with our views. (I have no idea where Sacks personally stands on our issues but for our purposes here, that is beside the point.)
“I have been increasingly conscious,” he writes

for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual…

Exactly. We are not interchangeable parts. Each one of us unique. We cannot be replaced—and that applies just as much to the unborn child who is never allowed to take a breath outside the womb as it is to someone who has lived 5 years, ten years, or, in Sacks’ case, 81 years, or more.
Sacks ends where he began. His “predominant feeling,” he writes, “is one of gratitude.” A gratitude for life, for the friendships he has made, the people he loves, the work he has accomplished.
This does not mean that we have to be famous authors and respected academicians either to be grateful or to be deemed ‘worthy’ by the quality of life set that is habitually on the hunt for categories of people whom they can dispatch of.
We can be grateful just for who we are and protected for that very same reason—just because we are.

Source: NRLC News

Assisted Suicide

 

A perplexing and very unfortunate column in favor of assisted suicide by George Will

By Dave Andrusko
Over the weekend, a piece by syndicated columnist George Will appeared in the Washington Post on one of our Movement’s core issues– physician-assisted suicide.
This was the same man who a month ago wrote “Planned Parenthood and the barbarity of America.”
Will’s capacity to cut through PPFA’s rhetorical ruses and feints was extraordinary.
He was writing about the first of the now eight undercover videos that gave us an unfiltered picture of Planned Parenthood’s planned barbarism.
Will trenchantly observed

Cecile Richards, Planned Parenthood’s president, apologizes for the “tone” of her operatives’ chatter about crushing babies. But the tone flows from Planned Parenthood’s premise: Why be solemn about meat?

Even partial-birth abortion is — must be — a sacrament in the Church of “Choice.” This sect knows that its entire edifice depends on not yielding an inch on its insistence that what an abortion kills never possesses a scintilla of moral significance.

Will, however, also wrote “Affirming a right to die with dignity,” which ran Sunday. I am not exaggerating when I say it’s exceedingly difficult to believe the same man wrote both.
Compounding my perplexity is that Will has also written as eloquently as it is possible to write about infanticide, no doubt in part spurred by the fact that his son, Jon, has Down syndrome, the same condition that “Baby Doe’s” parents used as a reason to starve him to death in 1982.
His column on the nauseous undercover videos and Baby Doe’s ugly and wholly unnecessary death are remarkable in their depth, breadth, and moral intuition. It would seem abundantly clear that he understands perfectly what happens when we grade life on a curve or when unborn human life has moral significance only to the extent that a baby’s remains can be harvested and sent along to be experimented on.
But then came “Affirming a right to die with dignity.”
As you would’ve anticipated, bioethicist Wesley Smith pointed out some of the many and sundry ways Wills unfortunately went astray [“George Will’s cultural death wish”].
Wesley begins

What a disappointing and shallow column from George Will endorsing assisted suicide, based primarily on a bald assertion that autonomous decision making is “death with dignity.” (If committing assisted suicide is “death with dignity,” then are those who die naturally undignified?)

The column was disingenuous and misleading, both in what Will wrote and what he left out.

Obviously, I would have opposed Will’s conclusions even had they been presented in a much more coherent and defensible manner. But it was striking to read a Will column that consisted largely of bullet points you’d find in any pro-assisted suicide skein.
It’s primarily about “autonomy,” as if that is the be-all and end-all (so to speak) cultural and ethical value. Never mind that virtually every disability rights organization passionately opposes laws or court decisions that legalize physician-assisted suicide. THEY know how many others are eager to exercise their “autonomy ” for them.
As Wesley points out, dismissing the “slippery slope” argument requires being oblivious to the “facts on the ground”–that many countries have already reached the bottom of the slope, yet cannot wait to find even more justifications to “assist” even more categories of people.
What Wesley calls “euthanasia inflation” means that more and more people are encouraged to believe that their dilemma is best addressed by killing themselves. He notes

Thus, in addition to the physically ill and dying, doctors in Belgium and the Netherlands kill the mentally ill, the healthy elderly “tired of life,” and in Belgium, even engage in joint killings of married couples that fear widowhood and/or dependency.

Switzerland’s legal suicide clinics have facilitated the deaths of people who are not sick for existential reasons. Recently, an elderly Italian woman received assisted suicide because she was in despair over her loss of beauty. The first her family knew that she was dead was when the suicide clinic mailed the family her ashes.

Will is a very smart man. How does he circumvent the abundant evidence that once unloosened, the physician-assisted suicide horseman will never cease looking for new victims? Especially so in light of the aforementioned column he wrote on the undercover PPFA videos?

Today’s culture of casual death (see the Planned Parenthood videos) should deepen worries about a slippery slope from physician-assisted dying to a further diminution of life’s sanctity. Life, however, is inevitably lived on multiple slippery slopes: Taxation could become confiscation, police could become instruments of oppression, public education could become indoctrination, etc. Everywhere and always, civilization depends on the drawing of intelligent distinctions.

Will likens the race to “assist” more and more people to die to the possibility that our taxes could become confiscatory. Why? So he can tell us “Everywhere and always, civilization depends on the drawing of intelligent distinctions.”
But those are not “distinctions,” intelligent or otherwise. They are altogether different categories, apples and oranges.

“Multiple slippery slopes”? Please.
But there is a larger conclusion to be drawn. People, like Will, who are both very smart and very articulate and who often come down on the correct side of moral and ethical issues can nonetheless be seduced by the allure of “autonomy” and then slide, as Will does, into a discussion of the percentage of Medicare expenditures that are made in patients’ last six months of life. Airy principles meets Green eyeshade economics.
Will received something like 5,000 responses on the Washington Post webpage to his column on Planned Parenthood. I hope he gets as least as many for “Affirming a right to die with dignity.”

Source: NRLC News

Media Bias

 

Networks Haven’t Covered a Single Planned Parenthood Video Release in One Month

By Katie Yoder
More fuel doesn’t mean more fire – at least when it comes to the media’s coverage of Planned Parenthood. As more and more undercover footage surfaces, the networks dedicate less and less time to reporting on the horrific videos released by the Center for Medical Progress.

In fact, the three broadcast networks, ABC, NBC and CBS, haven’t reported on a single video exposing Planned Parenthood’s trafficking of aborted babies during their news shows in 31 days – or one full month.

The last time a network mentioned a particular video came July 31, when CBS This Morning correspondent Julianna Goldman acknowledged the fourth video of a “Planned Parenthood doctor in Colorado discussing providing fetal tissue for a fee.”

NBC last reported on a specific video July 30, while ABC – the worst of all three networks – last noted a video July 16 (keep in mind the first video came out July 14).
The networks have not covered the last four videos released by the Center for Medical Progress. In other words, ABC, NBC and CBS refused to investigate headlines like these:

· Full Video: Planned Parenthood Partner Jokes about Shipping Intact Baby Heads

· Gosnell-Like Horror: Abortion Worker Describes Cutting Open Baby with ‘Beating Heart’

· VIDEO: Abortion Workers ‘Would Just Take’ Baby Parts from Women – Without Consent!

· SHOCK: Planned Parenthood Workers Laugh Over Babies ‘All Mixed Up Together in a Bag’

That also means, after the release of eight videos exposing Planned Parenthood, the networks have still only played 1 minute and 13 seconds of footage from these videos on air.

Although they haven’t covered a particular video since July 31, the networks included related Planned Parenthood news in their shows more recently. For example, on August 3, CBS This Morning noted a “showdown in the Senate” after the “videos of Planned Parenthood officials” and on August 7, NBC Today recognized Planned Parenthood in presidential debate coverage.
Methodology: MRC Culture searched Nexis and recorded news shows.
Editor’s note. This appeared at newsbusters.org and is reprinted with permission.

Source: NRLC News