Life Saving Legislation

Pennsylvania passes the Down Syndrome Information Act

By Mark Leach

Chloe Kondrich prays as Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett signs “Chloe’s Law” (used with permission of Kurt Kondrich)

Last week, Pennsylvania joined the growing number of states passing the Down Syndrome Information Act.
In 2012, Massachusetts passed the law. In 2013, Kentucky passed it. And, then, this year, Maryland, Delaware, Louisiana, and now Pennsylvania have passed their versions of the Down Syndrome Information Act.

In Pennsylvania, the Act is referred to as “Chloe’s Law,” after the daughter of Kurt Kondrich, the advocate who steered the legislation through to passage.
Campbell North reported on the law’s passage in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Dr. Kishore Vellody, medical director of the Down Syndrome Center at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC, is featured in the article:

“Published data shows that less than half of people felt like their training was accurate in communicating prenatal diagnosis,” he said. “Even in my med school textbooks, a lot of things we learned about Down syndrome was inaccurate because it takes so long to have them updated.”
* * *

“Our goal in medicine is to make sure people receive balanced and accurate information when they make decisions about health care,” Dr. Vellody said. “That’s why we support endeavors to help expectant parents.”
Mark Bradford, executive director of the Lejeune Foundation USA, attended the bill signing with his son. His organization has an excellent write up of the law’s enactment, with helpful links and a photo gallery of the bill signing.

My thanks to Mark for mentioning my assistance at the start of the process. Already this week I’ve been contacted by advocates in two states wanting to get the law passed in their home states. The bipartisan support and overwhelming vote margins passing this Act show that the Down Syndrome Information Act can be passed in any state.

Editor’s note. This appeared at downsyndromeprenataltesting.com.

Source: NRLC News

Politics

 

Why Obama matters even though he is “not on the ballot” this November

By Dave Andrusko

Pro-abortion President Barack Obama

Yesterday we discussed the November elections and the daunting prospects Democrats face, given the rocky political terrain.
In that context, we mulled over President Obama’s approval numbers which (if you were an Obama supporter looking for the “good news”) had not changed much in the past few months.
But 43.2% is extremely low which means Mr. Obama is highly unlikely to provide buoyancy for sinking Democrats. If you read a column by the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza today (“Here’s why President Obama’s dismal approval ratings matter this November”), clearly the President is more like an anchor.
Cillizza says he is answering the observation that no matter how “lackluster” Obama’s poll numbers may be, it doesn’t really matter. He “isn’t on the ballot.”
After examining a number of polls and considering the historical context of Presidents in their second terms, the conclusion of this well-thought out piece is starkly simply and deeply concerting if you are a Democrat:

“What those numbers suggest is that while Obama is not the only factor in how people will vote this fall, he is absolutely a factor in how people are making up their minds. And, at the moment, people who see 2014 as a way to send a signal of disapproval about Obama greatly outnumber the people who want to use their vote to show their support for him and his agenda.”

The conclusion is so important I jumped to it without citing the evidence. Here is just some of it.
About three in ten people in a Pew Research Center poll said their vote this fall would be against Obama, as opposed to only 19% who said it would be for him. That’s bad enough for Democrats.
“Among self-identified Republicans, 55 percent say their congressional vote is meant to be against Obama; 61 percent of conservatives say the same,” Cillizza writes. “On the other end of the spectrum, just 36 percent say that their vote for Congress is meant as a vote for Obama.”

 

But what about the all-important Independents? “More than one in four (27 percent) of independents say their vote is against Obama; just 10 percent say it is in support of the president.”
A second and very much related piece that ran in today’s Post (by Scott Clement) essentially answered “yes” to the question posed in the headline: “Has President Obama bottomed out yet?” Why?
“After six years in office, Obama has developed a bedrock of supporters — around 40 percent — that apparently won’t write him off without a major catastrophe,” Clement concludes. He gives himself some wiggle room at the end but clearly he believes the President has sunk about as far as he can go.
Two very quick points. First, what you might call mini-catastrophes are everywhere. With almost no exceptions, there is very, very little likelihood any of them will be “resolved” in a manner that improves the President’s standing. And that’s assuming nothing new breaks out.
Second, as we have written about repeatedly in NRL News Today, the public’s trust in the President’s competency continues to tumble. Moreover with more and more Americans convinced that Mr. Obama is acting as if he has effectively almost retired with more than two years to go in his term, he may be perilously close to tumbling down to the high 30s in approval rating, if not lower. 

Source: NRLC News

ObamaCare

 

They may not be Death Panels, but they are Death Advocates, and they are back

By Jennifer Popik, JD, Robert Powell Center for Medical Ethics
Editor’s note. This story appeared on page four of the July issue of National Right to Life News. You can read the issue online in its entirety online at www.nrlc.org/uploads/NRLNews/NRLNewsJuly2014.pdf

The Obama administration is considering whether to reimburse doctors for conducting end-of-life conversations with patients. © AP

In a recent Politico Magazine article titled, “Let’s Talk About Death Panels,” Harold Pollack urges reviving one of the most notorious proposals that did not make it into the Obama Health Car Law – “advance planning consultations.”
During the debate over Obamacare’s enactment, there was considerable controversy over a provision in an early version under which health care providers would have been paid by Medicare to discuss with their patients whether they would want life-saving medical treatment.
After former Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin dubbed the planning sessions “death panels,” the provision was dropped from the law ultimately enacted.

As Pollack acknowledges, “The ‘death panel’ charge stuck because it tapped into the primeval fears of millions of Americans. It’s only human to worry that we might someday be abandoned when we are old and sick, and thus judged to be a social burden. Such worries run especially deep among senior citizens, who had the most reason to feel vulnerable, and who perceived that they had the least to gain from the ACA.”

In the time since the “advance care planning” provisions were struck from the Obama Health Care law, there have been several attempts to resurrect the concept through various stand-alone bills in the House and Senate. Now, according to media reports, the American Medical Association (AMA) is working directly with the Obama Administration to implement reimbursement by administrative action, bypassing Congress.

In to a Stateline Article from the Pew Foundation titled, “Feds to Consider Paying for End-of-Life Planning,” Michael Ollove writes, “The current effort began last year, when the Illinois State Medical Society recommended that the AMA adopt specific medical codes for the reimbursement of doctors for advance care conversations. Medical codes provide a uniform description of hundreds of medical procedures and services and are used by medical providers, hospitals and insurers across the country. In response to the Illinois request, an AMA panel approved a new code for advance planning.”
The AMA is expected to submit the proposal to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services soon so that providers all across the country can be reimbursed for these “advance planning conversations.”
Such federally funded “advance care planning” conversations pose a very real danger, because they are likely to be used to nudge people to reject life-saving medical treatment they might otherwise want.
Advocates of using tax dollars to pay for “advance care planning” claim it is intended to promote neutral, fully informed planning by which patients can be assisted to implement their own values through legally valid advance directives. Unfortunately, however, there is abundant evidence that a combination of cost pressures and the ideological commitment of a significant number of health care providers to limitation of life-saving treatment for those deemed to have a “poor quality of life” would in practice lead to many federally funded advance care planning sessions being used to exercise subtle – or not-so-subtle – pressure to agree to reject life-preserving treatment.

While the advance care planning provision in the early version of what became Obamacare was being debated in Summer 2009, author and blogger Lee Siegel, in general a strong advocate of President Obama’s approach to health care restructuring, wrote:

[O]n one point the plan’s critics are absolutely correct. One of the key ideas under end of-life care is morally revolting.

. . . .

The section, on page 425 of the [original House] bill, offers to pay once every five years for a voluntary, not mandatory, consultation with a doctor, who will not blatantly tell the patient how to end his or her life sooner, but will explain to the patient the set of options available at the end of life, including living wills, palliative care and hospice, life sustaining treatment, and all aspects of advance care planning, including, presumably, the decision to end one’s life.

The shading in of human particulars is what makes this so unsettling. A doctor guided by a panel of experts who have decided that some treatments are futile will, in subtle ways, advance that point of view. Cass Sunstein, Obama’s regulatory czar, calls this “nudging,” which he characterizes as using various types of reinforcement techniques to “nudge” people’s behavior in one direction or another. An elderly or sick person would be especially vulnerable to the sophisticated nudging of an authority figure like a doctor. Bad enough for such people who are lucky enough to be supported by family and friends. But what about the dying person who is all alone in the world and who has only the “consultant” to turn to and rely on? The heartlessness of such a scene is chilling.

It has become widespread to now talk about treatment as being costly and burdensome, depending on one’s ‘quality of life.” Pollack himself illustrates this, writing, “Under the current system, physicians can bill Medicare for aggressive imaging, procedures and chemotherapies treatments that may bring little patient benefit in advanced illness. Doctors and hospitals are far more handsomely rewarded for the placement of a feeding tube or a ventilator than they are for meeting with patients and families to determine whether these therapies are helpful or wise.”
In a taxpayer-funded advance care planning session, a patient with cancer might well be told chemotherapy provides little benefit because it will leave him or her with a disability and only “prolong life,” without a cure. The extra period of life might be exactly what a person would want, but because the treatment was presented in such a negative way the patient might well be lead to agree to reject treatment.
A major campaign (the subject of a forthcoming NRL News Today article) is now being waged to show videos to patients that are clearly weighted to persuade them to forego cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, and its proponents do not hesitate to cite the financial savings associated with the increased number of viewers (as opposed to patients not subjected to the videos) who agree to DNRs. Importantly, there is no apparent realistic way to adequately monitor the interactions in such tax-funded sessions to ensure that the presentation of options is done in a neutral way, rather than one biased toward rejection of treatment.

A precedent on the federal level is a Veterans Affairs patient decision-making aid that was the subject of considerable discussion during the debate over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a 53-page

production

entitled “Your Life, Your Choices.” The booklet had worksheets to fill out for “Current Health,” “Permanent Coma,” “Severe Dementia,” “Severe Stroke” and “A future situation of concern when I might not be able to express my wishes.”

For each of these there was a section on “quality of life.” Only for current health was there a choice to affirm that life is worth living without reservation. For all of the others, the choices were “Life like this would be difficult, but acceptable,” “Life like this would be worth living, but just barely,” and “Life like this would not” – the “not” is underlined – “be worth living.” In each circumstance except current health a negative picture was given. For example, “Terminal Illness” was described as a state in which you “have a lot of discomfort that requires medication [,] are in bed most of the time due to weakness [, and] need help with getting dressed, bathing, and bowel and bladder functions.” You can read more about this at www.nrlc.org/archive/news/2009/NRL07-08/RationingPage1.html; and www.nationalreview.com/articles/228199/your-life-not-worth-living/jim-towey.
Of course, what people experience when terminally ill varies widely depending on the particular illness and many other factors, but this booklet seemed designed to lead people to believe that life with terminal illness will be almost unremittingly bleak. In the words of Paul Malley, President of the national non-profit organization Aging with Dignity, “’Your Life, Your Choices’ encourages our nation’s service men and women to look at illness and disability as things that render life not worth living.”

When “advance planning” is so heavily promoted by advocates of cost-cutting and the “quality of life” ethic, we need to consider it with a critical eye – one that asks “who is driving these conversations, and what will they say to people in a vulnerable position?”

Note:
The National Right to Life Committee supports the use of advance directives by which individuals may indicate their wishes regarding medical treatment should they become incapable of making health care decisions; indeed, we promote our own alternative, the “Will to Live,” and make available separate forms complying with the laws of each of the states.

Our concern is that in practice federally funded “advance care planning sessions” are likely to pressure patients into rejecting treatment essential to preserving their lives in a manner they would be unlikely to agree to under conditions of truly informed consent.

Source: NRLC News

Meriam Free and in Rome

Meriam Ibrahim Finally Leaves Sudan After Being Sentenced to Death for Her Faith

by Steven Ertelt  

The Sudanese woman who was pregnant and sentenced to death for not recanting her faith has finally been allowed to leave Sudan after she spent weeks in a U.S. embassy after her release from prison.
At eight months pregnant, Ibrahim had been sentenced to death for not renouncing her Christian faith and she was imprisoned and eventually forced to give birth in chains while shackled in the Omdurman Federal Women’s Prison in North Khartoum, Sudan.

Ibrahim was freed from prison after an appeals court found a lower court’s death penalty sentence to be unfounded. Ibrahim and her husband, who has both Sudanese and U.S. citizenship, traveled to the airport in Khartoum to leave the country for the U.S. They were arrested at the airport and accused of using forged travel documents, a claim Ibrahim denies.
After they were released, they went to the U.S. embassy, where they were in a “makeshift” home there. But they had been there for some time.
Now, Ibrahim has flown to Italy on her way to the United States — a flight that came one day after pro-life Rep. Chris Smith led a Congressional hearing about Ibrahim’s plight featuring pro-life leader Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council.
In an email to LifeNews, Perkins expressed deep gratitude and relief early this morning after

learning

that Meriam Ibrahim and her family arrived in Italy. “We celebrate Meriam Ibrahim and her family’s escape to freedom. It is our hope and prayer that Meriam and her family will now enjoy the liberty to practice their Christian faith without government interference or persecution,” he said.
“We are grateful to several members of Congress on both sides of the aisle who have worked to secure Meriam’s freedom and facilitate her entry into the United States. Particular thanks to U.S. Reps. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), Chris Smith (R-N.J.), and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who were very instrumental in Meriam’s release,” he added. “Additionally I want to applaud the efforts of other Members of Congress like Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), Frank Wolf (R-Va.) and Sens. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Mary Landrieu (D-La.) who were deeply involved in securing Meriam’s freedom. I also thank the European governments that worked to secure her release.”

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said “a warning should be sounded across America” over the Obama administration’s “virtual silence” toward the Sudanese government’s persecution of Meriam Ibrahim, who was imprisoned in Sudan for being a Christian.
Shortly after Perkins testified Wednesday before a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee, Ibrahim and her family – two young children and her American husband – were allowed to leave the U.S. Embassy in Sudan, where they took refuge on June 27.
They arrived in Rome on Thursday, their exit from Sudan reportedly negotiated by the Italian government and the Vatican — not the United States.

In his testimony to Congress, Perkins said Ibrahim has shown more courage than the Obama administration throughout her ordeal:
“We are here because of the courage of a 27-year-old mother — a 27-year-old mother, if you’ll just imagine the situation for a moment, in a prison on Khartoum [Sudan], which the U.N. says has an infant mortality rate of one child dying per day in that prison. At her side, at eight months pregnant, is a 21-month-old boy. And she is told that if she will denounce her faith in Jesus Christ, there’s the door, you can be a free person. But yet she refused to denounce her faith because she had the courage to stare death in the face.”
“What has America done?” Perkins challenged. “Where is the courage in America?”
“While other governments have called attention to Meriam’s situation, including the European parliament passing a resolution and the British government’s prime minister speaking out publicly, the U.S. government has been practically mute,” Perkins said.

Ibrahim is due to meet Pope Francis in the Vatican today, after being rescued from Sudan by Italy’s deputy foreign minister.
Ibrahim was greeted at Rome’s Ciampino Airport by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and his wife, Agnese, after being accompanied on an official government plane from Khartoum by Lapo Pistelli, the deputy foreign minister.She is expected to remain in Rome for a few days before heading on to the United States.
Meriam is a Sudanese Christian, married to a U.S. citizen, who was sentenced to death by a Sudan court for the “crime” of converting from Islam, and 100 lashes for “adultery.” Meriam spent months in a notoriously rank Sudanese prison with her 21-month-old son and her newborn daughter

Source: LifeSite News

Assisted Suicide and Celebraties

 

Andrew Lloyd Weber Changes Mind on Suicide

By Wesley J. Smith

Andrew Lloyd Weber

Andrew Lloyd Weber might not still be here if assisted suicide had been legal. He wanted to die and almost was set to go to Switzerland. Now, he’s glad he didn’t. From the Telegraph story:

“Lord Lloyd-Webber, the West End impresario, was so convinced he wanted to die last year that he took steps to join Dignitas, the Swiss assisted suicide clinic, he has disclosed. The composer said he now believes that taking such a step would have been ‘stupid and ridiculous’ but that it was all he could think of amid a bout of deep depression triggered by the pain from a series of operations.

“He is among members of the Lords likely to oppose the bill tabled by Lord Falconer, the former Lord Chancellor, to legalise ‘assisted dying,’ which will have its first parliamentary airing [last Friday]. It came as Dominic Grieve, who until this week’s reshuffle was the Government’s chief law officer, said the proposals could open the door to a form of ’legalised execution.’

“’It is not something that a civilised society should do,’ he told The Daily Telegraph.”

Indeed.

And don’t tell me he didn’t die so what’s the big deal. If it had been legal he might have. Indeed, I have no doubt Dignitas would have helped poison him and happily garnered the publicity.
And don’t tell me he isn’t terminally ill, so he couldn’t have obtained assisted suicide. That limitation is just a way station on the way to death on demand.

Moreover, many of the Swiss assisted suicides of Brits have been by people who were not terminally ill. Dying isn’t driving this agenda, despair and fear are.
Way to go ALW! That’s beautiful music to my ears.
Editor’s note. This appeared on Wesley’s great blog.

Source: NRLC News

Adoption

 

Abandoned newborn now doing well, foster parents seek to adopt “Baby Carlos”

By Dave Andrusko

Baby Carlos was discovered in a dumpster four months ago.
Photo credit: Ricky Ramirez

A final decision may soon be made in finding a home for Baby Carlos Guzman, abandoned by his mother last February, but whose image “made the hearts of Houstonians melt,” according to local television station KPRC.

Referring to a foster family who wants to adopt him, a case worker was in court last week to tell the judge that Baby Carlos is “in a great place…he couldn’t be in a better place.”
The baby is named after Carlos Michel, a maintenance worker at the Reserve at Windmill Lakes who found the baby February 25 in a dumpster in the parking lot of the apartment complex.

 

Michel, a grandfather, told Local 2 news that “he thought he heard a cat in the dumpster and looked inside to check. After seeing something in a garbage bag move, he opened the bag up and found the baby. He held the boy while other workers called 911.”

The New York Daily News provided additional details in its story. “The newborn had been placed upside down in the trash container. The bag that the child was in also contained scraps of food and school homework, which had a student’s name on it.”
Authorities searched the area and found the baby’s 16-year-old mom. According to KPRC-TV, she told a Child Protection Services caseworker she didn’t know she was pregnant and gave birth in a bath. She said she cut the umbilical cord herself and told the CPS caseworker she put him in the dumpster because she thought the baby was dead.

At last week’s hearing, four months after the baby was abandoned, a caseworker told the court that Baby Carlos “loves his foster mom, responds to her voice and interacts well with his siblings,” KRPC-TV reported.

Source: NRLC Nerws

ObamaCare

 

Conflicting appeals court opinions threaten ObamaCare exchanges

By Jennifer Popik, JD, Robert Powell Center for Medical Ethics
On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit delivered another blow to the Obama Health Care law– a law that has continued to remain unpopular and plagued by problems.
In a 2-1 decision the court said that insurance subsidies cannot go to people in federally-run state exchanges, but only to those the state itself runs. Currently, only a mere 14 states run their own exchanges.

However two hours later, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 3-0 decision, held that both sets of exchanges are eligible for subsidies. The conflicting opinions set up a clash that will likely end up in the hands of the Supreme Court.
The center of the cases–the state exchanges–has been overwhelmed by problems that started with a dysfunctional website (healthcare.gov). More recently a serious and widespread new problem has arisen.

The problem is that when Americans are purchasing plans in the exchanges, they are shocked to find out that they no longer have access to specialist and hospital systems they did before.
While the media has occasionally reported on this for months (NRL News Today has addressed the limitations at powellcenterformedicalethics.blogspot.com), Politico magazine reports that the problem is deep, spreading, and shaping up to become a major election issue.
In his piece, “Obamacare: Anger over narrow networks,” Politico’s Brett Norman reports

“Anger over limited choice of doctors and hospitals in Obamacare plans is prompting some states to require broader networks — and boiling up as yet another election year headache for the health law.

“Americans for Prosperity is hitting on these ‘narrow networks’ against Democrats…. And Republicans have highlighted access challenges as another broken promise from a president who assured Americans they could keep their doctor.”

While people would prefer to pay less for healthcare (especially given how high premiums and deductibles are under ObamaCare), there is growing public outrage when people are told that the cost of these less expensive plans is less access to the doctors and hospitals of their choice.
As Norman points out,

“The Affordable Care Act sets out general guidelines directing insurers to include enough doctors and hospitals to provide timely access to care, including specialty care. But it does not spell out what that means, leaving it to states to fill in the blanks.

“About 70 percent of the lowest-cost exchange plans were built on narrow networks this year, according to the consulting firm McKinsey, and on average they cost 13 percent to 17 percent less than comparable plans with broader networks.

This has prompted many states to take legislative or regulatory action. Even though the exchanges are still new, 70 bills have been introduced in 22 states aimed at broadening networks.
In discussing one state’s particularly tough struggle, Norman writes,

“In New Hampshire, for instance, Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield was the only insurer on the market, and it cut 10 of the state’s 26 hospitals out of its network. That left residents in some rural areas with long commutes to the nearest hospital in their network, and the issue has become a political football in the congressional races there.”

Those who promote these narrow networks often tout the narrow plans as “one choice among many” – saying that people ought to be able to weigh the tradeoffs. However, according to Norman

“Incomplete or inaccurate provider directories were rampant in this year’s plans on both the federal and state exchanges, leading consumers to buy plans thinking they cover their doctors only to find out later they do not. That’s led to GOP charges that Obamacare has broken the president’s promise that ‘if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.’

“Another complication: Even if a patient goes to an in-network hospital, not all the doctors are necessarily part of the plan. For instance, patients can get stuck with thousands of dollars in bills for anesthesia, even if surgery is covered. ‘What we’re seeing is consumers not knowing and getting stuck with high out-of-network bills,’ said Stephanie Mohl, government relations manager at the American Heart Association.”

While many are quick to place some of the blame with insurers, it seems more likely that the real culprit is the Obamacare provision under which exchange bureaucrats must exclude insurers who offer policies deemed to allow “excessive or unjustified” health care spending by their policyholders.
Under the Federal health law, state insurance commissioners are to recommend to their state exchanges the exclusion of “particular health insurance issuers … based on a pattern or practice of excessive or unjustified premium increases.” The exchanges not only exclude policies in an exchange when government authorities do not agree with their premiums, but the exchanges must even exclude insurers whose plans outside the exchange offer consumers the ability to reduce the danger of treatment denial by paying what those government authorities consider an “excessive or unjustified” amount.

This means that insurers who hope to be able to gain customers within the exchanges have a strong disincentive to offer any adequately funded plans that do not drastically limit access to care. So even if you contact insurers directly, outside the exchange, you are likely to find it hard or impossible to find an adequate individual plan. (See documentation at www.nrlc.org/medethics/healthcarerationing.)

When the government limits what can be charged for health insurance, it restricts what people are allowed to pay for medical treatment. While everyone would prefer to pay less–or nothing–for health care (or anything else), government price controls prevent access to lifesaving medical treatment that costs more to supply than the prices set by the government.

Critical access to top health care providers is already being severely restricted in the individual health insurance plans on the Obamacare exchanges and there is reason to believe that when the exchanges are expanded to employees of all businesses, many employers will end their present coverage and force their workers into the constricted exchange plans. While Obamacare continues to be implemented in 2014, it is important to continue to educate friends and neighbors about the dangers the law poses in restricting what Americans can spend to save their own lives and the lives of their families.
You can follow up-to-date reports here: powellcenterformedicalethics.blogspot.com

Source: NRLC News

Unborn Babies

 

Moms can teach their unborn babies nursery rhymes, study shows

By Dave Andrusko
What an incredible coincidence. Just this morning (as is my habit) I scanned both today’s Washington Post and a couple of stories from a few days ago. I came across this fascinating article, dated July 19, written by Meeri Kim headlined “Babies grasp speech before they utter their first word, a study finds.”
In one paragraph, here’s the gist:

“A new study has found that a key part of the brain involved in forming speech is firing away in babies as they listen to voices around them. This may represent a sort of mental rehearsal leading up to the true milestone that occurs after only a year of life: baby’s first words.”

Honestly, I thought to myself, this is great but wouldn’t it also be helpful if a story ran about some of the latest research documenting what unborn babies can learn. Lo and behold…
From a section on the TODAY Show blog, here’s a story by Linda Carroll: “Fetuses can learn nursery rhymes from mom’s voice, study finds.” Here’s Carroll’s lead sentences:

“Even before they are born, babies [note, babies, not “fetuses”] are learning from experience, especially if it’s directly related to their moms, new research is shows. For example, while in the womb babies can learn to recognize a nursery rhyme if the mom repeats the verses between weeks 28 and 34, according a study published in Infant Behavior and Development.”

Thirty-two moms of babies who were in their 28th week were recruited. They recited a nursery rhyme twice a day until the 34th week. Four weeks later the mothers returned to the

University

of Florida.

Carroll answers an obvious but intriguing question: how do you record an unborn baby’s brain activity? It’s not as difficult as you might think.
Researchers already knew that the heartbeat of a baby later in pregnancy will slow down when she hears something familiar. Carroll wrote

“So, while the moms wore headphones playing Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons,’ a female stranger’s voice recited either the familiar rhyme or a completely different one. The headphones kept the moms from actually hearing when or what their fetuses were being exposed to.

“The heart rates of fetuses who heard a stranger read the familiar rhyme slowed down. The heart rates of those who heard the stranger reading a different rhyme essentially stayed the same.”

The study’s lead author, Charlene Krueger, an associate professor in nursing, told Carroll, “We were basically asking the fetus, if your mother says this repeatedly, will you remember it?” Krueger’s “take away message”?

“I would want mothers to understand is that their speech is very important to the developing fetus. When a mother speaks, not only does the fetus hear, but also the whole spine vibrates.”

Not until late in the story is the reader reminded that speech is not the only thing unborn babies “absorb” in the womb. “Studies have shown that around the 20th week of pregnancy the sensory systems for taste and smell have developed,” Carroll writes. “And that allows the baby to experience some of mom’s favorite foods as nutrients pass into the womb.”
Krueger actually had another takeaway, only this time it was for medical personnel taking care of preterm infants. They should consider playing recordings of moms talking to their babies.

“My goal really is to identify experimentally the benefits of providing this kind of exposure to the preterm infant who has largely lost hearing a very important voice – the mother’s.”

Tip of the hat to lifenews.com.

 Source: NRLC News

Politics

 

What the numbers are telling us about the outcome of the November mid-term elections

By Dave Andrusko
Let’s put together a Gallup summary of President Obama’s popularity over the last three months (which ran yesterday) and an analysis of what might happen this fall, provided today by Josh Kraushaar at the National Journal and see what they tell us.
Gallup’s Jeffrey Jones tells us

“President Barack Obama averaged 43.2% job approval during his 22nd quarter in office, from April 20 through July 19. That is a minimal increase from the prior quarter’s 42.4% average, but still ranks among the lowest for Obama to date. His worst quarterly average thus far is 41.0% in quarter 11.”

Those numbers for the 22nd-quarter are higher than only two presidents, one of whom was Richard Nixon just before he resigned in August 1974.
Jones added

“Obama may be able to keep his ratings above the 40% mark as long as he maintains strong levels of support among Democrats. Although Democrats’ approval ratings of Obama are down from earlier in his presidency, they still consistently approach 80%.”

Let’s move on to Kraushaar’s “The Odds of a GOP Wave Are Increasing: This year’s political environment is shaping up to be nearly as bleak as 2010, and that’s ominous news for Senate Democrats.”

A fair portion of his intriguing piece is an explanation/rebuttal over what’s constitutes a “wave.” As would be obvious, if you make the bar high enough, it’s almost impossible for the GOP to secure a wave (“shorthand for a landslide victory for the winning party,” as Kraushaar explains).
An important point made early: in the second midterm election, historically, the president’s party suffers high loses. “But Clinton’s and Reagan’s relatively high popularity likely helped mitigate midterm seat losses for their parties in the elections.”

 

With Obama striving to stay about 40% in job approval, vulnerable Democrats don’t have that life-preserver to cling to. Especially given “that the right-track/wrong-track numbers [whether the country is on the right track or the wrong track] are near historic lows.”
Here are two quick observations.
First, the caveat we always

offer

. Politics and electoral fortunes can change in a heartbeat. But that turnabout should be less of a problem for Republicans in 2014, given the high caliber of their candidates, including challengers to sitting Democratic senators.

Second, as Kraushaar observes

“If anything, this year’s environment for Democrats is shaping up to be as bleak [as 2010]. Sizable majorities oppose the Obama administration’s handling of nearly every issue, including the economy, health care, and foreign policy. The administration looks out of its element, lurching from foreign policy crises to domestic scandal over the past year. Even out of the headlines, Obamacare is still a driving force for Republicans and for unfavorable poll numbers. This week, Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg released new data showing Obama’s disapproval at a whopping 60 percent in 12 Senate battlegrounds, with half strongly disapproving of his performance. Overall, Republicans held a 2-point edge on the battleground generic ballot, 46 percent to 44 percent.”

Please keep that conclusion about ObamaCare in mind. We are constantly told that the importance of this issue has “peaked,” and will not play a major role come November. That simply is not true.
In addition, there is the “generic ballot” gap. That is the response when people are asked whether they would vote for a generic Democrat or Republican (as opposed to naming a specific candidate).
Kraushaar informs us in his first paragraph that running even (or in this case, 2 points ahead) “usually translates into a clear GOP edge” when people actually vote.
Please take five minutes and read the analysis.

 Source: NRLC News

Pro Abortion Activism

 

 

Biased pro-choice activism wrapped “in the guise of ‘academic excellence’”

By Dave Andrusko
It’s probably because I spent more years in academia than I care to admit that I still retain the notion (against all evidence) that conferences put on by universities would at least pretend to be quasi-balanced. So when I read a long letter to the editor of a Canadian newspaper under the headline “Upcoming abortion conference to be one-sided affair,” I made sure I read what Dr. Kevin J. Arsenault had to say.
In his letter to the Journal Pioneer, Arsenault referenced an international conference that will be held August 7-8 at Canada’s University of Prince Edward Island. The title, alas, pretty much says it all: “Abortion: The Unfinished Revolution.”

I went to the webpage of UPEI and downloaded the 46-page outline. I quickly found that Dr. Arsenault did not exaggerate when he wrote,

“After reading the presentation summaries found in the

online program

it is clear that this conference is not a typical academic conference at all: it is, in fact, a gathering of international academic abortion activists committed to further promoting the cultural and political acceptance of abortion.” Arsenault focused on the euphemism-ridden language. “[T]he conference program consistently uses the term ‘foetus’ rather than ‘unborn child,’ or terms such as ‘product of conception (POC)’ and, when discussing the grief a mother feels after an abortion, ‘a grievable object.’”
In his letter Arsenault asks, “Why such disdain for using plain, honest language?” His answer is

“The intention is clearly to deflect attention away from what is inherently known to be true in order to diminish awareness of the unpleasant aspects of those truths.

“In his article ‘Euphemism, the University and Disobedience,’ Alexander Duttmann claims that ‘When speaking, writing and thinking, euphemists actively contribute to the suppression of their awareness, and are therefore aware of what they seek to conjure away.”

Such language, Arsenault argues, “has no place in an academic conference at a university.”
Of course, this is not limited to academic gathering. Arsenault wrote

“Those promoting the right for women to end the lives of their unborn children don’t speak plainly about what a woman is actually doing because they instinctively know that it would be far more difficult to convince others that abortion is a morally acceptable and truly healthy choice. That is obviously why pro-choice activists hate to see images of the unborn on pro-life placards…because they show the unborn as the little human beings they are.”

What are a few examples of the workshops at “Abortion: The Unfinished Revolution”? How about (under “Abortion in Literature and Popular Culture”) “Cultures of Abortion and the Fetish Within: Popular Culture, Abortion and Political imagery in post 9-11 America”?

Or (under “Confronting Abortion Stigma”) “’I didn’t like killing my baby’: teenage pregnancy, the construction of risk, and abortion stigmatization in the UK”?
And then there is “Abortion journeys in Northern Ireland; using art activist practice to highlight discrimination.”

As you would expect there is a load of workshops dealing with the situation of abortion in the province of Prince Edward Island (PEI). NRL News Today has carried a number of stories about the all-out efforts of pro-abortionists to persuade the local government to open the spigots to pay for abortion. In the cross-hairs are the provinces of New Brunswick and PEI
So in that sense, the conference is pulling double-duty. Talking about the “unmet need” for abortion in countries all over the globe and snipping at the Prince William Island government for not funding abortions performed at private facilities.

Prof. Arsenault’s conclusion is a fitting place to end:

“It is not surprising that abortion activists use euphemisms to avoid key questions at the centre of the abortion debate. It is, however, shocking that professional academics would use these same tactics and invite only pro-choice academics to present at this conference. It is even more disturbing that UPEI would host this conference and allow such a biased pro-choice activist endeavour to wrap itself in the guise of ‘academic excellence.’”

Source: NRLC News