***Warning: Graphic Content***
I am not a big fan of flashing around aborted baby pictures in the whole pro-life/pro-choice debate, but this video is much more than that and deserves to be watched. What is happening in Wichita is appalling and needs to be exposed:
HT: Pro-Life Blogs
Previous posts:
Exposing the Fruitless Deeds of Darkness
President Bush spoke at the 4th annual National Catholic Prayer Breakfast this week and said the following:
Renewing the promise of America begins with upholding the dignity of human life. In our day, there is a temptation to manipulate life in ways that do not respect the humanity of the person. When that happens, the most vulnerable among us can be valued for their utility to others — instead of their own inherent worth. We must continue to work for a culture of life — where the strong protect the weak, and where we recognize in every human life the image of our Creator.
This is why I’m rooting for Sen. Brownback – I don’t want to lose this sentiment in the White House.
LifeNews tallied up the votes of the presidential candidates in the Senate and the results are no big surprise. Democrat candidates Clinton, Obama and Biden voted for S. 5 – the ESC research funding bill – while Sen. Chris Dodd was absent. The only Republican candidates were Sens. John McCain and Sam Brownback – the results: McCain:yes, Brownback: no. Brownback not only voted no, of course, he also lead the floor debate against the bill.
As for S. 30, the “alternatives” bill for funding stem cell research that does not destroy human life the votes went as follows:
Clinton: no
Obama: no
Biden: yes
McCain: yes
Brownback: yes
The big winner? Who else…Sam Brownback
This ranks among the most disturbing things I’ve ever read. The UK Times Online columnist, Caitlin Moran, has an article out today explaining why abortion is the ultimate motherly act. Caitlin herself opted to have an abortion after giving birth to two children because “I knew I would see my existing two daughters less, my husband less, my career would be hamstrung and, most importantly of all, I was just too tired to do it all again.”
Her entire article is proof of what I have spoken before about how abortion and the modern feminist movement has destroyed our sense of the sacredness of maternity. She rejects the traditional view of the mother as the “gentle giver of life” who would “carry to term every child she conceived…because her love would be great enough for anything.” But this is exactly who all mothers are called to be!! No doubt there are many hardships that come with motherhood, but that does not mean that we give up and take the easy way out. We are all called to love as God loves and very often that requires us to “give until it hurts.” As Mother Teresa put it, “So, the mother who is thinking of abortion, should be helped to love, that is, to give until it hurts her plans, or her free time, to respect the life of her child. The father of that child, whoever he is, must also give until it hurts.” And always adoption is there as a loving alternative.
There is a reason that we have this “traditional” view of the mother, because we know deep down that a woman’s very soul is meant to be maternal – biologically or spiritually. And we know that abortion distorts this virtue.
Previous posts:
Child Born Despite Mother’s Best Efforts
Check out this fabulous article about Sam Brownback in the Washington Post. It does an excellent job of describing who Sen. Brownback really is as a person. We could use more people like this in politics. The entire article is more than worth your time, but here is a little bit:
During the 2004 Republican convention, Brownback told a closed-door rally, “We must win this culture war,” according to the New York Times. “I say we fight.”
“He has this kind of soft physical presence,” says Burdett Loomis, a political scientist at the University of Kansas. “I think Sam Brownback is a very tough customer.”…
Across the country, not many people know who Sam Brownback is. His fundraising has been lackluster, though it’s still early. Even if he doesn’t get close to winning, though, his support in the conservative Christian community may affect what other candidates are talking about.
“One of his major contributions would be to anchor the moral issues in the Republican Party,” says Rob Schenck, an evangelical minister and president of the conservative National Clergy Council. “He in a way could hold the evangelical and the traditional Catholic vote hostage if the party began to waver on those issues.”
Brownback says his model for the presidential race would be the way he ran for Senate in 1996, after discovering the melanoma.
“If I win, I win. If I lose, I lose,” he says. “It’s a great liberation. . . . And then you run on the topics that you really feel called to do. And the beauty of it is, is that people really like that. They may not agree with you on things but they really do like that. The purpose-driven life.”
Vote for Brownback on the American Family Association’s Presidential Straw Poll. I realize that nobody in the media is giving him a chance and he’s not even really talked about in conservative circles, but I’m still pulling for him. He seems to me to be the most obvious alternative to Rudy Giuliani (which most conservatives are looking for) and I don’t know why more people don’t see that – right now he is only 6th on the AFA poll.
Hat Tips to: Alive and Young; The Steubenville Conservative
Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, who is a Democrat, was heavily pressured as the “swing vote” on S. 5 when it came to getting enough votes for a veto override. I forgot to report that he did vote against it. Good for him! It’s always nice to see pro-life Democrats who are willing to take such an unpopular stand against their own party. Thank you Senator!!
Democrat Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska also voted against the bill.
So we knew this was coming and now it has happened. Thankfully President Bush is remaining faithful to his position against further funding for this research and vows to veto the bill again:
I didn’t watch any of the debate on the Senate floor this week, luckily Family Research Council has been paying close attention and has issued a couple of press releases separating fact from fiction regarding some of the claims being made by the bill’s supporters. It appears that the main offenders were Senators Harkin, Specter, Durbin and Dorgan. The first deception they highlight is always my favorite. Supporters of ESC research always think they can get by with claiming to have “ethical guidelines” for destroying human life for scientific research – it’s not possible.
DECEPTION: Senator Harkin claims that S. 5 has tighter ethical guidelines than the Bush embryonic stem cell policy.
TRUTH: Apparently, Senator Harkin thinks using taxpayers’ money to encourage the destruction of human life is more ethical than not destroying human embryos. President Bush’s policy does not allow funding for research that destroys human embryos, nor create an incentive to do so. S. 5 is written precisely to do so at taxpayer expense.
Then we have the ever popular “these embryos are going to be destroyed anyway” rationale:
DECEPTION: Senator Specter claims that the 400,000 frozen embryos available for research will be thrown out. He says they won’t be used to produce life.
TRUTH: According to Rand, of the 400,000 frozen embryos, only 2.8% are designated for research, and Rand estimates that if all these embryos were used, they could only generate 275 new stem cell lines at most. S. 5 will not generate as many embryonic stem cell lines as proponents claim. Researchers will have to create human embryos for the sole purpose of destructive research, or attempt to clone human embryos for research.
Regardless of whether an embryo is facing certain death or not, it is beneath the dignity of the human person to be used as an object of experimentation. Human embryos deserve the same respect owed to every other person.
There were other claims of Bush imposing his moral views and cries of not enough stem cell lines available. But what was most interesting was that apparently both Sen. Harkin and Sen. Dorgan used juvenile diabetes as an example of a disease that could potentially be treated with ESC research. Meanwhile the Journal of the American Medical Association just published a study about human patients with Type I diabetes who were very successfully treated with their own stem cells. Perfect timing, huh?
Bottom line, we’re already funding ESC research, and we’re giving quite enough. Keep in mind this final deception:
DECEPTION Senator Durbin said that Bush “closed down federal funding” for human embryonic stem cell research.
TRUTH: President Bush is the first to use federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research. Last year, NIH spent about $40 million on human embryonic stem cell research.
Family Research Council PRs:
FRC Condemns Deception By Senators Specter and Harkin On Stem Cell Research
Senators Dorgan and Durbin Mislead on Stem Cell Research
We all know that’s true, but now we have scientific proof – when it comes to stem cells anyway.
This finding could have a major impact on the successful development of stem cells as viable therapies for a variety of diseases and conditions, according to the study’s senior author, Johnny Huard, PhD, director of the Stem Cell Research Center at Children’s and the Henry J. Mankin Professor and Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
“Regardless of the sex of the host, the implantation of female stem cells led to significantly better skeletal muscle regeneration,” said Dr. Huard, also the deputy director of the McGowan Institute of Regenerative Medicine. “Based on these results, future studies investigating regenerative medicine should consider the sex of the stem cells to be an important factor. Furthermore, investigations such as ours could lead to a better understanding of sex-related differences in aging and disease and could explain, at least partially, the high variability and conflicting results reported in the literature on stem cell biology.”
It’s taking me a while to get back on the blogging bandwagon after taking a few days off. Please bear with me. Last week Fr. Tad Pacholczyk wrote an article for the Evening Bulletin called Recapturing the Soul of Bioethics, here’s some of it:
Modern bioethics seems to be going through a kind of identity crisis. With ethicists available for hire, drug companies and biotech firms have easy access to “experts” who can provide them with the veneer of respectability if they decide to head in the direction of unethical science. Erwin Chargaff, a pioneer in the field of biochemistry, once quipped that, “Bioethics didn’t become an issue until ethics started being breached. Bioethics is an excuse to allow everything that is unethical.” One common approach to allowing the unethical is to claim that, “We have already made certain choices, and now we really must move on to the next step – we must yield to the inexorable progress of science.” Rather than examining and rejecting certain poor choices that may have been made in prior years, and trying to regain lost ground, bioethicists today unwittingly continue to grease the slippery slopes by their lack of courage in disavowing some of the unethical practices they have aided and abetted in the past.
Today, for example, we see enormous pressure on the public to support embryo-destructive stem cell research. Where do the embryonic humans come from that are to be destroyed for this research? They come from in vitro fertilization (IVF), a practice very few bioethicists have been willing to confront or challenge. IVF has become a kind of “sacred cow” that few outside the Catholic Church are willing to question. Yet it requires very little ethical reflection to see, for example, how making “extra” embryos during IVF and freezing them is a grave moral problem. Relatively few countries (among them Italy and Germany) have legal restrictions regarding IVF. In Italy, it is illegal to freeze embryos, and whenever you do IVF, you are not permitted to make more than three embryos at a time, all of which must be implanted into the woman. Germany has a similar law, and the country has almost no frozen embryos as a result. Such a law is a straightforward attempt to limit some of the collateral damage from IVF, and any reasonable person can see the benefit of enacting such legislation. But in the United States, we face what has been termed the “wild west of infertility,” where few regulations of any kind exist and close to half a million frozen embryos are trapped in liquid nitrogen tanks in fertility clinics. As couples get older and no longer intend to implant their own embryos, researchers begin to clamor for those embryos to use in their research experiments. Bioethicists and politicians then further muddy the waters by suggesting that “they are all going to be thrown away anyway,” which is neither true nor morally relevant. Even when somebody else will perform the dastardly deed of destroying a group of humans (discarding them as medical waste), that does not suddenly make it OK for me to choose to destroy them with my own hands. Here we have a perfect opportunity for some serious introspection about the mistakes of the past, an opportune moment to limit some of the collateral damage from IVF through laws like Italy’s and Germany’s. Yet one finds very few bioethicists willing to step up to the plate to tackle such an unpopular topic…Bioethics is an exceedingly important discipline for the future of our society, addressing critical issues in science and life. This discipline cannot afford to compromise its integrity as new controversies arise, selling its soul to the highest bidder or playing to powerful special-interest groups like universities or biotech companies. Only by rejecting the demands of expediency and courageously acknowledging past mistakes can it regain the kind of principled moral foundation and credibility it needs to effectively assist scientists, medical professionals and researchers in the future.
For more on Biotech’s slippery slope check out his column of a few years ago: The Slippery Slope of Biotechnology. It is a fabulous resource for trying to understand how we got here in the first place.
Hat Tip: Mary Meets Dolly
Rejoice in the Risen Christ! This is the day the Son of Man appeared to his apostles who had lost hope after his passion and death. Yes! Christ’s Resurrection from the dead brings hope to all mankind. It is too easy in the right to life area to lose all hope of ever turning things around with the ever increasing secularization of our society. But the Risen Christ promises that as long as we are armed with the truth we shall overcome even death, which includes this culture of death that has plagued us for so long.
Christ is Risen (Luke 24:1-35)
But at daybreak on the first day of the week they took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb; but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were puzzling over this, behold, two men in dazzling garments appeared to them. They were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground. They said to them, “Why do you seek the living one among the dead? He is not here, but he has been raised. Remember what he said to you while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners and be crucified, and rise on the third day.” And they remembered his words. Then they returned from the tomb and announced all these things to the eleven and to all the others. The women were Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James; the others who accompanied them also told this to the apostles, but their story seemed like nonsense and they did not believe them.
But Peter got up and ran to the tomb, bent down, and saw the burial cloths alone; then he went home amazed at what had happened.
Now that very day two of them were going to a village seven miles from Jerusalem called Emmaus, and they were conversing about all the things that had occurred. And it happened that while they were conversing and debating, Jesus himself drew near and walked with them, but their eyes were prevented from recognizing him. He asked them, “What are you discussing as you walk along?” They stopped, looking downcast. One of them, named Cleopas, said to him in reply, “Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know of the things that have taken place there in these days?” And he replied to them, “What sort of things?” They said to him, “The things that happened to Jesus the Nazarene, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, how our chief priests and rulers both handed him over to a sentence of death and crucified him. But we were hoping that he would be the one to redeem Israel; and besides all this, it is now the third day since this took place. Some women from our group, however, have astounded us: they were at the tomb early in the morning and did not find his body; they came back and reported that they had indeed seen a vision of angels who announced that he was alive. Then some of those with us went to the tomb and found things just as the women had described, but him they did not see.” And he said to them, “Oh, how foolish you are! How slow of heart to believe all that the prophets spoke! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them what referred to him in all the scriptures.
As they approached the village to which they were going, he gave the impression that he was going on farther. But they urged him, “Stay with us, for it is nearly evening and the day is almost over.” So he went in to stay with them. And it happened that, while he was with them at table, he took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them. With that their eyes were opened and they recognized him, but he vanished from their sight. Then they said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning (within us) while he spoke to us on the way and opened the scriptures to us?” So they set out at once and returned to Jerusalem where they found gathered together the eleven and those with them who were saying, “The Lord has truly been raised and has appeared to Simon!” Then the two recounted what had taken place on the way and how he was made known to them in the breaking of the bread.