Life Links 11/30/07

Scott Klusendorf provides a point Steve Weimar makes about Michael Kinsley's latest stem cell column and one of the methods Kinsley uses to try to justify the killing of human embryos for research. Weimar notes,

Kinsley makes the dubious claim that not speaking against in-vitro fertilization makes embryonic stem cell research justified. The logical conclusion though from his line of reasoning is that both in vitro and ESCR are wrong, not that both are OK. Secular people argue this way all the time. They try to find an inconsistency and then claim that everything is permissible.

Weimar's right - I see this quite often. For example, the whole "How much time?" debate, which was recently revisited at CNN's Republican presidential debate. Pro-choicers for some reason believe that since most prolife politicians (and prolifers in general) don't want to punish women who have abortions this somehow proves the prolife position (abortion should be illegal because it intentionally kills an innocent human being) to be wrong or proves that prolifers don't really believe the unborn are worthy of protection.

It's this simplistic thinking where, "If you have position A on issue B, you must therefore have position C on issue D. If you have position A on issue B but not position C on issue D, then your position on issue B is false." There's either no or very limited thought put into the possibility that maybe someone's position on issue D is wrong or that there are reasonable reasons to hold position A on B but not position C on D.


Charles Krauthammer on stem cell vindication.


More details about the Wisconsin man who slipped his girlfriend RU-486 to cause her to miscarry have been revealed and printed in a variety of papers including the Washington Post. I'm wondering what pro-choicers who opposed unborn victims of violence laws think Manishkumar Patel should be charged with if his actions didn't physically hurt his girlfriend's body.


This is truly distrubing.

Police investigating four abortion clinics in Barcelona used frequently by British women have been horrified to find purpose-built machines attached to the drains that were used to crush foetuses.

The clinics allegedly performed illegal abortions on women into their eighth month of pregnancy.

Sad news about the prevalence of abortion in Korea.

Prof. Kim Hae-jung of Korea University said that a total of 342,000 fetuses were aborted in 2005 while 476,000 babies were delivered in the same year.

Tags: abortion, stem cell research