Life Links 10/16/08

Jill Stanek and Ed Morrissey cover Obama’s misleading response when McCain brought up the Born Alive Infant Protection Act during the debate last night.

I think McCain did alright with the abortion question but I was waiting for him to bring up Obama’s favoring the use tax dollars to pay for abortions and wish his response regarding “health” and abortion was a little more exact or call Obama out for his campaign’s “clarification” regarding abortion and mental health. Or maybe mention how BAIPA passed in the U.S. Senate 98-0. McCain also said “Breyer” when he meant Alito.


CQ Politics has the text of the debate here. The abortion question comes up approximately 3/4 of the way down. I just don’t know how any rationale person can actually find the following Obama line convincing:

There was a bill that was put forward before the Illinois Senate that said you have to provide lifesaving treatment and that would have helped to undermine Roe v. Wade

What? How would declaring born-alive infants who survive abortions “persons” help to undermine Roe v. Wade? Does Roe prevent states from saying born-alive infants aren’t “persons?” Could someone from Planned Parenthood or Barack Obama’s campaign provide an explanation for this assertion? Maybe someone in the media could actually ask for some reasoning to this nonsensical statement? I won’t be holding my breath. The media “fact-checkers” have been exceedingly horrendous on this issue.


Sharon Begley reports on how a leading scientist thinks it will take a “major miracle” for embryonic stem cells to treat Parkinson’s. Apparently, when transplanted, they eventually change in the same way the body’s original cells change.

In other words, whatever went wrong in the brain originally to produce Parkinson’s was still going wrong, ravaging the transplanted cells. Very bad news for Parkinson’s patients who have pinned their hopes on stem cells—and ironic given the prominent, courageous role Michael J. Fox and his foundation have played in drumming up public support for stem cell research.

Unfortunately, earlier in the piece Begley (who is a proponent of embryonic stem cell research who ignores the success of adult stem cells) doesn’t inform readers the successful treatment of blindness by British research Pete Coffey was with adult stem cells from the patients’ own eyes.


The Bay City Times comes out against Proposal 2.

Proposal 2 would allow researchers in Michigan to harvest embryonic stem cells in the state, and prohibit any attempt in the Legislature to tinker with the law.

This is a textbook example of what we mean about locking laws into the vault of the Michigan Constitution. If flaws in this proposal later appear, it's too late to tweak the law after it becomes part of the Constitution.