Life Links 10/27/08

George Weigel and Ramesh Ponnuru point out the numerous errors and poor thinking on display in Doug Kmiec’s, Nicholas Cafardi’s and Cathleen Kaveny’s editorial entitled a “Catholic Brief for Obama.”

It’s almost like endorsing Obama makes people dumber. Of course it’s not that and every election cycle people of both sides disavow previously firm beliefs and issues simply because they prefer a certain candidate. But this year with Obama it just seems to have exponentially increased. For Catholic scholars like Kmiec and Cafardi, who have fought against abortion, to endorse someone like Obama, who supports the Freedom of Choice Act and using tax dollars to pay for abortions, and then claim, “Obama proposes to reduce the incidence of abortion by helping pregnant women overcome the ill effects of poverty that block a choice of life,” feels almost like the pinnacle of self-deceit. They laud Obama’s universal health care plan but then don’t mention anything about whether abortion would be one of the procedures covered by the plan. It’s almost like they can’t even honestly come up with a defense for Obama’s positions on life issues so they’ll just act like they don’t exist.


Speaking of self-deceit, Archbishop Egan recently had a good quote regarding people who deny the unborn are living human beings,

If you can convince yourself that these beings are something other than living and innocent human beings, something, for example, such as "mere clusters of tissues," you have a problem far more basic than merely not appreciating the wrongness of abortion. And that problem is—forgive me—self-deceit in a most extreme form.

Leonard Stern in the Ottawa Citizen on assisted suicide.

In most places, people who express a desire to die are evaluated for depression, and receive treatment for it. In places where assisted suicide is practised, such patients might instead receive a fatal dose of barbiturates. The researchers discovered that in 2007, not one "of the people who died by lethal ingestion in Oregon had been evaluated by a psychiatrist or a psychologist."

Asti Poole is an paraplegic Australian woman whose experience at Geeta Shroff’s clinic in India where patients are supposedly treated with embryonic stem cells (for thousands of dollars) is pretty similar to what I would have guessed the “treatment” would have been like.

"We used to joke that we were all being conned. None of us are miraculously walking."....

While in New Delhi, Ms Poole saw Indian patients of her doctor taking steps but when she asked to see footage of them before their treatment she was told: "No."

"She doesn't have anything to document before and after so there's nothing to gauge on," Ms Poole said.

Wendy Long notes the most recent misleading commercial from pro-choice groups this election cycle.


The New York Times has an article on prolife Democrats running in typically Republican districts. There’s also a quote from abortion advocate Kelli Conlin showing that she doesn’t really get the political strategy of running prolife Democrats in congressional districts which are strongly prolife.