Life Links 11/24/08

I wonder what prolife Obama supporters think of him appointing Ellen Moran , executive director of EMILY’s List, to be his White House communications director. Is Moran’s appointment, as Doug Kmiec might put it, a way “to use compassion and assistance, not condemnation and prohibition to promote human life.” I guess we'll just have to wait and get the know President-elect Obama as well as Kmiec knows him.


Dr. D. Joy Riley has an op-ed in the Tennessean about the numerous changes in how a human embryo is treated in Britain since the inception of IVF.


Nat Hentoff has a column in the Washington Times on Obama and his pledge to sign the Freedom of Choice Act.


There’s a notable editorial in the Sacramento Bee on the problems with California’s embryonic stem cell agency.

The most striking testimony came from Kenneth Taymor, executive director of the UC Berkeley Center for Law, Business and the Economy.

Taymor, who has been watching the institute's operations for three years, noted that nearly everyone on the institute's governing board – medical school deans, university officials – has some sort of financial interest in the grants being awarded.

Even with officials recusing themselves, the board's deliberations, he said, have the feel of "a club that was allocating money among themselves" based on preordained decisions.

Wesley Smith on the whining of researchers intent on getting human eggs for human cloning.

But I digress: What's ridiculous is scientists expecting women to line up and risk their health, fecundity, and even their lives in order for "the scientists" to potentially gain world fame and huge dollars from their biotech companies from human cloning.