LIfe Links 1/9/09

The prolife movement lost an important voice yesterday with the death of Father John Neuhaus. Here's a piece he wrote for the January 2009 issue of First Things entitled, "The Pro-Life Movement as Politics of the 1960s."

In short, pro-life intellectuals, like pro-life activists, insist on talking about the science and moral reasoning pertinent to the moral status of the unborn. So do the more honest of pro-choice intellectuals, which is why they are more hindrance than help to the pro-choice movement....

Again, the pro-choice proponents are the defenders of the status quo. They routinely cite data indicating that a majority of Americans do not want to see Roe overturned. As has often been pointed out, these same Americans believe that Roe created a restrictive abortion policy....It is understandable, however, that pro-choice advocates trumpet popular support for Roe, dependent as they are on the ignorance of “the silent majority.”

In Afghanistan, a mother and brother of a 14-year-old girl are facing prison time after they allegedly cut the girl's unborn child out of her. The girl was 5 months pregnant and had been allegedly raped. She is in critical condition.

The abortion was performed about nine days ago, using no anesthesia. The incisions were then stitched up with a thick string usually used to sew up potato sacks, said Gulam Mohammad Nader, one of the doctors who subsequently treated the girl in the provincial capital. He said the wound became dangerously infected.....

Nader said the girl told him that she had not known her mother and brother's plan when they took her into the cattle shed. She said they wrestled her to the ground and held her down while they cut her stomach open. She blacked out for much of the ordeal, but she said she remembered seeing her brother hold up the fetus.

Police have recovered the body of the fetus, and both the brother and the man accused of raping the girl have been arrested, Khan said. Police also plan to arrest the mother, he said, but are waiting to take her into custody because she is an 11-hour trip away and recovering from recently giving birth herself.

In Britain, the first child who was screened as an embryo for the gene BRCA-1 (which is linked to breast and ovarian cancer) has been born. This, of course, means any of the child's siblings who had the gene were disposed of. The article also contain this pathetic attempt to justify this kind of genetic discrimination from Peter Braude.

In fact, he argues that the procedure actually prevents abortions because it takes place on a three-day old embryo in a lab. Only embryos that lack the defective gene are implanted.

"I don't think you can equate eight cells in a dish to an embryo or a child," said Braude, head of the department of women's health at the King's College London School of Medicine.

So an eight-celled embryo isn't an embryo?


A 16-year-old girl in Washington has been charged with murder after allegedly drowning an infant, whom is believed to be her newborn son, in a toilet.

The baby's body was found Monday by authorities combing 60 tons of trash at a dump site near Tacoma.

An affidavit filed that day said Last "put her baby face down into a toilet and allowed it to drown for several minutes until it died. Then she threw her son into the trash can outside in a plastic garbage bag."