Life Links 2/12/09

Glamour has a long piece on abortion entitled, “Abortion: The Secret Health Decision Women Aren’t Talking About Until Now” and another piece where 8 women share their abortion stories (the beginning lists resources for women who’ve had or are considering abortion - all of which are from pro-choice groups). The first story is just an attack on crisis pregnancy centers and rest are from women who seem to have no regrets about their abortions. Here’s an example from the last story,

My abortion was not painful, but I am wistful about losing the physical sensation of being pregnant. I never realized how a baby could get into a woman’s blood—I still feel a connection to that little lima bean.

CNN has an article on the experiment using the stem cells of man resistant to HIV to treat an HIV-positive patient with leukemia. The patient has no signs of HIV two years after the treatment. Unfortunately, this treatment isn’t likely going to be for everyone.

While promising, the treatment is unlikely to help the vast majority of people infected with HIV, said Dr. Jay Levy, a professor at the University of California San Francisco, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study. A stem cell transplant is too extreme and too dangerous to be used as a routine treatment, he said.

"About a third of the people die [during such transplants], so it's just too much of a risk," Levy said. To perform a stem cell transplant, doctors intentionally destroy a patient's immune system, leaving the patient vulnerable to infection, and then reintroduce a donor's stem cells (which are from either bone marrow or blood) in an effort to establish a new, healthy immune system.

Levy also said it's unlikely that the transplant truly cured the patient in this study. HIV can infect many other types of cells and may be hiding out in the patient's body to resurface at a later time, he said.

A woman in Louisiana named Ciara Craig is in the process of being charged with first degree murder after admitting to throwing her newborn daughter into a lake,

Craig, accompanied by relatives, surrendered to police Tuesday night, saying she threw her daughter into the lake that afternoon because she didn't want to raise a child and she didn't want her parents to know she had been pregnant, police said....

Craig told investigators the pregnancy resulted from a single incident with a man she doesn't know. At some point recently, she decided to abort her pregnancy but was told it was too advanced. She then investigated putting the baby up for adoption....

After delivering the child at home, Craig gathered two plastic garbage bags and two bath towels and drove with the infant to Kenner's Laketown park, police said. Witnesses there saw a woman walk to the water's edge, throw something into the water, return to the car and drive away. A bag and a bloodied towel were found nearby.

Officials at the St. Mary’s University are working on their excuses for shutting down a prolife presentation by JoJo Ruba. They apparently allowed the event to continue at a nearby church.

Chuck Bridges, vice-president of external affairs at Saint Mary’s, said the university did let the presentation continue, it just took place at the nearby church instead.

"It’s important to clarify . . . that the lecture was not shut down," he said Wednesday.

"When we saw the level of emotional engagement from those on both sides of the discussion, we felt it better that rather than having people face disciplinary action, that we would defuse the situation by allowing a bit of a cooling off and moving it to another location a building away," he said.

"So those who were keenly interested in hearing that side of the discussion, they had that opportunity."

So the answer to incredibly childish, unruly protestors is to give into the handful protesters and move the event off campus instead of removing the protesters or disciplining them?