Life Links 2/2/09

I was going to write something on the inaccurate reporting by Alice Park in this Time article regarding stem cell research but Yuval Levin has saved me the time.

The facts Park is working with suggest that we need not ignore the humanity of human embryos for the sake of science—though she does her best to rearrange these facts to argue otherwise.

Wesley Smith comments on the recent birth of octuplets to Nadya Suleman.

A lot of people will be angry about this. Her mother even defended the woman as not being "evil." But I don't see how she or her doctors can be condemned when the watchword of the era is terminal nonjudgmentalism with the only gauge of morality being "choice."

I’m glad this woman chose not to selectively abort one or more of her children but my hope is this event opens the eyes of the public to just how unregulated the IVF industry is. Maybe this eye-opening could lead to ideas about how it might be prudent to at least pass some basic regulations like limiting the number of embryos being created based on how many will be implanted.

Also, the snippet below from this Telegraph article makes me wonder if Ms. Suleman was an egg “donor” who financed her various IVF cycles with money she received by selling her eggs.

She once told another neighbour that she wanted 12 children. "She told me that all of her kids were through in vitro, and I said 'Gosh, how can you afford that and go to school [college] at the same time?'" Yolanda Garcia told the Long Beach Press-Telegram. "And she said it's because she got paid for it."

Kathyrn Jean Lopez has a piece on the Mexico City Policy and some misinformation which often surrounds it.

The policy presented overseas health organizations with a choice: They could accept federal American cash and discourage abortion or they could refuse the cash and do as they wished. That’s far from draconian; NGOs that opted out of the Yankee dollar were free to solicit donations from sympathetic private citizens and institutions.

NGOs like the International Planned Parenthood Federation who chose to close up shop in certain places because of lack of U.S. government funding were choosing abortion over providing family planning with U.S. government funds.