Thursday, March 26, 2009

Life Links 3/26/09

Members of the President's Council on Bioethics have published a statement on President Obama's stem cell decision and correcting various errors in Obama's statements on stem cell research.


Have a problem with abortion? Don’t become a OB/GYN. That’s what UCLA law professor Julie Cantor argues in a New England Journal of Medicine editorial (my emphasis).
Medicine needs to embrace a brand of professionalism that demands less self-interest, not more. Conscientious objection makes sense with conscription, but it is worrisome when professionals who freely chose their field parse care and withhold information that patients need. As the gatekeepers to medicine, physicians and other health care providers have an obligation to choose specialties that are not moral minefields for them. Qualms about abortion, sterilization, and birth control? Do not practice women's health.


A coroner in the UK is publicly criticizing abortion provider Marie Stopes after a “15-year-old schoolgirl died from toxic shock syndrome just days after having a termination.”
Coroner Roger Whittaker said he would be writing to the sexual health organisation after it was revealed Alesha Thomas was never given a prescribed course of antibiotics, which would have saved her life....

An hour and 20 minutes after the operation the doctor issued an electronic prescription for the teenager to be given a course of prophylactic antibiotic, Doxycyline, to prevent infection. But unbeknown to him, Alesha, from Huddersfield, had already been discharged from recovery - 45 minutes after the operation.

The hearing at Huddersfield Coroner's Court was told the organisation had no system in place for nurses to re-check a patient's notes after they had been discharged to make sure all instructions had been followed.


Wesley Smith comments on the latest “feed me” editorial in Nature and their call to get rid of the Dickey Amendment.
See, the assurances--oft stated--that all "the scientists" want are "leftover" embryos that were "going to be destroyed anyway" was always hogwash, part of a sophisticated propaganda campaign intended to unfetter biotech from any meaningful limitations on the instrumental use of nascent human life.

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