Life Links 5/13/09

The Local reports that Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare has ruled that doctors can't deny a woman the ability to know the gender of her child when the only reason she wants to know the gender is to have a sex-selection abortion if the child is a girl.

The woman, who already had two daughters, requested an amniocentesis in order to allay concerns about possible chromosome abnormalities. At the same time, she also asked to know the foetus's gender.

Doctors at Mälaren Hospital expressed concern and asked Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) to draw up guidelines on how to handle requests in the future in which they "feel pressured to examine the foetus’s gender" without having a medically compelling reason to do so.

The board has now responded that such requests and thus abortions can not be refused and that it is not possible to deny a woman an abortion up to the 18th week of pregnancy, even if the foetus's gender is the basis for the request.

Mark Shea has a nice response to Amnesty International's whimperings about lower donations.

Yes. Well. I have no doubt you are, Mr. Cox. That could have something to do with the fact that you are no longer about helping political prisoners subjected to torture and death, and have instead dedicated yourselves to expanding the abortion license worldwide? When you mutate into another garden-variety promoter of the culture of death, it rather stands to reason that people who think you should be doing what you were founded to do and not the exact bleedin' opposite will find other places to send their money. Somehow your appeal letter neglects to mention this salient fact.

I look forward to the death of your organization soon, and its replacement by apostolates willing to actually do the Lord's work rather than pay homage to Lefty pieties.

Wesley Smith notes that fetal farming experiments are still occurring in animals.

If and when an artificial womb is created, and if and when scientists figure out how to clone human beings and gestate them beyond the first few days of development--the apparent current state of the technology--the pressure will be on to permit this research to proceed. And the arguments in its favor will be the same as those made today about ESCR and early human cloning research: A developed embryo or fetus isn't a "person;" the embryo/fetus will never be born so what does it matter; the embryo/fetus value isn't as important as Uncle Charlie whose Parkinson's we can cure," etc.

A doctor in the UK has been on paid leave for 4 and half years at a cost of 600,000 pounds to taxpayers. She was suspended after allegedly taking her daughter to Spain for 31-week abortion.

Dr Adlakha, of Somerset Road, Edgbaston, and her daughter Shilpa Abrol, were charged with conspiracy to commit child destruction abroad after the GP allegedly arranged for the then 18-year-old to have an illegal late abortion in Barcelona at 31 weeks into her pregnancy, although the legal limit is 22 in Spain.