Life Links 6/30/09

Dan Gilgoff reports that there is a growing schism among common ground advocates regarding legislation on abortion. One side wants the two segments of the common ground package (preventing unwanted pregnancies and reducing the need for abortion) introduced in one bill while another side wants them introduced separately.


Joe Carter writes about how the language we use could be effecting how we think.

When you stop to consider the differences between such phrases as “methods of procreation” and “reproductive technology” it begins to become clear why social conservatives are losing ground in the fight to preserve the concept of human dignity. Any attempt to argue that embryonic human life is deserving of a particular moral status is undercut when we are using such phrases as ‘blastocysts produced by the technological advances of in vitro fertilization.” The language of the factory and of human dignity is as incompatible as would be the interchangeability of machine and life. Such degradation of language only leads to linguistic confusion and muddy thinking.

Algerian singer Cheb Mami has been arrested in France and accused of participating in an attempted forced abortion.

Prosecutors at Thursday's trial in Bobigny will allege that Cheb Rami was one of a group who abducted and beat the woman, a French photographer, in the Algerian capital, Algiers, in 2005.

The woman was allegedly forced to undergo an abortion, but on returning to France she discovered she was still pregnant and later gave birth to a daughter.

France issued an international arrest warrant for Cheb Mami after he skipped bail in Paris in May 2007 and fled to Algeria.

CBS News is featuring a story on a Cedars-Sinai medical study where doctors attempt to heal the hearts of patients who've had heart attacks using their own adult stem cells from their hearts.