Life Links 6/21/10

The apparent ignorance of the regular writers at the RH Reality Check never ceases to amaze me. This time, Robin Marty chastises Cardinal Daniel DiNardo because he calls an embryo an embryo in a letter to the commissioner of the FDA. Marty writes,

Also, the Cardinal seems to have forgotten developmental biology -- an embryo is at least 21 days post-fertilization. Before that, you have a blastocyst or a zygote.

Robin, ....Ummm.... a blastocyst is a name for an embryo at a certain stage of development and your link to a Mayo clinic web page does nothing to prove a pre-implantation embryo isn’t an embryo. Only ignorant people or people attempting to dehumanize human embryos try to act like blastocysts aren’t embryos. Even the National Institutes of Health defines blastocyst as “a preimplantation embryo of about 150 cells produced by cell division following fertilization.”

Also, as an employee of a pro-abortion web site, you might also want to avoid linking to a page whose subheader reads (my emphasis), “Fetal development begins soon after conception. Find out how your baby grows and develops during the first trimester.”

In 2009, the number of reported euthanasia cases rose in the Netherlands by 13%.

Last year a total of 2,636 Dutch people were killed by euthanasia, with 80 per cent of cases involving people dying at home after their doctors administered a lethal dose of drugs.

This compares to 2,331 reported deaths by euthanasia in 2008, which saw a 10 per cent rise on 2007.

The New York Times has a piece on a pro-choice adoption agency which is attempting to encourage abortion providers to be more open to talking to women about adoption.

Now Ms. Lohser, 33, works for Spence-Chapin Adoption Services, a New York adoption agency that supports abortion rights, and has come to regret the lack of information she had been able to provide women in Cleveland. If a client said she didn’t think she could carry a pregnancy to term, then never see the child again, Ms. Lohser’s response was, she recalled, “Yup, check, me either.” She did not realize how much more common open adoptions had become; she knew of no adoption agency that would speak to women with an open mind about abortion.

At ProWomanProLife, Andrea Mzorek posts a Canadian study’s findings on abortion and preterm delivery.

After adjusting for baseline characteristics, women with one previous abortion were 45% more likely to have a premature child at under 32 weeks; 71% more likely at less than 28 weeks; and more than twice as likely at less than 26 weeks. This association was even stronger for those with two or more abortions.

The San Franscisco Chronicle has an article on Shinya Yamanka winning the Kyoto Prize for creating induced pluripotent stem cells. The writer, Chronicle’s Science Editor David Perlman, can’t help himself from deceiving his readers in describing President Bush’s embryonic stem cell funding policy.

Before his discovery, those pluripotent human stem cells could only be harvested from human embryos, a source posing such powerful ethical issues that former President George W. Bush banned virtually all embryonic stem cell research eight years ago. The ban remained in force until President Obama reversed it last year.

Even after the reversal of the policy, reporters across America still have so much trouble honestly describing the policy which limited federal funding on embryonic stem cell research. I understand the goal of lying about the policy while it was still in place but why now? In at least one previous article Perlman shows he can accurately describe the Bush policy so why is he intentionally describing it inaccurately now?