When Kennedy refers to the gynecologists and obstetricians who perform abortions as "abortion doctors," he's repeating anti-choice language intended to impugn the professionalism of these physicians and make it easier to disregard their judgment about how best to care for their patients. Abortion doctors! What do they know?
In the New York Times Magazine Eyal Press, a contributing writer to this magazine, writes of his father, a heroically brave and dedicated abortion doctor....
"Evans was paroled in 2005 after serving three years of a 15-year service for a crime spree that included breaking into cars and using a pellet gun to rob a convenience store and a fast-food restaurant."
As in past Congresses, the act includes the ludicrous "finding" that "Prior to the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, an estimated 1,200,000 women each year were forced to resort to illegal abortions. . ." This claim, a favorite of Boxer, is based on dubious studies and makes no sense. There were 900,000 abortions in 1974 and 1 million in 1975. Are we really supposed to believe that the nationwide legalization of abortion caused the number of abortions to drop?
In an often-cited 1992 paper, Dr. Trussell of Family Health International, Research Triangle Park, N.C., used modeling to suggest that access to emergency contraception could prevent half of all unintended pregnancies and abortions in the United States (Fam. Plann. Perspect. 1992;24:269–73).
But in nine randomized trials and one cohort study in which a total of 11,830 women were enrolled, and in one demonstration project in which 17,831 women were given emergency contraceptive pills (ECPs), not one of the studies found clinically or statistically significant differences between intervention and control groups in pregnancy or abortion......
A third hypothesis is that emergency contraceptive pills have intrinsically low efficacy. The labeling on Plan B (two doses of levonorgestrel) quotes an 89% reduction in pregnancy risk after a single act of coitus, and estimates of risk reduction in the published literature range from 60% to 94%. But Dr. Trussell called all these estimates into question because it's difficult to accurately estimate the expected number of pregnancies that would have occurred without emergency contraception......
Dr. Trussell concluded that the numbers of expected pregnancies reported by studies are probably too high and that most published efficacy figures are probably overestimates. Nevertheless, it's clear that emergency contraceptives produce physiologic effects that are incompatible with pregnancy and that at the very least they are more effective than nothing......
As for how physicians should respond to this new information, Dr. Trussell urged honesty. Physicians should not oversell emergency contraception by implying that Plan B will reduce unintended pregnancy at a population level, he said.
But if legislators could take that modest move of banning abortions on the basis of sex, the public mind could be prepared for reasoning about the next step: barring abortions based on the disability of the child. In surveys in the past, more than half of the public were opposed to aborting a child if the child was likely to be born deaf. The opposition seemed to be invariant by the period of gestation. My own reading was that, if people thought it was wrong to kill someone because of his deafness, they did not think that the wrong varied with the age of the victim.
Mainly, then, I start to think about the abortion debate. About pro-lifers, in particular. I think about all those meddling politicians that would want to interject themselves into everything that just happened to me, interject themselves between me, my wife, and her doctors. And then I had a strong, visceral reaction. I wanted the m*f* to die. I wanted to rip off their heads and tear out their hearts, because how DARE they play politics with my wife's life? The baby was fine until the end. I wondered if that would have meant they'd force us to let my wife bleed until almost death before they'd let us abort, because well, if she's not near death, then it is just a 'health' exception, and we can't have that! F* them. F* them all. They can f* die, as far as I'm concerned.Such anger and hate for a group of people he apparently knows so little about. The prolifers I know would have been the first to tell him and his wife how sorry they were for their loss and situation.
What evidence shows is that childbearing before the age of 35 reduces a woman's risk of developing breast cancer, and breast-feeding also helps, said the new study's lead author, Karin Michels of Harvard Medical School. Scientists believe breast cells that have gone through a full-term pregnancy gain protection against cancer, she said.
Women who want a controversial abortion procedure for health reasons have few options beyond going to court and trying to prove that a Supreme Court decision banning the practice should not apply.
"the utilization of a somatic cell nuclear transplantation procedure which was for the sole purpose of creating nuclear transfer blastocysts for the extraction of embryonic stem cells. As used in this subdivision, "blastocyst" means an embryo that has developed to a stage where it consists of a sphere made up of an outer layer of cells, a fluid-filled cavity, and an inner cell mass."
In this insistence, the Court brushes under the rug the District Courts' wellsupported findings that the physicians who testified that intact D&E is never necessary to preserve the health of a woman had slim authority for their opinions. They had no training for, or personal experience with, the intact D&E procedure, and many performed abortions only on rare occasions.
The liberal dissenters have not merely made a minor logical error here. Take their argument seriously for a moment. They claim that it is conceivable that in some cases, partial-birth abortion is the safest method of abortion, and therefore it has to be allowed. (And it has to be allowed whether or not the pregnancy itself threatens the mother's health.) They further claim that it should make no difference to anyone where the child's feet are positioned when he is aborted.
Let's apply this argument to infanticide. It is conceivable that in some cases removing the child from the womb completely before killing it is the safest option. And surely it should make no difference to any rational person whether the infant was fully within the womb, partly inside it, or all the way out when his skull is crushed? Four justices on the Supreme Court have accepted all the premises for a constitutional right to infanticide. They lack only the nerve to take their reasoning to its logical conclusion.
A man's vision has been restored by a corneal patch grown from adult stem cells by a team at the University of Melbourne's Centre for Eye Research Australia (CERA) and the Bernard O'Brien Institute of Microsurgery (BOBIM).
The patch, which replicates the cornea, was cultivated from a single stem cell from a donor eye and was transplanted to the surface of the man's eyes.
It is self-evident that a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound when she learns, only after the event, what she once did not know: that she allowed a doctor to pierce the skull and vacuum the fast developing brain of her unborn child, a child assuming the human form.
Gorsuch also digs deeply into the philosophical issues raised in the debate. He points out that the provision in law that a patient be "terminally ill" in order to qualify for assisted suicide has little rational basis in a policy that places such tremendous emphasis on personal autonomy. After all, if "choice" is the issue, and killing is determined to be an acceptable response to the problem of human suffering, what does dying have to do with it? Many people who are not terminally ill suffer more intensely—and for a far longer period—than do the terminally ill. This being so, why should they be refused access to "aid in dying"?
When I saw the ultrasound, I realized that I could not do this - I saw a little clump of life inside of me, and became instantly protective of it. I kept going with the rest of my appointment and scheduled my procedure regardless, because I knew that a crowded abortion clinic would not be the place to discuss this with my boyfriend.
By whatever rationale you use, ending a pregnancy 12 weeks into gestation is incalculably more moral than bringing an unwanted child into this world. Or a child that, through no fault of its own, would be the destructor of a marriage, a family, a parent. It's fairly inarguable to say that unhappy children, who then grew into very angry adults, have caused the great majority of mankind's miseries."By whatever rationale you use, killing a born child at 12 weeks is incalculably more moral than allowing an unwanted child to stay in this world." Using Moran's thinking shouldn't we then be allowed to kill "unwanted" children at 12 weeks of age simply because they could possibly cause various miseries to mankind. Also, Moran provides no argument to how unwanted children have caused "the great majority of mankind's miseries" because it is somehow "fairly inarguable." I guess that's what happens when you don't have an argument.
I don't agree with partial-birth abortion, I consider it brutal and believe it should not be legal.Imagine the mental gymnastics it takes to hold this kind of position. The writer believes partial-birth abortion exists and thinks it is a brutal procedure which shouldn't be legal yet doesn't believe the procedure involves puncturing the child's skull and removing her brains.
However, I don't believe for an instant that the fetus is cut open at the neck so that the brain can be sucked out. What would be the point? Those are "facts" that are presented for the sole purpose of sensationalism, not truth. And gullible, idealistic young people (and older people) are the pawns in this plan. The procedure destroys the fetus; there is no life left. The brain, whatever there is there, is not active.
"She obviously has some problems that led her to a desperate act, and I hope she gets the help that she needs," Greenwood said. "She's obviously feeling very desperate."I think this is definitely one of those situations where abortion is not going to solve this woman's problems.
"They're using the death of all those people to shove their point down our throats," said freshman Cass Mercer, 19, of Auburn, who did argue with organizers. "It's horrendous, and it's abuse of life."
After the decision, Ms Evans said: "I am distraught at the court's decision. It is very hard for me to accept the embryos will be destroyed."The UK's law treats IVF embryos as the shared property of both individuals up until the point of implantation. But what if (and why doesn't) UK law treated human embryos created by sexual intercourse the same way? Would a man, who had unprotected sex with a woman, be able to demand every measure be taken to prevent the woman's uterus from accepting the implantation of a human embryo which could have resulted from the couple's sexual intercourse?
I have to ask the Joplin Globe how can some procedure that to date has never worked in humans be anyone's "only" or even best hope? Ethics aside, shouldn't we be a tad skeptical and see if anyone can actually clone a human embryo and extract stem cells from it before we decide it is the "only" hope?
"I have seen firsthand what happens to these children that don't get adopted," she said, sobbing. "So many little girls are forced into (slavery); to me it would be better off if they had been aborted. Abortion is choosing a better life even if it's not living."Abortion is choosing a better life for the child?? How is not living a "better life?" If killing unborn children makes them better off because they wouldn't have the chance of being forced into slavery, then wouldn't it follow that killing those poor little girls who are forced into slavery would make them better off as well?
All of this has caused senators to revise the House bill and include support for ethical alternatives. But given that revision, the Senate bill now contains a contradiction that its sponsors will need to learn from for next time. It acknowledges the value of exploring means of deriving pluripotent stem cells without destroying embryos, and so acknowledges also the problem inherent in such destruction. But if they now recognize that problem, and the value of advancing scientific techniques that allow us to avert it, the sponsors of the Senate bill need to rethink the rest of their measure.
My mind kept returning to the pregnancy test. If my reaction to those fateful double lines that said 'baby ahead' had been horror instead of hurrah - and, to be honest, it wasn't unalloyed joy that I felt when I saw them; I was scared, too - then I would have had little hesitation in having an abortion. But it was that very fact that was confusing me. I was calling the life inside me a baby because I wanted it. Yet if I hadn't, I would think of it just as a group of cells that it was OK to kill. It was the same entity. It was merely my response to it that determined whether it would live or die. That seemed irrational to me. Maybe even immoral.Miranda, however, concludes that early term abortion should be legal on demand because while the unborn are alive they don't have "human characteristics"/aren't persons but then notes for late-term abortions, "Who are we to say whether the life inside is a person, or not?"
The study of 9,683 young Australian women aged 22 to 27 found that those reporting either teenage abortions or abortions later in their 20s, were more than three times as likely to have been abused by a partner as those who didn't terminate.
We got rid of slavery because we realized it was manifestly evil to treat human beings as farm equipment. As it is.At another point, he claims that Christians not funding embryonic stem cell research for religious reasons is terrible.
Sam, what are the secular sources of an acceptable moral code?
HARRIS: Well, I don't think that the religious books are the source. We go to the Bible and we are the judge of what is good. We see the golden rule as the great distillation of ethical impulses, but the golden rule is not unique to the Bible or to Jesus; you see it in many, many cultures—and you see some form of it among nonhuman primates. I'm not at all a moral relativist. I think it's quite common among religious people to believe that atheism entails moral relativism. I think there is an absolute right and wrong. I think honor killing, for example, is unambiguously wrong—you can use the word evil. A society that kills women and girls for sexual indiscretion, even the indiscretion of being raped, is a society that has killed compassion, that has failed to teach men to value women and has eradicated empathy. Empathy and compassion are our most basic moral impulses, and we can even teach the golden rule without lying to ourselves or our children about the origin of certain books or the virgin birth of certain people.
Though curing disease is a noble cause, it can never take precedence over who the cause is attempting to cure. The end-game is not to merely cure diseases, but to improve human life. We cannot improve our lives if in the prevention of disease we have destroyed human dignity.
"I felt bad because I knew she was suffering," Abreu said. "I felt guilty for what I had done. At that moment, I'd have done anything to let her live.
"I was hysterical when she died. I hugged her and kissed her," said Abreu, her eyes filled with tears.
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