Life Links 7/2/08

Barack Obama's campaign weakly tries to defend Obama's votes against legislation to protect infants who survive abortions. I guess we're supposed to ignore the fact that Obama is against giving basic rights to abortion survivors because Bill Bennett said the Illinois Born Alive legislation was "exactly the same" as the federal legislation. Who cares that it wasn't exactly the same because Obama prevented it from being exactly the same.


Michael Cook, editor of MercatorNet, shreds an editorial in Nature which attacks the concept of human dignity.

Since human dignity leads inescapably to the conclusion that embryo experimentation is inadmissable, it has ditched human dignity. "Dignity as a concept cannot be a director of moral judgement," it insists.
What is cringingly embarrassing about this argument is that it was cribbed from a controversial article by the Harvard neuroscientist Stephen Pinker in The New Republic....

But has the editor of Nature never considered the consequences which accompany Pinker’s theory? Persons in permanent vegetative states are not autonomous; the unconscious elderly are not autonomous. What will be their fate if scientists, doctors and hospitals reject human dignity?...

It’s hard to understand how the world’s leading science journal could ever have taken Pinker’s hissy-fit seriously. The consequences of rejecting centuries of human dignity and replacing it with a self-serving, gimcrack theory are momentous. Embryos may be small but upon them rests our dignity, too.

HT: Mary Meets Dolly


Mark Stricherz has some questions regarding the controversy over a Catholic charity in Virginia helping a teenage girl obtain an abortion.