Wednesday, January 14, 2009

LifeLinks 1/14/09

Licia Corbella takes down assisted suicide advocate Lady Warnock in the Calgary Herald.
"If you're demented, you're wasting people's lives--your family's lives--and you're wasting the resources of the National Health Service," she said a few months ago.

There was a time when such statements would be described as wicked and the orator as well.

But in Warnock's twisted world of "ethics," doctors who kill are righteous and doctors who refuse to kill are villainous.

Black is white, white is black and wrong is right. Murder is merciful and compassionate care, cruel. Somewhere out there, George Orwell is saying, "I told you so."
Corbella later notes this disturbing trend in Oregon's assisted suicides:
In 1998, 12 per cent of PAS patients in Oregon said they chose this irreversible course of action because they didn't want to burden their family. That rose to 26 per cent in 1999, 42 per cent in 2005 and 45 per cent in 2007, the last year figures are available....

In other words, for the infirm and disabled, the right to die quickly becomes the duty to die. Wanting to live despite being frail or ill increasingly is viewed as selfish in places where euthanasia is the law.

That's not empowerment, it's coercion, guilt for living, pressure to die.


Wesley Smith notes how the whining of cloning scientists (they were denied government funding) in Britain quickly leads to action by members of Parliament. Maybe Britain's science funding organization understands that with iPS cells, there is no good reason to fund human cloning experiments, unfortunately politicians bent on scoring political points don't seem to get this.


Rebecca Taylor comments on the BBC's lame attempt to redefine conception.
So the nearly half a million human embryos that are sitting in the deep freeze have yet to be conceived? What utter rubbish! Conception is when sperm penetrates egg, implantation is when the resulting embryos implants in the womb.

Once again society is being mislead and numbed by language that has no meaning. If the BBC were to acknowledge that PGD occurs after conception then maybe some of us would actually put 2 and 2 together to make 4 and decide that they are very uncomfortable with this technology. Especially when we realize that all of the post conception embryos that failed the genetic test got tossed in the biohazard waste.


A team at Stanford has discovered that stem cells taken from human testes can develop into a wide range of tissues.
Samples from two of the men yielded stem cells, but one of the men dropped out before the experiments could continue. The tissue from the remaining man yielded abundant stem cells that proved able to transform themselves into a variety of other tissue cells when they were injected into mice bred with impaired immune systems, Reijo-Pera said Monday.

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