Life Links 12/17/10

William Saunders, Vice-President of legal affairs at Americans United for Life provides the good news and the bad news in the The European Court of Human Rights ruling in ABC v. Ireland.


Joanna Wagner has a piece in MercatorNet discussing sex-selection abortions.

Because this kind of abortion is based on intense gender discrimination, we Americans easily condemn the practice. It appears to be different from American abortion because it disproportionately targets female babies.

But wait! The exact same practice takes place at a rate of more than a million abortions each year in our own country, down our own streets, with our own young women and their unborn girls and boys. In India, unborn women are reduced to the status of disposable things. In America, unborn women and men are both reduced to the same status. How is it socially acceptable here for Americans to abort the unborn of both sexes, while we see it as a grave evil when done just to one sex in India?

The National Post notes that Quebec policy of paying for IVF on the condition that only one embryo is implanted at a time has dramatically lowered the percentage of IVF pregnancies resulting in multiple births.

Industry figures to be officially unveiled Thursday indicate just 3% of IVF procedures done in the first three months of the new policy resulted in multiples, compared with the usual in-vitro rate of about 30% multiples. Quebec stipulated that just one embryo at a time could be implanted in most provincially funded cases.

Its goal was partly to reduce the occurrence of twins, triplets and other multiples, who are much more likely to face health problems and burden the health care system than singletons.

The article also includes this LOL quote:

She also said it would be unfair for governments to restrict IVF treatment to single-embryo transfers without footing the bill. That would be “getting a little communistic, getting a little dictatorial,” said Ms. Hanck.

The New York Times has an interesting piece on how an excellent Division III football player missed the final game of last year's season to donate blood stem cells. Rowan University defensive end Matt Hoffman invited stem cell recipient Warren Sallach and his family to Gagliardi Trophy (Division III's Heisman) award ceremony.