The Personally Opposed BUT... Pro-Choice Political Position

          Very important primary elections are right around the corner for Nevada, and the way candidates try to spin their position on abortion can make you dizzy.  The most mesmerizing position says, “I am personally opposed, BUT…. I think 1.) the government should not be involved,” or 2.) “that we should not interfere in private personal family matters,” or 3.) “that we should not tell women what to do with their bodies,” or 4.) “I don’t think I can impose my personal beliefs on others.” 

 

          This personally opposed pro-choice position is the easiest abortion position to deconstruct and the least serious because it is clear that killing innocent human beings is NOT permissible when or because it is done in private and/or the decision to do so was agonized over and agreed to by family members.  Abortion is a public (not private) act because it involves two people not one.  An unborn child is never his or her mother’s body or part of it.  And since abortion involves the destruction of one person by another, a just government is duty bound to intervene in these “private” affairs to protect the right to life of defenseless human beings.  They are duty bound no matter how personal the decision is or how much deliberation or agony a woman and her family have put into or experienced over the decision to abort unborn children.

 

No serious person believes that parents are free to abuse or dispose of their children as long as it’s done in private and handled by the family.  But personally opposed politicians are in the bizarre position of saying people are free to destroy unborn human beings for THOSE reasons.  That is why the “personally opposed (because abortion takes a human life) BUT…” position is the least respectable of all positions on abortion.  Personally opposed BUT politicians are telling us that they do not have the will to assert and impose their belief that aborting innocent human beings is wrong.  Every law or regulation proceeds from someone or some group’s morality-their sense of right and wrong.  Why then are personally opposed candidates running for office if they are not willing to impose morality?

 

          There’s another flaw with the “personal opposed BUT”… pro-choice position.  Princeton Professor Robert George says the personally opposed BUT… pro-choice position suggests “that someone can will for others the freedom to have an abortion without being responsible in any morally significant way for the abortions sought or performed by people exercising that freedom.”   

 

That flight from responsibility is impossible.  You cannot as a public official will that one person or a class of persons' rights not be protected and escape responsibility when others seek and accomplish their demise because of your actions just because you hope or prefer it doesn’t happen.  Professor George says any public official “who acts to establish or preserve a legal right to abortion necessarily wills that unborn human beings be denied the legal protection against direct (and other forms of unjust) killing that he wills for him and others whom he considers to have lives worthy of protection of the laws.  … in this way, he renders himself complicit in the injustice of those abortions that his actions help to make possible.  However sincerely he may hope that women will forgo the freedom to abortion and opt instead for pro-life alternatives, the blood of abortion’s unborn victims is on his hands.” (The Clash of Orthodoxies, p. 247).

These are things for the pro-life voter to consider in the imminent elections. 

Fetal Farming On The Way-Necessary For Embryonic Stem Cell Therapies

FETAL FARMING is almost sure to follow on the heels of the announcement that Harvard and UCSF are about to start cloning human embryos for research.   Unless the Senate acts, it will REMAIN LEGAL to do so.

Cloning advocates swear that they ONLY want to allow the clones to live 10-14 days in a Petri dish.  That is wrong in it self, but these are the SAME PEOPLE who said they just wanted to use "leftover" embryos in fertility labs and would NEVER EVER want to clone.  That was soon abandoned for wanting to use more and more embryos (H.R. 810, S. 471) and now to clone them (S 1520). 

The next step is to implant the clones and allow their embryonic stem cells to "mature'  until they are more useable.  Unless the Senate acts-with Harry Reid getting out of the way-fetal farming is right around the corner. Here's why:

Young embryonic stem cells don't seem to have what it takes to do what researchers want-replace or repair diseased/degenerating tissues.  These embryonic stem cells are programmed to rapidly construct a human body from one single celled zygote to a 5-10 pound baby boy or girl with trillions of cells and all the complicated systems needed to sustain life outside the womb in just 9 months!  Those cells are rapid producers and seem uncontrollable and as a result cause a high rate of tumors and teratomas in animal studies.   They can’t be used right now with mature tissues like researchers want.  “Maturation” looks to be necessary if embryonic stem cells are to work.

This is probably why MIT stem cell researcher James L. Sherley writes that "Using cloned embryos to investigate the basis of disease in adults and children will often, if indeed not always, require that the embryos undergo maturation. "

Politicians and lobbyists are ready to act on this realization.  The US Catholic Bishops Conference says that new proposals on cloning in various states to legalize implantation and fetal maturation is due to "a growing realization that human cloning will probably not produce usable cells and tissues unless cloned humans can be developed past the embryonic stage."

This is where researchers have wanted to go all the time.  They just couldn't do it all at once.  Growing clones for research and medicine and farming them for their more matured embryonic stem cells is REVOLTING-but not if they can get us there in baby steps and break down incremental barriers of resistance along the way.  They’ve already overcome objections to using already killed embryos-with presidential authority-for research.  The Congress is pushing to allow more killing of embryos (HR 810, S 471) and Harvard & UCSF are going to fund cloning.  Unless some kind of action happens in the Senate to pass the Brownback Landrieu Human Cloning Prohibition Act, researchers will be legally farming human clones in the next several years, if not sooner. The Brave New World of Future Shock is lobbying at our door step. 

Another State Bans Abortions. Abortion Advocates In Panic!

Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco (D) signed a bill to ban almost all abortions except to save the mother's life.  The law would become effective upon the overturn of Roe.  Abortionists would be fined $10,00-100,000 and face 1-10 years in prison for doing an abortion.  Read more at LifeNews.com. 

This movement reflects a growing policy shift among pro-life supporters.  For years, mainstream pro-life leaders have advocated a policy of incrementalism.  That policy works to restrict abortion, create cognitive dissonance and secure justices who will overthrow Roe.  Along the way we have been tirelessly educating the public to create a culture of life that rejects abortion and welcomes every child in life and protects them in law. 

While that policy is still the dominant policy, others are not willing to wait any longer and accept the paternalism of the court.  They are pressing forward and telling the Court what they want and that they reject its unconstitutional anti-democratic rulings on abortion.  States are no longer waiting for the Court and are taking action to stop the killing of their unborn children.

Pro-lifers should consider this new shift carefully.  In seminary I repeated a professors concern that black South Africans should wait awhile until a more opportune time to press for full freedom-surely the apartheid regime would crush them and it would result in violence.  One of my Black African American classmates thundered back at me something to the effect that, "now is always the time for freedom."  Now is the time for the release of unborn children from the tyranny of abortion.  Not tomorrow.  Not the next justice.  Now is the time. 

So as we work to restrict access-and protect women in the process because the abortion industry is not willing to regulate itself, we demand the rights and security of the unborn now.

How is the other side taking this?  A recent NARAL alert warns that 20 percent of the states-like Ohio-have or are considering abortion bans like these.  It's leading NARAL, Planned Parenthood and others into a panic.  Expect more vitriol.  We are progressing.  Time, demographics and the young are on our side.

Less and Less Need To Kill Embryos For Embryonic Stem Cells

Check out this comment from Wesley J. Smith’s blog on embryonic stem cells.  If it is true, there is less and less need to create human embryos or kill existing “leftover embryos” to get embryonic stem cells.  Here's Wesley's comment". 

Progress on Regressing Adult Cells into ES Cells

Nature is reporting that scientists may be close to creating a protein "elixer" that would regress adult cells to an embryonic pluripotent state. According to the report, "Doctors might be able to take a simple biopsy of cells from a patient and reprogramme them, using one set of proteins to first transform them into embryonic stem cells, and then another to coax them into growing new blood, pancreas or other tissue."

If these proteins can applied as scientists hope, it would do away with the need to clone human life for use in ESC treatments. For all the hoopla by politicians and media, we may actually find a scientific way out of our moral dilemma. As one scientist put it, "Obviously that's where the field is really headed. It's a terribly exciting time."

Not All Cloning Bans Are Equal

As noted on June 7th, human cloning is about to begin in the United States at Harvard University and the University of California at San Francisco.  That will involve the creation of human embryos-human beings at the embryonic stage- to be studied and destroyed for bio-medical research in American laboratories.

Readers may be surprised to know that there are no prohibitions on human cloning in the United States for research or “reproductive” purposes.  Who would have thought that the United States would be manufacturing human beings for research only 60 years after our annihilation of the Nazi regime-a regime that horrified us with their human experimentation?  The Brave New World of Future Shock has landed on American soil.

Harry Reid can stop this.  The House of Representatives has repeatedly passed a human cloning ban-the Stupak Weldon Human Cloning Prohibition Act to ban all human cloning-for research and reproductive purposes.  The Senate version of that bill The Brownback-Landrieu Human Cloning Prohibition Act has not come to a vote in the United States Senate because Senator Reid and his allies oppose it.  Reid, Hillary Clinton, Diane Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, along with Republicans Arlen Specter and Orin Hatch, support a partial cloning ban that would permit cloning to create cloned human embryos for research and “therapeutic” purposes. 

Of course, they don’t call their legislation (S. 1520) cloning.  These Senators are “political” scientists and are skilled at playing politics with science.  Their human cloning ban says that human cloning is not cloning until the human clone (“the product of nuclear transplantation”) is implanted “into a uterus or the functional equivalent of a uterus.”  That redefinition of cloning allows them to call this a cloning ban.  Not all cloning bans are equal… or cloning bans at all.

Why do Senator Reid and others want human cloning?  Embryonic stem cells.  You can’t get embryonic stem cells with current technologies without killing a human embryo.  Cloning is believed to be necessary to obtain the kind of patient matching embryonic stem cells that will not be rejected by the patient.  Embryonic stem cell researchers and supporters claim that if they can just kill those human clones when they are embryos for their embryonic stem cells, they can cure degenerative diseases.

They continue to believe this despite years of unproductive research that has yielded no successes.  Embryonic stem cell research is so dangerous in animal studies that there are no human trials.  Other stem cell research called adult stem cell research uses non-embryonic stem cells from a person’s own body, umbilical cord blood, placental and other tissues that do not destroy human beings and poses no ethical problems.  There are over 65 adult stem cell cures and over 300 approved human trials.

Human cloning for any purpose is wrong because it uses human beings as means to an end without consent.  It assaults human dignity by turning human life into a commodity.  An attack on the least of us is an attack on all of us.  Once one group of humans’ right to life and personhood is disposable, everyone’s personhood and right to life becomes negotiable.  Human rights, the right to life, human dignity and personhood are inherent.  They are not earned or achieved.  They are not realized by development.

To say otherwise is to create criteria that humans must meet to gain and retain their humanity and their right to life to protect them from harm.  That is unconscionable and has led to the assault upon and tampering with human life.  The loss of human dignity is the highest price to be paid for allowing any kind of cloning and creation of one human being as a means for another.  It must be stopped.

Senator Reid needs to know that you oppose any partial cloning bans (S 1520) and that you support the Brownback Landrieu human cloning ban (S 658), which bans all human cloning, to stop the bio-ethical nightmare that is upon us. 

DNC New Direction Manifesto: More Abortion. Outreach To Pro-lifers Is Over.

The Democratic National Committee has released its "New Direction For America" manifesto to the Boston Globe.  One (old) new direction for America is to kill more unborn children by creating more access to abortion. So much for making abortion rare and reducing abortion.  It looks like the DNC is done with their ridiculous outreach attempts to pro-lifers.

Memo to the DNC: no party, no people, no species, no nation ever grew stronger by killing its own. About 45 percent of your party is pro-life.  Ignore them and you will keep losing. 

Memo to Harry Reid pro-life supporters.  Harry's no longer pro-life.  He was part of this.  He had more power to stop this than he has power to stop Yucca Mountain, but he didn't.

Here's part of the text as reported in the Boston Globe.

"Ensure access to family planning methods and abortion.."

Human Cloning Begins At Harvard

Harvard University just approved plans to begin human cloning for bio-medical research.  California Universities are soon to follow.  Harvard is sold on embryonic stem cell research (ESCR).  The only way to get embryonic stem cells (ESCs) is to DESTROY an embryonic human being. 

Here are a few things to know.

1. What's the connection with ESCR and Cloning?  ESCR supporters believe cloning is necessary to overcome rejection of ESCs.  There are not enough "LEFTOVER" embryos in fertility labs to create matches for the 100+ million sufferers who could benefit from this research.  Cloning is seen as the way to create perfect matches. 

2. Cloning is legal for any purpose in the United States.  There is nothing in US law to prevent anyone from cloning another person for reproductive purposes or to strip mine the clone for his or her stem cells for therapy.  

3. Cloning is very difficult and inefficient.  It took over 276 attempts to clone Dolly the sheep.  Like all of the other animal clones, she was genetically defective.   I get it-grow an embryo with defective genes and transplant them.  That’s good medicine!  

4. Cloning will exploit women.  Cloning occurs by fusing or inserting cells of the donor with or into the hollowed out unfertilized egg from a woman.   An electrical charge is applied and boom, a new human clone comes into existence.  Because it is so inefficient it is going to require massive numbers of eggs from women.  The surgical procedure for doing so is risky and at least one woman in Britain died.  What will happen to the millions of women donors on surgical assembly lines in nations with second rate medical care?  That’s why some abortion supporting feminists are opposing cloning and embryonic stem cell research. 

5. ESCR has not provided a single cure-not even in animal studies after all of these years.  It is so DANGEROUS in animal studies that there are no human trials.  It could be decades before we see any results.  At the same time, other stem cell research, which uses non-embryonic stem cells-usually called “adult” stem cells-has produced more than 65 results.  There are well over 300 human trials in progress.

6. Adult stem cells have overcome all of the perceived advantages of embryonic stem cells and are proving themselves to be superior.  They do not pose rejection problems and they appear to be easier to control than ESCs, which have a high rate of teratomas/tumor formation.

I oppose human cloning because it kills a human being.  It assaults human dignity by treating human beings as commodities to be manufactured, mined and marketed.  Others oppose it because it will exploit women and there are superior result producing alternatives.  For more info about these results see our guest on Voice For Life, Dr. David Prentice’s presentation to the Congress.  Visit the Nevada LIFE cloning page for our position and links to other sites.

New Poll Shows Americans Still Oppose Embryonic Stem Cell Research Funding.

Here is the Nevada LIFE news release to the major Nevada Media June 1, 2006 regarding the upcoming Senate vote to overturn President Bush's Embryonic Stem Cell Research Policy.  Read the Nevada LIFE policy briefing on this legislation.

 

New Poll Shows Americans Still Oppose Embryonic Stem Cell Research Funding.

 

For Immediate Release  June 1, 2006

Contact Don Nelson, Nevada LIFE

·        Proposed Expansion Opens Door To Unethical Human Experimentation

·        Every Nevada Congressman Supports Expansion 

 

The following statement can be attributed to Nevada LIFE President Don Nelson:

 

A new International Communications Research poll shows that Americans oppose federal funding of research that kills human embryos for research by 48% to 39%.  This is in direct opposition to legislation passed by the Congress (H.R. 810) last year to overturn President Bush’s embryonic stem cell research policy.  That policy opposes federal funding of research on human embryos killed after August 9, 2001.  Every Nevada Congressman voted for this unpopular legislation to significantly expand federal funding of human embryo killing for research.  Their votes “take us” as President Bush says, “across a critical ethical line by creating new incentives for the ongoing destruction of emerging human life.”  The proposed expansion opens the door to fetal farming and unethical human experimentation.

 

Some polls indicate support for public funding of embryonic stem cell research (ESCR).  Those polls are so fraudulently biased that even President Bush would end up supporting legislation to overturn his own funding policy.  When respondents discover that scientists disagree on whether embryonic or non embryonic stem cells may be more successful in treating diseases, 57% favor funding research that does not harm the donor; only 24% favored funding all stem cell research, including ESCR. 

 

Nevada’s Congressmen should not be misled by irresponsible hyping of ESCR.  There are over 65 non-ESCR successes and more than 300 human trials in progress.  This research poses no moral objections and progress been made with heart disease, Parkinson’s, and curing diabetes in mice.  Some paralyzed women have begun to walk with braces.  There are NO embryonic stem cell successes.  There are NO human trials after years of research.  Results in Korea trumpeted by leading American science journals, and still cited by the BBC, were fraudulent.  Those researchers face criminal charges.

 

The Senate will pass a version of HR 810 this summer.  Nevada’s Congressmen must switch their votes to uphold President Bush’s expected veto so that they don’t waste taxpayer money on unproductive, morally objectionable research that crosses an ethical line and opens the door to fetal farming and unethical human experimentation.

 

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