Ultrasound Bill Would Reduce Abortions

Life News.com is reporting that Senator Sam Brownback has introduced a bill to require abortionists to show a woman considering an abortion an ultrasound of the unborn.  That would surely reduce the number of abortions.  Crisis Pregnancy Center volunteers will tell you that the man almost always bonds with the child and the mother chooses life. 

This would be a great way to make abortion rare.  But abortion advocates won't go for it.  There are a lot of reasons, but they really don't believe in making abortion rare.  Abortion is going down because of abstinence sex education, commitments to wait until marriage (even though they are usually broken, the delayed entrance to sex makes a difference), informed consent laws, parental notification laws, partial birth abortion (the education), federal funding bans, clinic standards... all of these have reduced abortion, but abortion advocates oppose all of them and/or ridicule them.

But that's because they are not serious about reducing abortion.  And it's probably more than the money they make on abortion, though the money is a big deal.  Many of them truly believe that the worst thing for the mother, the child-as if being killed is better than being poor, abused or unwanted- and society is to have the child. 

If they really cared about making abortion rare, they would send pregnant women to crisis pregnancy centers.

And by the way, abortion advocates criticize us for talking women out of abortions.  I'll let you decide what kind of mentality that is.  It tells the kid it would be better if they were dead.  Of course they wouldn't say that.  Well, some would, but that's what their mentality says.

The fact that they think that talking a woman out of an abortion is a bad thing shows they are not serious about reducing abortions.  They will oppose the ultrasound bill because like a salesman on a used car lot (a noble profession) who knows he or she will lose the sale if the buyer leaves the lot, Planned Parenthood and abortionists know that if women see an ultrasound, they'll lose the sale.  The woman will choose life.  They'll lose their money and the woman will "do harm" to herself by having the kid.   That's who they are and how they think. 

The determinism that they preach "your life is over if something unexpected like a baby comes along when you aren't 'ready'" is paralyzing.  But that's for another time. 

Pro-choice and undecided people will support the ultrasound bill, but not abortion advocates.

Umbilical Cord Stem Cells Help Children With Type 1 Diabetes

LifeNews.com is reporting that "Another study has been published showing that adult stem cell research has just as much potential, if not more, than embryonic stem cells to help patients with various diseases. In this cases, researchers at University of Florida founds that stem cells from umbilical cord blood helped children newly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes."

"The study found that stem cell transfusions using the adult stem cells helped the children reduce their disease severity, possibly re-setting the immune system and slowing the destruction of their insulin-producing cells." Click here to read more.

This is huge!  It's still experimental, but it shows how wrong embryonic stem cell advocates are to say that president Bush's veto of expanded embryonic stem cell funding for destruction of human embryos shatters hope for sufferers. 

Embryonic Stem Cell Research Is About Cloning

After President Bush's veto last week of an embryonic stem cell funding bill to destroy more human embryos, Molly Dillon of the Nevada Juvenile Diabetes Research said “this (embryonic stem cell research) has nothing to do with cloning…. This is about fertilized eggs from fertility clinics that would otherwise be thrown away as medical waste."

Embryonic Stem Cell Research is a cloning issue because even if the president caved to the powerful biotech industry, it is not likely that these embryos would create the kind of genetic diversity necessary for patient specific matches for mass cures.  Why proceed if there are no mass cures?

To create those genetic matches, researchers believe that cloning, using the same technique that created Dolly the Sheep (somatic cell nuclear transfer-or nuclear transfer), will be necessary to create embryos almost identical to the patient.  The cloned near identical twin would be destroyed for his or her stem cells in the hope that this near match will not be rejected.

This is also a woman's issue because cloning technology requires unfertilized eggs. Dolly the Sheep was created after the 276th attempt.  Even if cloning were to become much more efficient, it would require vast and enormous amounts of unfertilized eggs to create matches for the 100+ million Americans who could benefit.  This would involve hyper-ovulatory drugs and surgery to get the eggs.  Risks include infertility.

If women are not willing to be exploited for this kind of research and therapy-if it can work, researchers are likely to use rabbits or other animals for those eggs.

Non embryonic stem cell would not require any of this.

Embryonic Stem Cell Research Is A Right To Life Issue

In the wake of President Bush's veto of legislation that would have expanded funding for embryonic stem cell research and funded the destruction of human embryos,   Molly Dillon of the Nevada Juvenile Diabetes Research says "this (embryonic stem cell research) has nothing to do with cloning. This is about fertilized eggs from fertility clinics that would otherwise be thrown away as medical waste. It's not a right-to-life issue, it's a right-to-quality-of-life issue."

This is a right to life issue and it is about cloning.  Human embryonic stem cell research is wrong-as we noted in the same RGJ article, because "No human being is expendable for science or anything else." Embryonic stem cell research kills human embryos.  It doesn't matter how small human embryos are.  It doesn't matter that they are going to be thrown away or that some hypothetical good could come of it.  It is offensive and demeaning to human dignity to say that any human being is "medical waste."

That's because human beings have inherent ultimate value.  This ultimate value is intrinsic to us and woven into the fabric of our being.  It's not earned, achieved, nor grown into or gradually realized.  It does not depend on our size, our circumstances, being wanted or valued by others.  We are not expendable because our demise could benefit others.  Our ultimate infinite value belongs to us by our existence as human beings from the first moment of our existence.  Once anyone becomes expendable, everyone becomes negotiable.  There's no way to firewall the proposition that certain humans are expendable and keep it from ultimately impacting others. So this is a right to life issue. That makes it an ethical issue.   

Hopes NOT Shattered By Bush Veto

On June 20th, President Bush again vetoed legislation that would overturn his embryonic stem cell research policy.  Critics of the President's veto in Nevada say that this removes hope for sufferers.  These critics cannot be taken seriously. 

In an article in the Reno Gazette Journal, Bob Fulkerson of the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada said President Bush, "with the stroke of a pen, struck away the hopes and dreams" of cures for chronic illnesses.  “It's a shame (Bush) is kow-towing to a very small group instead of doing what's best for the American people suffering from chronic ailments.”  Mylan Hawkins, executive director of the Nevada Diabetes Association said, “We are deeply saddened that once again the hope for so many Americans who suffer with incurable conditions has been shattered.”  Planned Parenthood's Allison Gauldin told KOH that thinking that adult stem cells are superior is naive.

It is obvious to anyone with a little knowledge about the research that embryonic stem cell research is not the only hope-if it has any hope at all.  There is plenty of hope beyond embryonic stem cell research and embryonic stem cell research appears to show NO hope at all.  When the president announced his veto a woman who had her bladder replaced with one made from her own stem cells was standing with the president.  This month we learned that diabetic participants in a Brazilian study went off of insulin for long periods of time after being treated with their own stem cells.   Another woman Carol Franz; of Las Vegas was also with the president.  She has beaten cancer twice by using her own adult stem cells.  Who's naive?

You would think that people speaking for sufferers and working for relief and cures for their ailments would know that there are over 70 benefits for human sufferers through non embryonic and adult stem cells.  There are well over 1000 human trials.  There are no human embryonic stem cell benefits or trials.

There is also hope beyond stem cell research.  Two stories have appeared in the last few days that have nothing to do with any kind of stem cell research.  One concerns an experimental Parkinson’s trial using gene therapy.  The other is about a promising Alzheimer’s vaccine which attacks the plaque build up in the brain.  Those possibilities have nothing to do with stem cell research at all. 

It is utterly irresponsible and unconscionable to crush hopes of sufferers by telling them that if the President will not expand their preferred-and for many, their politically preferred-option, that they have no hope. 

We should expect that the people above would know about these things and understand that these are huge reasons for hope.   And critics should think twice before calling pro-life ideas naïve.  What is truly naive saying there is no hope after researchers began taking back their promises this summer.  Instead of cures, they are now talking about models for understanding disease.  That is a far cry from the miraculous cures that are said to be at our fingertips if the president would open the treasury to the special interests of the biotech lobby. 

We may cure many of the diseases that concern us most before embryonic stem cells ever get a human trial.  Embryonic stem cell advocates may not notice.

Rewriting History: The FOCA Findings, HR 1964:1

HR 1964, the Freedom for Partial Birth Abortionists Act… I mean the Freedom of Choice Act is a classic example of rewriting history.  For instance, finding 5 says:

(5) These decisions (Roe v. Wade, Griswold, Doe v. Bolton and etc)have protected the health and lives of women in the United States. Prior to the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, an estimated 1,200,000 women each year were forced to resort to illegal abortions, despite the risk of unsanitary conditions, incompetent treatment, infection, hemorrhage, disfiguration, and death. Before Roe, it is estimated that thousands of women died annually in the United States as a result of illegal abortions.

Give me a break.  If there were 1.2 million illegal abortions in unsanitary conditions per year before Roe, why did abortion go down to 750,000 abortions the year after Roe when those same doctors who let women in through the back alley were now legal?  There weren’t 1.2 million abortions per year until 1977.  There were probably 100-200,000 abortion a year, legal and illegal, in the years before Roe. 

Were those doctors incompetent back alley butchers?  That depends on when you ask abortion advocates.  That’s the mantra now, but in 1960 Planned Parenthood’s Mary Calderone noted that almost all illegal abortions were performed by licensed physicians in good standing.

What about the 5-10,000 women who were dying every year?  Didn't happen.  Bernard Nathanson one of the founders of NARAL writes,  "How many deaths were we talking about when abortion was illegal? In NARAL, we generally emphasized the frame of the individual case, not the mass statistics, but when we spoke of the latter it was always ‘5,000 to 10,000 deaths a year.’ I confess that I knew the figures were totally false, and I suppose the others did too if they stopped to think of it. But in the ‘morality’ of our revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics? The overriding concern was to get the laws eliminated, and anything within reason that had to be done was permissible." B. Nathanson, Aborting America, Doubleday, 1979, p. 193”

A thousand women a year died from abortion in the 40’s, but with the availability of antibiotics and improving trauma care, this was reduced to 39 deaths in 1972, the year before Roe. The findings are nonsense.

So Much For Choice-Abortion Advocates Are The New Totalitarians

Life News.com is reporting that "Abortion advocates in Congress have introduced new legislation that would force pharmacists across the country to dispense birth control and the morning after pill, which can cause an abortion in some instances. Under the bill, pharmacists who decline to dispense such drugs could be required to pay as much as $500,000 in fines."

So much for choice.  The mantra of choice is a fraud.  They never meant it anyway.  Don't agree with abortion advocates' choice, then you can pay.  $500,000 in fines.  These people are the new totalitarians.

What's next?  If you are a pharmacist and don't fill a prescription for suicide, or a doctor and don't want to do an abortion, or a Catholic heath network and you don't want to provide coverage against your morals-I forgot, they already are forced to do that in California, you will pay fines for that too?

In Nevada, abortion advocates wanted to fine pharmacists $10,000 and take away their licenses.  One pharmacist I spoke with in rural NV was the only pharmacist serving many thousands of people.  He said he'd leave the state and he thought no one would come to take his place, especially with the national pharmacist shortage.  But who cares about the needs of those thousands of Nevadans?  Abortion advocates want what they want when and how they want it.