Cloning obfuscation in the media

Now that cloning is back in the media again, the media is once again demonstrating their ignorance of the science, or blatant attempt to pull the wool over the public’s eyes about what is really being done in the lab.  They either:

1. Leave out the fact that what is produced is a human embryo (going straight from enucleated egg with the nucleus of an adult cell, directly to stem cells)
2. Or they admit that an embryo is created, but claim it’s not a human being
3. Or they deny that the embryo is a human clone (redefining human clone to refer to a cloned human who is allowed to be born. 

They are leaving out important details, and redefining scientific words to fit their purposes.  It’s all rhetoric and propaganda, and obfuscates the science and biology behind it. 

For the last time: somatic cell nuclear transfer does not produce embryonic stem cells.  It creates a human clone, and that human produces stem cells.  To extract the stem cells, the human clone must be killed! 

Wesley J. Smith has some nice posts demonstrating how the mainstream media continues to get it wrong: 

• Let the Cloning Obfuscation Begin
• Cloning Obfuscation 2
• Human Cloning Obfuscation 3
• Human Cloning Obfuscation 4

 

Humans have been cloned for the first time

Shoukhrat Mitalipov, of Oregon Health & Science University

Researchers at The Oregon Health & Science University have just announced in Cell that they successfully cloned 21 humans, and then killed them to extract their stem cells at the blastocyst stage (although they didn’t describe it as “killing”).  This is the first time stem cells have ever been derived from a human clone.  

Welcome to the brave new world of cloning.

 

HT: Wesley J. Smith

 

Vermont legalized assisted suicide

On Monday, the Vermont House approved a bill to legalize assisted suicide in the state by a vote of 75-65 (the VT Senate passed it previously by a vote of 17-13).  The governor supported the bill and will surely sign it, making VT the 4^th state in the nation to legalize assisted suicide.  

There’s nothing like sending a message to the most vulnerable people among us that we think their lives are of such little value that they can be disposed of at will.  Our moral decline continues….

 

HT: Wesley J. Smith

 

Adult stem cells used to build new windpipe…and other medical successes

I haven’t been reporting on stem cell research lately, but there has continued to be a flurry of advances in the field.  None of them, however, involve embryonic stem cell research.  All of them involve adult stem cells, cord blood stem cells, or induced pluripotent stem cells (adult cells reprogrammed back to an embryonic state). 

The latest advance was announced earlier this month.  Scientists extracted stem cells from a two year old girl’s bone marrow and created a new windpipe with it in less than a week.  Growing one organ from the cells of another body part is truly astonishing work!  

Here are some other recent medical advances in non-embryonic stem cell research that I have not reported on: 

 

Russia: 13 abortions for every 10 live births

Russia is experiencing a population problem.  Putin has hired Boyz II Men ahead of Valentine’s Day to get the Russians in the mood for baby-making!  As Daniel Halper at The Weekly Standard quipped, he should have hired a pro-life organization instead.  In Russia, for every 10 babies born 13 more are aborted.  That is a staggeringly high abortion rate (for comparison, in the U.S. “only” 2.5 babies are aborted for every 10 babies born).  More babies are killed than born!

Russia will never fix its population problem until it fixes its culture of death that devalues unborn human life.

 

Abortion: A life worth sacrificing

Mary Elizabeth Williams recently wrote at Salon that

when we try to act like a pregnancy doesn’t involve human life, we wind up drawing stupid semantic lines in the sand: first trimester abortion vs. second trimester vs. late term, dancing around the issue trying to decide if there’s a single magic moment when a fetus becomes a person. Are you human only when you’re born? Only when you’re viable outside of the womb? Are you less of a human life when you look like a tadpole than when you can suck on your thumb? … It seems absurd to suggest that the only thing that makes us fully human is the short ride out of some lady’s vagina. That distinction may apply neatly legally, but philosophically, surely we can do better.

If you are cheering on Ms. Williams as an articulate pro-life apologist, you would be mistaken.  She is a card-carrying member in the pro-abortion cause.  What makes her rather unique among her peers is that she admits “life begins at conception,” and yet also fully supports a woman’s right to kill that human being because “all life is not equal.”

 

Abortion and the pro-life movement prior to Roe

Daniel Williams has written a nice piece on how Roe v. Wade affected the pro-life movement.  While many think that Roe gave rise to a substantive pro-life movement, this is not true to history.  Williams notes the following facts:

• The pro-life movement witnessed a string of legislative victories to curtail or outlaw abortion in 1971 and 1972.  They defeated abortion bills in all 25 states who considered them in 1971.  In 1972, voters defeated abortion initiatives in MI and ND by large margins.
• Abortion became legal in CA and CO in 1967.
• In 1970, four states legalized abortion for virtually any reason up to the 20^th or 24^th week of pregnancy
• There were 586,760 abortions in 1972, the year before Roe was decided. In 1973, the number of legal abortions rose 28% to 750,000.  By 1980 the number reached 1.5 million.
• When Roe was decided, 19 states permitted abortion, and 4 of those 19 allowed abortion-on-demand.
• White women used to constitute the majority of those obtaining abortion (75% in 1973), but now poor, minority women constitute the majority (55% in 2008).
• Several courts had recognized the unborn to be persons prior to Roe declaring this to be a wrong reading of the Constitution.

 

Healthy Twin Brothers Euthanized in Belgium

Twin brothers were recently euthanized in Belgium.  The two unidentified men – who appear to be in their 40s – were born deaf, and have spent their entire lives together.  When informed that they were both going blind, they decided to end their lives because they couldn’t bear the thought of not seeing one another again.

Belgium euthanizes 1% of the population every year.  What makes this brother-duo unique is that they were not terminally ill, nor were they experiencing any physical suffering.  They simply did not want to live with the quality of life they would be forced to live under, so they found a doctor to kill them before that day arrived.

Let this be a sounding alarm.  Euthanasia is not yet legal in this country, and only Oregon and Washington allow for physician-assisted suicide.  But there continues to be a big push for the legalization of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia, and it is gaining momentum throughout the Western world.  Those who push for its legalization always tell the public that the legal option for suicide will only be reserved for the terminally ill who are experiencing agonizing pain at the end of their lives.  But that’s just the selling point.  Once a society buys into that line, the pro-death community always goes for the upsell.  Their ultimate goal is death-on-demand.

 

Nevada judge may force girl to have abortion and undergo sterilization

This is crazy.  A mentally handicapped women is pregnant.  While both she and her parents want to give birth the baby and give it up for adoption (6 couples are already waiting to adopt the baby), a judge is considering forcing her to have an abortion and undergo sterilization.  Outrageous!

 

Abortion matters little in people’s political choices

In my opinion, abortion is the greatest moral issue of our day.  Nothing is more unjust than depriving innocent human beings of their God-given, inalienable right to life simply because we are inconvenienced by them.  For that reason, the issue of abortion figures prominently in my political affiliations and the way I vote.  While I am not a one-issue voter, and while I do not think it is always wrong to vote for a pro-choice political candidate (there are some political offices for which one’s personal views on abortion are irrelevant on a practical level), I will almost always vote for the pro-life candidate even if I have fundamental disagreements with him on other matters.  It’s not that I think economic issues do not matter, or that foreign policy does not matter, but that I think the moral injustice of abortion is much more important than these others. 

That is why I was disheartened to read the results of two polls which sought to determine what voters think the most important issues are when choosing the candidates they will give their vote to.  

 

Defining abortion: dictionaries get it wrong

While dialoguing with a friend on the topic of abortion, I was asked how I define abortion.  After communicating my own definition of abortion, I thought it would be interesting to see how various dictionaries define it.  Needless to say, I was amazed at how inaccurate and politically correct the definitions were.  Here are a few: 

Dictionary.com
Abortion:

1. The removal of an embryo or fetus from the uterus in order to end a pregnancy.
2. Any of various surgical methods for terminating a pregnancy, especially during the first six months.

Interestingly, there is no mention of the fate of the unborn baby.  Instead, the focus is on the “pregnancy” and terminating that pregnancy.  

The first six months?  How is that relevant to the definition?  If a child is killed in utero at seven months, that is also called an abortion.  

 

How Statistics Can be Manipulated: Euthanasia in the Netherlands – 2.8% or 28%

Wesley J. Smith wrote about the most recent statistics available on the number of deaths caused by euthanasia in the Netherlands.  The official report as reported in the Lancet notes that only 2.8% of all deaths in the Netherlands were the result of euthanasia.  The truth is about a decimal point off, however, and Smith explains why.

First, the report also notes that only 77% of all cases of euthanasia were reported to a review committee.  That means 23% of deaths by euthanasia were not reported, raising the total number to 3.5%.  But this leaves out the deaths involving terminal sedation, which is nothing more than “slow motion euthanasia.”  The practice of terminal sedation involves sedating a person to the point of unconsciousness, and then depriving them of food and water until they die.  In 2012 a full 12.3% of people were killed this way!  Since approximately 2% of people are so close to death when they receive terminal sedation that they die of their disease before they die of dehydration, we can reduce this number to approximately 10%.  That means that nearly 14% of deaths in the Netherlands are caused by doctors actively killing the patients.

It gets worse.  The 14% figure is based on the total number of deaths.  Given the fact that approximately half of all deaths do not involve end-of-life medical decisions (accidents, heart attacks), the reality is that approximately 28% of all deaths involving end-of-life decision making are the result of intentional killing by the medical community!  Of course, the headline “28% of deaths involving end-of-life medical care caused by suicide at the hands of doctors!” doesn’t sound nearly as good as “Only 2.8% of Dutch die by euthanasia.”  You’ve got to be careful when it comes to stats.  If you’re not careful, they (stats and Dutch doctors) will kill you.

 

Medical Ethicist advocates dehydrating demented patients to cause their death

A former professor of medical ethics and former chairman of the Institute of Medical Ethics in Britain, Raanan Gillon, wrote an editorial in the British Medical Journal lambasting a judicial ruling that gave pre-eminence to the sanctity of life.  Gillon argues that given scant medical resources, physicians should be allowed to withdraw treatment from stable, but minimally conscious patients suffering from severe dementia in order to cause their premature death.  

Yes, this is a preeminent bioethicist.  The field has become overrun with utilitarians who espouse views that are anything but ethical.

 

Theism is Required for Objective Human Value

What makes humans valuable?  There are only two options: something inherent within the nature of humans themselves (intrinsic) or something acquired by humans (extrinsic).  Things that are valuable in and of themselves for the sake of themselves have intrinsic value (love, friendship, health, happiness, virtue, etc.).  Things that are valued for their function – what they do for us or how they allow us to obtain an intrinsic good (money) – have extrinsic value.   

When it comes to bioethics, the great divide is between those who think human value is extrinsic (and many would add, subjective) and those who think human value is intrinsic and objective.  Put another way, bioethicists are divided between the liberals who think human value is based on doing (extrinsic value) and conservatives who think human value is based on being (intrinsic value).  Whereas liberals only value the functional expression of certain human capacities, conservatives value the being who possesses those innate capacities whether they are being expressed or not.

 

Skin cells converted into heart cells

Adult stem cell research has been booming.  There are so many advances that it is hard to keep up.  Just recently researchers were able to take adult human skin cells, convert them back to an embryonic state, and then with a string of chemical cocktails convert them into heart cells that were capable of being transplanted into rats.  While not yet ready for human trials, this is a major milestone that may one day give real hope to those who have suffered heart attacks.

 

HT: Wesley J. Smith

 

New York Magazine: “A Life Worth Ending”

The cover story for New York Magazine’s May 28th issue is titled “A Life Worth Ending.”  The author, Michael Wolff, “argues” for the voluntary euthanizing of the sick and elderly—not a rational argument, but an appeal to our emotions, our finances, and our hatred of being inconvenienced.   

Most of the article is taken up with the story of Wolff’s mother who is suffering from dementia, seizures, and a host of other debilitating health issues.  While no human could read his mother’s story without feeling a strong sense of compassion and empathy for both what his mother has endured as well as her family, his proposal is chilling: kill.  Here are some of the most provocative excerpts:

 

Pro-life vs. pro-choice in America

Gallupreleased the results of their annual abortion questionnaire yesterday.  Since 1995 they have been asking Americans whether they identify as “pro-life” or “pro-choice.”  When they asked the question in 1995, 56% of Americans considered themselves pro-choice and 33% pro-life.  In 2012 the situation is nearly reversed with 50% identifying as pro-life and 41% as pro-choice. 

Often in questionnaires about abortion people’s true positions get blurred by the legal vs. moral distinction.  For example, someone may be opposed to abortion morally, but think people should have a legal right to an abortion.  Such a person could rightly identify as either pro-choice or pro-life.  To truly gauge people’s views on abortion we need to separate the legal question from the moral question. Gallupdid just that, asking people what they thought of the morality of abortion, apart from whether or not they think it should be legal.  The result was 51% saying they thought abortion was morally wrong, while only 38% thought it was morally acceptable. 

 

 

Opposed to abortion? Your politics may say otherwise.

It’s 1856.  The American presidential race is on.  What would you say to me if I told you that I am opposed to slavery, but was prepared to vote for a political candidate who personally supported it, or who was part of a political party whose platform included support for it?

While there would be no reason to question the sincerity of my personal belief/position, one would be thoroughly justified in questioning the level of my concern and the propriety of my political priorities.  If candidates’ economic and foreign policy was more influential in determining my vote, then slavery ranks low on my totem poll of priorities.  While I say I am morally outraged that society would permit the use of human beings as property, my political choices indicate that my concerns lie elsewhere.  After all, how could one be genuinely concerned for the welfare of African Americans while at the same time supporting political parties and political candidates whose platform includes the enslavement of African Americans?

 

Bioethicists Advocate “After-Birth Abortions” = Infanticide

Bioethics is a strange field.  Not only are there no objective qualifications for being a bioethicist, but one need not even hold views that are deemed ethical by most morally sane people.  Indeed, it seems that the field of bioethics consists primarily of liberals who hold to a utilitarian philosophy of ethics in which almost everything is permissible.  That is why you can have bioethicists advocating infanticide in respectable bioethics journals like the Journal of Medical Ethics.  Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva wrote an article for the journal titled “After-birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?”[1] that appeared online February 23, 2012.

The abstract reads:

Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus’ health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

While I disagree vehemently with their reasoning and conclusion, this is where the arguments for abortion logically lead one to.  The authors recognize that birth is a trivial and subjective dividing line for determining who is valuable and who is not; who can be killed and who cannot.

HT: Wesley Smith

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[1]J Med Ethics doi:10.1136/medethics-2011-100411.

 

Scott Klusendorf Addresses Abortion Questions

Scott Klusendorf is the best pro-life apologist out there.  No one can say as much as Scott can say in as little space and as eloquently as he can.  He wrote an essay for the Christian Research Journal addressing five questions often asked of pro-life advocates and the pro-life movement:

1. Are pro-life advocates focused too narrowly on abortion? After all, informed voters consider many issues, not just one.
2. Why don’t pro-life advocates care about social justice both here and in developing countries?
3. Why don’t pro-lifers oppose war like they do abortion?
4. Instead of passing laws against abortion, shouldn’t pro-life Christians focus on reducing its underlying causes?
5. Should pastors challenge church members who support a political party sworn to protect elective abortion?

It’s worth checking out his answers.  It is not a long piece, and he provides some great answers to ponder.