Pro-life

Pro-life groups are protesting the new Planned Parenthood clinic that tried to disguise itself by getting building permits in the name of the Gemini Health Center. Though deception is just part of the territory when it comes to Planned Parenthood in the first place.

"The anti-choice extremists have started already with a fairly consistent presence [at the Aurora site] — not a big presence, but they started their 40-day vigil," she said by phone. "We’ve started getting phone calls from people asking, ‘Are you going to do something?’ The pro-choice side needs to be visible."

Planned Parenthood said in a statement that it offers a bulwark against sexually transmitted diseases and other health problems that are growing in DuPage, Kane, Kendall and Will Counties. Steve Trombley, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood/Chicago Area, said that more than 90 percent of its services have to do with reproductive health care, not abortion, and that the clinic is opening because of local demand.

So people praying for 40 days in front of an abortion clinic is the new extremism. Yes a 40 day vigil must be countered – maybe they will start an anti-vigil to Moloch.

Their second argument is even stranger. "Only ten percent of the food I serve contains cyanide" would not be an effective argument for a restaurant.

While people can differ on abortion, the place to debate is not in front of clinics, Trombley said.

"The place to have that argument is in the legislature and in the courts," he said. "And we think that holds true for both sides of that debate."

In that case how dare he debate in a newspaper article instead of the legislature and the courts. I wonder if he would have told Rosa Parks to take her case to the legislature instead?

Boston Globe on"doctor work arounds" regarding partial birth abortions.

In response to the Supreme Court decision upholding the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, many abortion providers in Boston and around the country have adopted a defensive tactic. To avoid any chance of partially delivering a live fetus, they are injecting fetuses with lethal drugs before procedures.

…The injections are generally done in abortions after 18 or 20 weeks gestation. (Massachusetts bans virtually all abortions at and beyond the 24th week, except to protect the life or health of the mother.) Medical staff inject either the heart drug digoxin or potassium chloride, a potentially poisonous salt also used in state executions.

NRO has an email from a lawyer who does criminal trails and is familiar with potassium chloride.

Wowsa. I have done some litigation in the area of lethal injection, and potassium chloride is typically the third drug used in the "three drug cocktail" most states use when they execution someone. It is a painful, painful drug that stops the heart. To mitigate that pain for prisoners, states give them sodium thiopental, which is a short-acting barbituate, then pancuronium bromide, which acts as a paralyzing agent, THEN they give the potassium chloride. It would be extremely painful for a prisoner to have an injection of potassium chloride alone. It stuns me that that’s what they’re using to kill these babies in utero.

This just shows how the creativity of the Culture of Death is of course all ordered towards death.
If only we had an appeals process for the unborn, especially one that lasted at least nine months.

This also shows the total inconsistencies of our laws since the method of how a baby was killed was outlawed, but another and even more painful method remains legal.

Red State

PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania, JULY 29, 2007 (Zenit.org).- A prominent bioethicist says he hopes that the closure of ES Cell International, a leading embryonic stem cell research facility, is a sign of growing realism.

Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk commented on the closure of the biotechnology firm in Singapore, telling ZENIT, "We can only hope that a certain realism may finally be sinking in, as Wall Street types recognize that the timeline for clinical therapies is likely to be quite long."

The firm closed when investors concluded that "the likelihood of having products in the clinic in the short term was vanishingly small," Alan Colman, former chief executive of ES Cell International, told Science magazine…

	Jester Hat Tip:	A.M.D.G.

As A.M.D.G. comments we hope this is a trend, but surely ESCR advocates will only put more pressure on state and federal governments here and the U.S. and governments throughout the world to fund this research. Too bad it was economics not ethics that lead to this. Unfortunately neither ethics or economics are deterrents to governments.

… strange bedfellows.

is "a dangerous new initiative" according to Planned Parenthood Golden Gate as caught by Dawn Eden.

There has been much comment about how some people are surprised about the number of doctors in the Jihadist plot in Britain and Scotland. They wonder how doctors could be involved in something like this. I wonder where they have been for the last 40 years?

These Jihadis’ aren’t that sharp. If these Jihadi docs really wanted to kill many innocent lives they could have simply become abortion docs. They could have killed many more people over their lifetime, get paid for it, and the police would even protect them from people wanting to stop them. Abortionist have been doing cultural terrorism for quite a while and they even have politicians fighting for them.

History repeated itself today when President Bush vetoed legislation for the second time that would authorize federal funding of embryonic stem cell research — and is likely to repeat itself again in the coming days when Congress fails to override the veto.

But even as Bush digs in on his position that taxpayers shouldn’t be asked to pay for the destruction of human life in the form of days-old embryos, bipartisan proponents of embryonic research pledged to force Congress to vote on the issue again and again — until they get a veto-proof two-thirds margin in both houses of Congress or until Bush leaves office.

Well considering that there were slightly less votes this time around they are not exactly going in the direction of a veto-proof two-thirds margins. They know this is a waste of time, but so did pro-lifers under President Clinton who twice vetoed the partial birth abortion ban. Interesting to compare the presidential vetoes where one was in support of virtual-infanticide and the other protecting the most innocent of life at the very beginning of human life.

Federal funding of stem cell research looms as a major issue in the 2008 presidential campaign. All the Democratic candidates support lifting Bush’s ban on expanding stem cell research and the leading Democratic contenders, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, quickly condemned Bush’s veto and pledged to encourage embryonic research if they are elected.

Two of the leading Republican candidates, Sen. John McCain of Arizona and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani also have said they’d lift the president’s ban on federal money for embryonic research.

Updated: I removed my comments about Giuliani’s and McCain support for ESCR since I was mistaken about McCain’s support.

The Coalition for Life has created a thirty minute program that explores pro-life activism called beingHUMAN. This video will be playing on EWTN and some satellite networks. You can go here for a YouTube preview and stations/times it will be presented.

Bishop Serratelli on pro-abortion Catholics and the statement by 18 Catholic Democrats.

…The Church teaches that the right to life is fundamental. Without life, there are no other rights. To support abortion is a grave moral evil. Why would a Catholic be surprised when the Pope says that anyone who freely and knowingly commits a serious wrong, that is, a mortal sin, should not approach the Eucharist until going to Confession? The Eucharist is the summit and source of the Church’s life. The Church guides the faithful in the correct formation of their conscience. She offers both the objective norms of morality and the norms for worthy reception of the Eucharist.

In his response to the reporter’s question, the Pope was not placing religious sanctions in the political arena, as these politicians stated. He was teaching religious doctrine in a religious context, that is, the worthiness to receive the Eucharist, the Body of Christ, who is the Lord of life. He is right when he insists that supporting abortion is incompatible with the reception of Holy Communion.

In recent guidelines provided by the bishops of the United States to help Catholics to prepare for the worthy reception of Holy Communion, the bishops said, “If a Catholic in his or her personal or professional life were knowingly and obstinately to reject the defined doctrines of the Church, or knowingly and obstinately to repudiate her definitive teaching on moral issues, however, he or she would seriously diminish his or her Communion with the Church. Reception of Holy Communion in such a situation would not accord with the nature of the Eucharistic celebration, so that he or she should refrain” (Happy Are Those Who Are Called to His Supper, 4). By steadfastly choosing to be pro-choice, a Catholic — politician or not — excludes himself or herself from communion.

Today not only is the taking of so many innocent lives alarming, but no less unsettling is the darkening of conscience among so many who find “it increasingly difficult to distinguish between good and evil in what concerns the basic value of human life” (Evangelium Vitae, 4).

Why should the Church not have a right to voice her teaching on this important issue in the public square? She must speak and speak often. Abortion may be for some just a political issue. But, for the innocent child, it is a matter of life or death.

Ultimately, the statement of the 18 politicians who publicly blasted the Holy Father is simply a refusal to allow the Pope freedom of speech and the Church freedom of religion. Now how American is that?

His Awesomness (not a formal ecclesiastical title) Cardinal Pell in reference to politicians voting for ESCR.

“Some seemed to suggest that while a football club, a political party or a business certainly could in some circumstances sack or exclude a member or employee, it was totally out of order to suggest a Christian Church might even consider a similar possibility,” said the cardinal.

“A few intolerant politicians want to ban religious argument in public life, so that the only permissible reasoning will be irreligious or anti-religious,” he observed.

The cardinal said the debate also raised questions about what it means to be a Catholic.

“A Catholic is someone who believes Christ is Son of God, accepts His teachings and lives a life of worship, service and duty in the Catholic community,” he explained. “Catholics are not created by the accident of birth to remain only because their tribe has an interesting history.”

“All Catholics who continue to reject important Catholic teachings, even in areas such as sexuality, family, marriage, abortion, euthanasia, cloning where “liberals” claim the primacy of conscience rules, should expect to be confronted, gently and consistently, rather than comforted and encouraged in their wrongdoing,” he continued.

The cardinal concluded by saying that every Catholic politician who voted recently in favor of the cloning bill “should think twice and examine his or her conscience before next receiving Communion.”

I love the reference to Tribal Catholicism, as Mark Shea calls it, by the Cardinal and his mentioning that those using primacy as a conscience as a dodge should expect to be "confronted, gently and consistently."

Not a good idea to try to use conscience with Cardinal Pell who has written extensively on the subject such as this First Things article: The Inconvenient Conscience.

The key is that if your examination of conscience is shorter that the transition between two energy levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom you are only echoing your will and not evaluating the message from an informed conscience.