Human Life Matters

MARK DAVIS PICKUP ON "THE BATTLES OF IDEAS"

2012-05-29T09:59:00.000-07:00

Mark Davis Pickup

"... If we lose the cultural war against abortion, millions more children will die along with our culture that once believed we all have value." -- Mark Davis Pickup's latest post under the title The Battles of Ideas. Read the rest at http://markpickup.org

ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF LIBERAL MEDIA BIAS

2012-05-23T12:55:00.003-07:00

On May 17th a record setting crowd of 1,400 citizens assembled at the Alberta Legislature (Edmonton, Canada) for the 2012 Alberta March for Life. From the Legislature, they marched through streets of Edmonton (the Capital city) with pro-Life signs, interrupting the flow of traffic, while proclaiming the value of all human life. They protested the wanton killing of 10,000 unborn children annually at Alberta's two abortuaries -- and Alberta hospitals when abortions involve later stage unborn children. The marchers decried euthanasia that is quietly practised in hospitals, and the rising acceptance of assisted suicide.[1]

Shhhh!

There was a virtual blackout in mainstream news coverage. Most Edmontonians who rely on the media to keep them informed would have been ignorant of the large event that occurred. Thankfully, with the advent of the Internet, the traditional liberal press no longer have a strangle hold on mass dissemination of information.

There was some coverage by the online pro-Life news outlet LifeSiteNews. See http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/alberta-march-for-life-breaks-attendance-record?utm_source=LifeSiteNews.com+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=5e516a554d-LifeSiteNews_com_Canada_Headlines_05_22_2012&utm_medium=email

SELECTIVE NEWS COVERAGE

If a dozen people show up at the Alberta Legislature to protest Alberta's oilsands -- it's the lead story on the evening TV news and on the front page of the Edmonton Journal newspaper the next morning. If five transgenders protest on the steps of the same Legislature because they want their sex change surgery paid for by the government, it gets wall-to-wall news coverage. But well over a thousand people protest the killing of unborn children by abortion or withholding food and water from the terminally or chronically ill ... and there's not a word by the liberal media. Silence. It's as though it did not happen. Shhhh.

The worst case of this sort of media censorship of the pro-Life message that I remember occurred in the early1980s when an estimated 25,000 citizens silently marched past Henry Morgentaler's Toronto abortion clinic, to protest the wanton killing of unborn children at that terrible place.[2] There was a blackout of the story by the media. Such a massive demonstration and it went virtually unreported by the media! Coincidence? I think not. The event was hard to miss -- particularly with press releases that went out beforehand. The censorship by the media was intentional.

Do not think this sort of bias and dishonest journalism is unique to Alberta or Ontario. It goes on in many jurisdictions. Liberal news organizations decide what they report and how they report in an attempt to sway public opinion toward liberal causes.

More than a decade ago, retired CBS reporter Bernard Goldberg wrote a book called Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How The Media Distorts The News. Goldberg was roundly castigated by his media colleagues for exposing what the public already knew. The media has a liberal bias. The book description on Amazon.com states:

"In 1996, veteran CBS News reporter and producer Bernie Goldberg committed the unpardonable sin of publicly mentioning the issue of liberal bias in the media. For that he became persona non grata at CBS. Goldberg tells how friends and colleagues turned on him, from junior CBS reporters all the way to Dan Rather. But much more than that, he exposes a bias so uniform and overwhelming that it permeates every news story we hear and read- and so entrenched and deep rooted that the networks themselves don't even recognize it."[2]

Nearly 40 years ago, I studied radio and television in college. I would have been failed for some of the antics that pass for news now. Later I worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation CBC). Internally their left-wing politics were obvious and it coloured their news and current affairs. Publicly they would not admit it but it was there. This was particularly blatant when it came to stories related to abortion. When doing a story about this topic they would try to ensure they interviewed the most inarticulate pro-Life people and get the most articulate abortion advocates. (It's called stacking the deck.) I remember on one occasion when an abortion story was in the news, the entire news room broke into a chant "Choice now! Choice now!" I thought to myself, "Is it even possible at the CBC to strive for balance?" On another occasion during the morning story meeting after a new provincial Cabinet was announced, the news producer was looking at the list of new Cabinet ministers and asked "Who is John Oldring?" The news anchor said, "He's an [expletive] pro-lifer! Let's get him!" I was new to the news team and asked, "I thought we supposed to be balanced and unbiased." The producer looked at me like I was from a different planet and mumbled something to this effect with a smirk and a wink to the rest of the people in the meeting. "Oh Yeah, we do that." They went on to try and "get" the pro-Life politician.

If you think this is all long in the past, watch how CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC and the New York Times cover the the presidential election and the months leading up to the election day in November.

Mark Davis Pickup
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[1] I spoke to the crowd (see previous blog entitled THEY ASKED FOR A SPEECH).
[2] Police estimate of the crowd size, not organizers.
[3] See Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/Bias-Insider-Exposes-Media-Distort/dp/0895261901

A PROPOSED MOTTO FOR BIOETHICS

2012-05-21T19:33:00.002-07:00

It is so important that we commit ourselves as individuals, families, communities and nations to ensuring no human life is destroyed, left behind or abandoned. To give in and give up on any human being is an offence against the interdependence of collective community. Granted, we can not govern the outcome of every situation but we can govern how we respond to each situation.

Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson said something about the purpose of government that could/should be adapted to govern bioethics.

I would like to see the following motto be adopted for the study and practice of bioethics at every university and hospital then posted on all bioethicists' office walls:

The care and protection of human life, and not its destruction, is the only legitimate role of bioethics. [1]

Mark Davis Pickup

______________________-
[1] The quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson: "The care of human life and happiness, and not its destruction, is the first and only object of good government."

THEY ASKED FOR A SPEECH

2012-05-18T08:25:00.002-07:00

Add caption

I was asked to give a short message to over a thousand people gathered in front of Alberta's legislature (Canada) for the annual March for Life. Below is the substance of that message.

Mark Davis Pickup
May 18th 2012

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VALUE ALL HUMAN LIFE

To value every human life from conception to natural death – and every state and stage between those two points – is what it means to be truly pro-Life. It is the ideal behind the concept of universal human rights. That’s what the word “universal” means. The right to life is the highest human right. If the right to life is not guaranteed and protected then all other rights become arbitrary and uncertain. They can be taken away with the stroke of a legislative pen.

That’s why it’s so important that you are here today. If you won’t take time out of your busy schedules to make a statement for life’s value for vulnerable humanity like the unborn or flawed people like me then pray tell, who will?

I hear talk of death with dignity for the terminally and chronically ill and the disabled. Dying with dignity is not achieved by injecting poison into a person’s blood stream when they are at their lowest point or withholding food and water from them. That is not dignity, that is abandonment of a most profound nature. Dying with dignity is not an event, it is a process. It is the end result of having lived with dignity.

People who espouse euthanasia or assisted suicide throw around the phrase "quality of life". They see a disability and say they wouldn’t want to live like that. So what! I don’t want to live like this either [in an electric wheelchair] but that does not mean I’m better off dead. After more than 28 years with degenerative multiple sclerosis I have come to understand that quality of life changes with time. When I was 30 years old what gave my life quality was to be active and athletic and to have an upwardly mobile career. If you would have told me that my future would be in an electric wheelchair with only one limb unaffected by disease I would have said there is no quality of life in that kind of existence. Well, now I am 59 years of age and in an electric wheelchair. My life has quality. Why? My definition of quality of life changed. What gives my life quality today is love: To love and to be loved.

LaRee

You see, during my darkest times when I was sinking beneath the wave of my circumstances, my wife LaRee held me up as valuable – even when I lost sight of my own value. She loved me even when I was not very lovable. She walked with me through my deepest grief and anguish (just as she has done with so many other people). The old Mark was gone as surely as if he had died, but she encouraged a new Mark to emerge from the shadows of grief and be as vital as the old Mark.

I have five grandchildren who love me and I love them. They bring LaRee and me so much joy. If I had opted for assisted suicide when I was at my lowest point during my mid-thirties, l would have missed it. You see, we do not know what blessings tomorrow may bring.

I want to thank you again for coming out today. You have not forgotten the weakest and most vulnerable whether they are the unborn, the sick or the disabled. You are our friends and a world that has abandoned the sanctity of human life ethic: We need as many friends as we can get. Please do not tire or grow weary of participating events like this. You never know whose heart you have changed (even the hearts of politicians who are squirreled away in the safety of the building behind me).

Always keep close to your heart the value of every human being regardless of their ability or sentience. Every life has immeasurable worth for no other reason than they all bear the indelible image of God.

IN THE WORDS OF RONALD REAGAN

2012-05-16T19:40:00.003-07:00

Most readers of the HumanLifeMatters blog are American. Although I am Canadian, I have an abiding love and respect for my neighbours to the south.

I fear for America. A new liberal elitism is emerging that threatens the very institutions, mores, values and religion that made the United States great. America has been a beacon to the world for human liberty, equality, justice and freedom. These bedrock foundations of American society are being dangerously eroded. Liberty is not licence. Freedom without moral restraint or a consensus of community standards is chaos. Communities worth belonging to protect their weakest and most vulnerable.

America needs another President like Ronald Reagan. He could bring out the best in the American people and rediscover virtue and goodness for which America is known. Great leaders of his calibre are needed for times like these.

Although the great man is gone, he can still speak to Americans (and the world) about a moral crisis that symbolizes the selfishness and moral poverty of our age: the holocaust of abortion. Thanks to YouTube, Ronald Reagan`s still speaks to us. His message must be heard again! Perhaps if we turn from the evil of abortion and turn back to God, our nations may experience His blessing anew and not judgment.

I ask every person who loves America to listen to Ronald Reagan again. At the time he said these words there had been 15 million abortions in America since Roe V. Wade. The number now exceeds 55 million abortions! Click on the image below.

Mark Davis Pickup

INCREASINGLY AMERICA'S YOUNG PEOPLE REJECT ABORTION

2012-05-10T20:39:00.003-07:00

Mark Davis Pickup

The last blog entry "When The Law Is An Ass" was about Canada's shameful Criminal Code that states a baby is not a human being until fully born. Prenatal life is unprotected throughout throughout all nine months of pregnancy! Abortions are tax funded in Canada. The situation is horrendous and intolerable!

Carol Tobias

Meanwhile things are slowly changing in America. Most American young people are rejecting the abortion mindset -- to the dismay of aging abortion ideologues from their parents' generation. National Right To Life Committee President Carol Tobias recently addressed this phenomenon in an open letter. Below is the text of. her letter.

MDP

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Dear Friends:

In an exclusive interview with the Washington Post’s Sarah Kliff released tonight, NARAL President Nancy Keenan announced that she would be stepping down from her post at the end of the year.

Kliff writes in her story:

In recent years, Keenan has worried about an ‘intensity gap’ on abortion rights among millennials, which the group considers to be the generation of Americans born between 1980 and 1991. While most young, antiabortion voters see abortion as a crucial political issue, NARAL’s own internal research does not find similar passion among abortion-rights supporters.

In other words, Nancy Keenan’s conclusion is something we have known for years: the post-Roe generations are pro-life – and more passionately so than their parents’ generations and their pro-abortion, post-Roe counterparts.

We know from Gallup that 61% of the country believes abortion should be illegal in all circumstances or legal only in a few circumstances. We know from Gallup that 45% of the country self-identifies as pro-life. We know from Gallup that 51% of Americans believe abortion is morally wrong. And we know that when those questions are asked of the post-Roe generation, the numbers tend to skew higher.

More important, I know that none of this would even be possible without you and the work you do with National Right to Life and our nationwide network of state affiliates and local chapters. Every day you are educating your communities, touching hearts and changing minds. Every day, you are helping us make a difference for the most defenseless members of our society.

Look back to 2003 when the New York Times Magazine quoted David J. Garrow, a hard-core pro-abortion "legal historian" at Emory University, as stating, “There’s been so much media attention over the last seven to eight years on partial-birth abortion, we shouldn't be surprised that some of it has had an effect on 12-to-14-year-olds, and it is a public relations coup for the National Right to Life Committee."

The other side has noticed. And they’re “worried.”

Keep up the great work. Together we will win…for their lives.

Carol Tobias

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I have been praying for years that young people would reject the abortion corruption that is the dark legacy of their parents generation. Perhaps I may yet see Roe V. Wade overturned and the United States of America emerge into the sunny warmth of a new day when all human life is treasured, embraced and included within the tender embrace of a culture of life. God's blessing may return to America.

Dare I hope for the same in Canada?

Mark Davis Pickup

WHEN THE LAW IS AN ASS

2012-05-09T21:46:00.000-07:00

Some topics keep coming up for discussion. Irrefutable evidence can be presented to settle the issue but it may not be what people want to hear. They may ignore the evidence or decry it.

Stephen Woodworth

The question of when life begins is such an example. In late April, Canadian Member of Parliament Stephen Woodworth put forth a motion to examine when life begins. He called for a special parliamentary committee to review Canada's federal Criminal Code's definition of when a baby becomes a human being. Canadian law says a baby only becomes a human being at the moment its birth is completed.

I am reminded of a famous line from Charles Dickens' book Oliver Twist: "'If the law supposes that,' said Mr. Bumble . . . 'the law is a ass - a idiot.'"

So it is. The law is based on pro-abortion ideology, not biological evidence which established decades ago that life reproduced sexually begins when sperm fertilizes egg. This is not a matter of taste or opinion, it is biological evidence.

If Canada truly believes in the concept of universal human rights then all human life must be included within that ideal. That's what "universal" means. Human rights begin when human life begins and ends with life's natural conclusion.

Thomas Mulcair

Canada's socialist leader in Parliament, the New Democratic Party Leader Thomas Mulcair adamantly opposed Woodworth's motion, or the establishment of a parliamentary committee. Mulcair said the entire New Democratic Party will vote against the motion.

In defending his motion, Woodworth said, "There's a diversity of opinion across Canada on the question of our definition of human being. But what does a parliamentarian do in the face of diversity? Rather than let opinions fester, one should expose them to the light of day."

Some opinions cannot be sustained in the light of day. They need the logic of darkness in order to be maintained. The light of biological science, unfiltered by pro-abortion ideology, would quickly establish that life reproduced sexually begins at conception. All one has to do is refer to the Carnegie Stages of human development.

Carnegie Stages of Human Development

The Carnegie Institute at John Hopkins University first described the initial stages of embryonic development back in the early 1900s. Canada's law's stating a human being's life begins at birth is ridiculous. It completely contradicts what we know about prenatal development.

Canada's law is backward and bigoted. It needs to change to finally recognize and include what we know about prenatal life.

Unborn children are not the first group of humanity that has not been recognized as legal persons. Until 1929, Canada's Supreme Court said women were not legal persons. There was a time in North America when aboriginal people were considered non-persons.

PROPERTY, NOT PERSONS

In 1857, the United States Supreme Court ruled in the Dred Scott decision that black slaves were considered property and not legal persons.

During the Third Reich, the personhood and humanity of Jews was questioned. Adolf Hitler said, "The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but not human."

History is marred with examples of people arbitrarily denying other groups of humanity legal personhood or even recognition as human beings. Now it is unborn children who are systematically denied their humanity and not recognized as legal persons. Prejudice makes civil society uncivilized.

Even if a parliamentary committee were to review the Criminal Code's position that a child only becomes human at the point of birth, it would still have to look at when biological science established when life begins. Unfortunately, too many parliamentarians will not accept the answer.

It would not be the first time a government has examined this important question. In April 1981, the U.S. Congress conducted a series of hearings to answer the question "When does life begin?"

SCIENTIFIC VALIDITY

A group of internationally recognized scientists appeared before the committee with a resounding collective statement that conception marks the beginning of a new human being. Fifty-seven witnesses appeared and only one scientist disagreed; his disagreement was based on philosophical, not scientific, grounds.

Did it change anything? No. Corrupt ideology and prejudice prevailed over truth. Millions of children have died by abortion across America since 1981. Why should we think it will be different 30 years later in Canada? Are we more open to truth now?

I fear the answer is "no," but pray it might become "yes." Until then, it remains important that God's people continue to proclaim the sanctity and dignity of all human life and prayerfully offer life-affirming alternatives to women considering abortion.

MDP

A CRITICALLY IMPORTANT CONFERENCE ABOUT EUTHANASIA

2012-05-08T08:50:00.001-07:00

Dear readers of this blog (as of this morning there have been over 70,000 hits): I want to bring your attention to an important event coming up in less than a month. It is important for people of good-will to hear what these people have to say. They are steadfastly fighting on the front lines against euthanasia and the protection of vulnerable populations. Register today for this timely conference at this link:

http://www.humanlife.org/StealthEuthanasia.php

Thank you.

Mark Davis Pickup

2012: A Conference on Stealth Euthanasia

Saturday, June 2, 2012 | 835 2nd Ave NW | New Brighton, MN 55112

Register Now
Human Life Alliance and United for Life of Minnesota are excited to announce Imposed Death: A Conference on Stealth Euthanasia to be held Saturday, June 2, 2012 in New Brighton, Minnesota. This full-day conference boasts a line-up of exceptional speakers covering a wide range of end-of-life topics.

Alex Schadenberg, Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition of Canada, will be discussing the world-wide perspective of imposed death from Holland and the Netherlands to what is happening here in our own neighborhoods. He will help us to understand how the “the-right-to-die” movement has brought us to this point and where we’re going from here if it continues unchecked. Mr. Schadenberg is an expert on assisted suicide and euthanasia around the globe and will be helping us to have a deeper understanding of how insidious the pushers of death are.

Ron Panzer, RN, founder and president of Hospice Patients Alliance (HPA), will be speaking about Stealth Euthanasia. As a nurse who has exposed violations of the standards of care within hospice and other niches of healthcare, Ron has much to share with us about what is really happening. Ron and HPA are at the frontline in exposing the pervasive infiltration into hospice and healthcare by the culture of death with its bioethical-based policies that are hastening many tens of thousands into death before their time. Ron has served as a consultant on hospice for thousands of families, patients and staff from all over the USA and has been interviewed by journalists for online news sources as well as newspapers, radio and TV. He will help us to understand how accepted, extensive and permeating the concept of euthanasia and a “right to die” have become.

Julie Grimstad, LPN, founder and president of Life is Worth Living, will be sharing her expertise in two areas: Health Care Decision Making and Physicians Orders for Life Sustain Treatment (POLST) forms and Patient Advocacy. Julie will help us to understand what we need to do to protect ourselves and our loved ones from stealth euthanasia. Julie is also working with HLA to build a network of patient advocates. Maybe you are being called to be part of that network.

Mary Kellett, founder and president of Prenatal Partners for Life will discuss infant euthanasia and hospice. She will share her experience, knowledge and expertise in working with healthcare providers involved in caring for children with conditions that put them at risk of being euthanasized.

Cristen M. Krebs, DNP, ANP-BC, Catholic Hospice Founder / Executive Director, is a graduate of Robert Morris University’s Doctor of Nursing Practice Program with twenty years of end-of-life care experience. After several years in the field of hospice nursing, Dr. Krebs became disheartened with the trend of hospices becoming more business oriented than patient focused. Concerned that direct patient care was being compromised, in 1997, Dr. Krebs began the first faith-based, nonprofit hospice program serving Pittsburgh and surrounding counties. In May 2007, she incorporated Catholic Hospice, the only pro-life, non-profit hospice in Pittsburgh. Catholic Hospice embraces the Vatican’s Declaration on Euthanasia, encouraging all faiths to uphold the teachings of the church when caring for those experiencing terminal illness.

CALLING PEOPLE "VEGETABLES": WHERE DID IT COME FROM?

2012-05-03T13:20:00.000-07:00

In response to my last blog post, "Let's Stop Calling People Vegetables", Dr. Dianne Irving responded to explain the origins and motive for calling comatose people vegetables or being in a vegetative state. Below is her illuminating response.

MDP

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The term "vegetative state" became popular at the "birth" of bioethics (1978 Belmont Report). It is traced to the "delayed personhood" arguments used at the beginning of life issues: first the vegetative soul is present, then later the sensitive soul is added, and finally (about 3-4 months) the rational soul is added. Then and only then is there a human being with a rational soul to be respected. St. Thomas (following Aristotle), as well as many religions today still follow that odd and scientifically/philosophically false dictum.

What bioethics did was also reverse this dictum to end of life issues -- and this was taught in a major seminar at a Georgetown bioethics conference early on (about 1990). Those of us in the seminar on "euthanasia" were taught that -- just as there is a series of souls at the beginning of life -- at the end of life the reverse happens (supposedly adapted from St. Thomas): in the dying patient, first the rational soul leaves the body, then the sensitive soul leaves the body, and finally the only thing left there in the patient is the vegetative soul -- and thus there is no "person" really present! Of course, that would also mean that with euthanasia, physician assisted suicide (PAS), and organ transplantation, the use of such "vegetables" in human research, etc., would be "ethical". This concept of the "vegetative state" was immediately picked up by one of the first new bioethics international centers in France -- INSERM. They were the ones who really popularized the phrase.

Of course, St. Thomas (and Aristotle) were systematically required as classical realist philosophers to start their philosophizing with empirical facts, and those that they "started" with in their "delayed hominization" arguments were empirically false; they both still believed that there were only 4 material elements in the natural world: air, earth, fire and water! Needless to say, whatever philosophical personhood concepts they arrived at from that false empirical starting place would be erroneous. But if you look at both St. Thomas' and Aristotle's systematic dogmas on the "soul", both taught that there was only ONE SOUL with THREE POWERS -- the rational soul -- that INCLUDES VIRTUALLY BOTH THE SENSITIVE AND THE VEGETATIVE POWERS.

Aristotle

Therefore, there cannot be three human souls, and there can be no "splits" among the three powers of that one single human soul; nor can there be any "split" between the whole rational soul and the human material body. The human soul and human body come into existence simultaneously. So for both of them, their systematic philosophical principles would contradict their own attempts to argue for "delayed personhood". Therefore, they would never have agreed that at the end of life there is only a "vegetative" soul present (and thus no "person").

As an Aristotelean Thomist myself, I wrote an article on this last year, with extensive direct quotations from both Aristotle and St. Thomas, using the wonderful encyclical of Pope Leo XVIII as a backdrop: “’Revival’ of St. Thomas’ Philosophy – Yes, But Not His Erroneous ‘Delayed Personhood’ Argument; Concerns for Beginning and End of Life Issues” (April 4, 2011), at: http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/irv/irv_185revival.st.thomas1.html.

So, the current efforts to call these poor vulnerable patients "vegetables" cannot be sustained academically or philosophically any more than can "delayed personhood" at the beginning of life. The only reason these terms continue to be used is purely political.

Dianne Irving, Ph.D.

LET'S STOP CALLING PEOPLE VEGETABLES

2012-04-30T13:48:00.000-07:00

A voice on the radio referred to someone in a coma as being a "vegetable". What a horrible term! What kind of people use such awful terms about fellow human beings who are compromised?

People spoke of cognitively disabled Terri Schiavo as being in a vegetative state. That was not true. She was cognitively disabled human being who deserved dignity and respect, not disdain. She was not a vegetable. Nobody is a vegetable regardless of the severity of their disability. People do not change their species. Calling someone a vegetable is a ugly, derogatory term meant to strip them of their humanity.

I look forward to a day when calling people vegetables or being in a vegetative state will be as unacceptable as calling African Americans niggers referring to gays as faggots. They are all horribly demeaning terms that have no place in civilized society.

MDP

TED WRITES ABOUT LOST FATHERHOOD

2012-04-24T18:26:00.001-07:00

Over the past few days there has been a great deal of interest in the blog post under the title More About Men and Abortion. The numbers in the previous entry give an indication. Clearly I have not been unique in grieving abortion of my first child. National Right to Life News based in Washington D.C. felt it important enough to re-published the substance of my blog today (see http://www.nationalrighttolifenews.org/news/2012/04/more-about-men-and-abortion/ )

I want to share an email sent to my personal email this morning with the subject reading "Thank you so much for letting me know I'm not alone". Although he gave me permission to post the content of his email message I will only identify his first name as Ted.

His email about abortion said, in part,

"It was with great interest that I read your article, reprinted on National Right to Life News. ... I insisted that the girl (not even my “girlfriend,” really, but a very good-hearted Catholic girl who did not deserve the callous disregard I showed her) abort our child, because I was a sophomore in college, where everyone tells you that a baby will “ruin your life.” I believed it, and I ran from it as hard and as far as I could. Needless to say, the instant my first child was born, the horror of what I had done clamped down and suffocated me, like going through life trying to breathe through a giant wet towel. God has seen fit to bless/curse me with two children who are more wonderfully sweet than I ever could have imagined, which somehow seems to make it even worse in a way, because now I know how great the other one would have been. I have tried to find peace by talking with priests and other ministers, volunteering, writing…I even thought that I had “laid it at the foot of the Cross” a few times, but maybe I keep snatching it back, who knows? I have always just accepted it as my penance. I was glad to learn from the article that you had managed to lay yours there successfully, because that tells me that it is possible. I suppose the point is to keep trying.

Again, I am very glad to have discovered your writings. These are important things that affect many people, and they are not adequately addressed. May God continue to bless you and yours."

Warm regards,

Ted

As I said earlier, I know there are brutish men and playboys who do not care about their children aborted on the alter of sexual license. I am not writing about them.

I am writing about men like Ted who have the hearts of fathers and grieve lost fatherhood from abortion --that may have occurred years or even decades earlier. Their regrets (like Ted's regret and mine) may not come immediately when they are young, self-centred and immature. The regret and grief may surface later with the births of subsequent children, or some other trigger.

I believe there are many, many men who are just like Ted and me. They need to know they can be forgiven, and forgive themselves.

This is where pro-Life organizations, in partnership with local churches or men's ministries, can reach out in a spirit of understanding to men hurt by abortion -- just like ministries such as Rachel's Vineyard and Silent No More reach out to women.

Abortion has caused so much pain to so many people throughout the past 40 years in Canada, the United States and elsewhere. We need to foster healing to all people hurt by abortion. And we need to encourage a repudiation of killing unborn children to supposedly solve the social problems of unwanted pregnancies. Abortion only creates new problems.

Our nations desperately need healing and spiritual revival. The good news is that God wants to heal us as individuals and as nations that once recognized Him as the ultimate source of enlightenment.

Mark Davis Pickup

BLOG INTEREST

2012-04-23T21:35:00.003-07:00

Yesterday's blog MORE ABOUT MEN AND ABORTION seems to have struck a full chord. In two days since it was posted there have been considerable interest. As of 9:00 this evening (MT), the blog has had the following hits:

The United States - 807, Canada 232, the United Kingdom 155, Russia 151, Ukraine 61, Germany 52, France 41, China 39, Brazil 24, the Netherlands 22.

MORE ABOUT MEN AND ABORTION

2012-04-22T13:15:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in my March 10th blog post called Men and Abortion, I gave an short address to a meeting of the Knights of Columbus in Edmonton (Canada). I spoke about them sponsoring a conference to help men affected by abortion. It cuts fairly close to home for me. I am one of those men. In 1971, my girlfriend became pregnant with our baby. I pressured her to have an abortion; eventually she succumbed to the pressure and had an abortion. For decades I regretted my role in that abortion.

Throughout the years, feminists have emphatically maintained that abortion is a "women's issue" that does not affect men. They must be wrong! If they were right then why did my heart ache so? If abortion does not affect men then why did my conscience condemn me for so many years? Of course the view that abortion does not affect men was/is the product of twisted feminism and the misandrists who have populated their ranks.

Was I the only man haunted by the dreams, the irrational sense of a foreshortened future, the sadness at lost fatherhood, the nagging desire to make things right and atone for my role in the abortion?(1) Every time I would meet someone who was born in 1972, I would think of my son or daughter. I suspected that I was not alone in my regrets.

Social custom expects men affected by post-abortion grief to be silent. Men affected by abortion have been marginalized and separated from discussions that recognized their post-abortion grief. Disclosure or help-seeking was unlikely.

For too long our grief has been discounted by mainstream scholarly discourse, media and establishment elites. But my grief was real regardless of conventional wisdom maintaining otherwise.

Yes, I suspected that I was not alone.

Then in 2007 I read an article in the Knights of Columbus magazine Columbia about a conference sponsored by the Knights in San Francisco for men of abortion. The conference was called "RECLAIMING FATHERHOOD: A multifaceted Examination of Men Dealing with Abortion." I thought, "At last! There is a awareness surfacing of post-abortion syndrome in men. Our sorrow at lost fatherhood has been recognized thanks to the Knights of Columbus!"

Dr. Vincent Rue

Dr. Vincent M. Rue is a physiotherapist with more than thirty years experience treating post-abortion trauma. He is an expert in this field and was one of the speakers at the conference. Although Dr. Rue states that post-abortion grief transcends genders, in a later interview with Columbia he said that there are factors specific to helping men resolve emotional pain of abortion.

He recognizes that men are at a disadvantage because, as he said, "men must overcome cultural and psychological hang-ups about communicating feelings. ... Men need safe places to talk about their issues." (See his interview at http://www.kofc.org/un/en/columbia/detail/547671.html)

Apparently another conference was held in 2009 in Chicago for psychologists, counselors, clergy, academics and ordinary men and women who have experienced abortion. According to another Knights of Columbus article they "spoke out about what they say is an "invisible problem" -- men, as well as women, can have profound grief and suffering as a result of abortion." (See http://www.kofc.org/un/en/prolife/reclaim.html)

It is time for men who have suffered from post-abortion syndrome to be allowed to address their grief and move toward healing in this area of their lives. At a personal level, I found healing through a long and difficult spiritual journey that culminated in being forgiven by God, through His Son Jesus Christ. I laid my lost fatherhood of forty years ago at the foot of the cross. It was only then that I was able to truly forgive myself.

I know many brutish men have no remorse for their children killed by abortion. I am not talking about them. I am talking about men who suffer post-abortion trauma and grieve lost fatherhood. It is time their grief be recognized, not dismissed, and avenues made available for them to settle that grief within the context of community. I encourage more conferences like what happened in San Fransisco and Chicago.

MDP

(1) In the early years after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, I occasionally wondered if it was punishment for the abortion.

MARRIAGE

2012-04-17T08:12:00.000-07:00

Mark Davis Pickup

Read Mark Davis Pickup's newest blog on MARRIAGE at http://markpickup.org

BIOETHICS: HOW DID WE GET INTO THIS MESS?

2012-04-09T11:42:00.000-07:00

Dr. Dianne Irving

It has been a decade since Dr. Dianne Irving's article "The Bioethics Mess" appeared in the online publication LifeIssues. Her warnings are more poignant today than when they were firsted penned. Bioethics is leading society down a frightening and brutal path into a new world that is hostile toward the weakest among us. Below is Dr. Irving's excellent essay.

MDP

________

Bioethics” — the word sounds like old–fashioned medical ethics applied to new medical technology. It's the application of traditional philosophical or theological principles to the moral dilemmas created by, say, cloning or experimenting with new AIDS drugs, right?

Not really. Like the word “Bioethics” itself, which formally dates only from the early 1970's, the philosophical underpinnings of bioethics are completely different from those that underlie traditional medical ethics. Traditional medical ethics focuses on the physician's duty to the individual patient, whose life and welfare are always sacrosanct. The focus of bioethics is fundamentally utilitarian, centered, like other utilitarian disciplines, around maximizing total human happiness.

Such factors as the feelings and preferences of other people — the parents of a child with severe birth defects, the husband whose wife seems permanently comatose, or even the doctor who decides that an elderly Alzheimer's patient would be better off dead — along with the possible cost of treatment to society, can weigh in against and ultimately outbalance the afflicted person's needs. Good–bye, Hippocrates; hello, Peter Singer. And good–bye, especially to the Catholic understanding of the sacredness of the life of each individual human being.

Bioethics as understood and practiced today was created by a congressional mandate in 1974. During the late 1960's and early 1970's, there was an explosion of exposes of research abuses in medicine, and also of ethical dilemmas created by new life–prolonging technologies. There were reports of patients enduring agonizing deaths, spending their last days — or even last weeks or months — hooked up to mazes of tubes and impersonal machines. Nursing homes and hospitals seemed to be overflowing with the hopelessly ill apparently consuming scarce medical resources.
There were also revelations that entire non-consenting populations — orphans in institutions, poor black men recruited by the Tuskegee Institute, prisoners, the mentally ill, residents of inner cities — had been used as human guinea pigs in government-sponsored medical experiments. Aborted fetuses were rapidly becoming prized biological materials for medical investigation, raising serious moral questions. And so, bioethics was formally “born“.

In the late 1960's and early 1970's, Senator Edward Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat, and then–Senator Walter Mondale, later to become vice president under President Jimmy Carter, conducted hearings on many of these abuses. The result was a piece of federal legislation called the 1974 National Research Act. It required the secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (now Health and Human Services, or HHS) to appoint a commission to “identify the basic ethical principles” that the federal government should use in resolving these extraordinary dilemmas. Those “ethical principles” were to be translated into practice as the basis of federal regulations concerning the use of human subjects in research.

In 1974, Casper Weinberger, President Gerald Ford's health, education, and welfare secretary, appointed an eleven–member commission that in 1978 issued a document called the Belmont Report, which identified and defined three ethical principles: respect for persons, justice, and beneficence. To this day, those principles are called “the Belmont principles.” “principlism” for short, or simply “bioethics.”

The Belmont principles became the foundation for the guidelines that the Office for Protection from Research Risks uses when assessing the ethics of using human subjects in research. They also underlie a host of other federal regulations and guidelines for medical research, and they have worked their way into the private sector as well. Universities and hospitals routinely use — or try to use — the three principles when approving research projects, deciding who qualifies for certain medical treatments, and even who lives, who dies, and who makes those decisions.

Thus, bioethics is really a brand–new ethical theory, a brand–new way of determining right and wrong. How did we get there? How did it come about that our government and its non–elected experts, rather than religious leaders or even traditional philosophers, acquired the power to define what is normatively ethical for all Americans facing complex medical or scientific issues?

A SHORT HISTORY OF MEDICAL ETHICS

The discipline of medical ethics goes back to ancient times, to the Greek physician Hippocrates (about 460–380 B.C.), who was concerned about the qualities of “the good physician,” and the decorum and deportment that a physician should display toward patients. The good physician was, in Hippocrates' view, a “virtuous physician,” whose duties included helping rather than harming the sick, keeping patients' confidences, and refraining from exploiting them monetarily or sexually. Hippocrates' code of conduct strictly forbade abortion and euthanasia. The paradigm of those duties was the Hippocratic oath, which most medical schools routinely administered to their graduates until relatively recent times.

During the Middle Ages, a more Christian and communal view of Hippocratic medical ethics prevailed that required physicians to present themselves to the public as “professionals” and to show themselves as worthy of trust and authority. Medicine became more than a physician–patient relationship. Its practitioners now had the sole privilege of education, examining, licensing, and disciplining other physicians, who pledged themselves to use their skills to benefit society at large as well as their own patients.

Starting in the late 19th century, with the rise of medical schools and teaching hospitals, traditional Hippocratic ethics began to incorporate new rules governing the behavior of physicians toward each other. There developed what was called an “ethics of competence,” especially in the practice of medicine in hospital settings. The emphasis was now on extensive cooperation among physicians and all the other professionals involved in the care of patients. Accurate record–keeping and written patient evaluations became the norm. Physicians were supposed to inform their patients about their diagnoses and courses of treatment and not to exploit them for teaching purposes. Senior doctors were not supposed to exploit junior doctors. “Moral practice” was defined as “competent practice,” including the mastering of advances in medical science.

After World War II, new medical research and technologies began to complicate patient care, thanks to massive federal funding of the health sciences. The crucial bonds of the physician–patient relationship were beginning to fray. Traditional Hippocratic medicine was breaking down rapidly, seemingly impotent in the face of pressing new questions: Could one experiment on dying patients to “benefit” other “patients” How should the growing intertwining of medical practice and government, commerce, and technology be handled? How should the benefits and burdens of medical research be justly distributed, or scarce medical resources allocated? Who should make these decisions? Patients? Their families? Physicians? Clergy? Experts?

THE CONFERENCES

Sir George Pickering

Starting in the 1960's, there were a series of conferences around the country on such issues as population control, thought control, sterilization, cloning, artificial insemination, and sperm banks. One of the first, the “Great Issues of Conscience in Modern Medicine” conference at Dartmouth College in 1960, hosted an array of scientific and medical savants, including the microbiologist Rene Dubos of the Rockefeller Institute, the physician Sir George Pickering of Oxford University, and Brock Chrisholm, a leading medical light of the World Health Organization, together with such famous humanists as C. P. Snow and Aldous Huxley.

The hottest topics were genetics and eugenics. Dubos declared that the “prolongation of the life of aged and ailing persons” and the saving of lives of children with genetic defects — two benefits of post-World War II advances in medicine — had created “the most difficult problem of medical ethics we are likely to encounter within the next decade.” Geneticists worried that the gene pool was becoming polluted because the early deaths of people with serious abnormalities were now preventable. The Nobel Prize–winning geneticist Hermann Muller offered his own solution to that problem: a bank of healthy sperm that, together with “new techniques of reproduction,” could prevent the otherwise inevitable “degeneration of the race” that might ensue thanks to medical advances that allowed the defective to reproduce.

At another conference, “Man and His Future,” sponsored by the Ciba Foundation in London in 1962, the luminaries included Muller; Joshua Lederberg, winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine; the geneticists J. B. S. Haldane and Francis Crick; and the scientific ethicist Jacob Bronowski. As at Dartmouth, concerns about human evolution, eugenics, and population control were primary. The biologist Sir Julian Huxley declared, “Eventually, the prospect of radical eugenic improvement could become one of the mainsprings of man's evolutionary advance.” Huxley proposed a genetic utopia that would include strict government controls over physiological and psychological process, achieved largely by pharmacological and genetic techniques. They would include cloning and the deliberate provocation of genetic mutations “to suit the human product for special purposes as the world of the future.”

William Shockley

Other conferences of the 1960's delved further into the implications of science for the modern world. One was a series of Gustavus Adolphus Nobel meetings in Minnesota in which many Nobel winners participated. At the first of them, in 1965, whose theme was “genetics and the Future of Man,” the Nobel physicist William Shockley presented his maverick views on eugenics. He suggested that, since human intelligence was largely genetically determined, scientists would embark on serious efforts to raise the human race's collective brainpower by various means, including sterilization, cloning, and artificial insemination.

Also evolving during this time were new concepts of scientific and medical ethics and the possible roles that professional ethicists and theologians should play in the critical debates over the new standards of right and wrong. Most of the savants of the 1960's espoused a then–fashionable ethical relativism, which raised concerns among some theologians and philosophers about the wisdom of allowing the scientific elite to develop policies outside the constraints of traditional ethical principles.

Some theologians, such as the Christian ethicist Paul Ramsey, persisted in proposing distinctly theological principles and values to guide such deliberations. Others, philosophers, especially those of the reigning “analytic” school in America and Britain, proposed that secular philosophical principles should serve as the sole guidelines for public policy. Some in that group, such as James Gustafson of Emory University, argued for trying to reach a “consensus” of society on medical ethics, rather than looking to traditional norms.

The result was the secularization of both theology and philosophy for public policy purposes. For example, Reed College in Portland, Oregon, sponsored a conference in 1966 titled, “The Sanctity of Life.” It included a lecture by the sociologist Edward Shils titled, “The Secular Meaning of Sanctity of Life.” Daniel Callahan, later to found The Hastings Center, a leading bioethics think tank, pressed for formulation of a new normative medical ethic that would be influenced solely by secular moral philosophy. Most agreed with Gustafson's proposal that “consensus” would be the method of achieving that formulation. This sort of thinking would become a major characteristic of the new field of bioethics yet to come.

THE THINK TANKS

As the 1970's approached, the debates and their participants moved from conferences at universities to permanent think thanks. Callahan and William Gaylin set up The Hastings Center outside New York City in 1969. There, such pioneers of bioethics as Dubos, Ramsey, Gustafson, Renee Fox, Arthur Caplan, Robert Veatch, and even Mondale and the liberal Catholic journalist Peter Steinfels held forth.

The first “research groups” at The Hastings Center addressed such issues as death and dying, behavior control, genetic engineering, genetic counseling, population control, and the conjunction of ethics and public policy. In 1971, the first volume of the Hastings Center Report appeared, a publication that was to become a bible of secular bioethics, which was just then acquiring its name. As Albert Jonsen, a pioneer of bioethics who taught at the University of Washington, noted in a 1998 book, The Birth of Bioethics (Oxford), “The index of the Hastings Center Report over the next years defined the range of topics that were becoming bioethics and constituted a roll call of the authors who would become its proponents.”

Under the leadership of the Dutch fetal–development researcher Andre Hellegers, the Kennedy Institute of Ethics (originally named the Kennedy Center for the Study of Human Reproduction and Development) opened at Georgetown University in 1971. Its mission was to study the ethical issues involved in reproductive research in a Catholic context, if a generally liberal Catholic one. Such scholars as the Rev. Richard McCormick, S. J., a Catholic bioethicist of decidedly liberal views, and later, Edmond Pellegrino, a more traditionalist Catholic bioethicist, worked out of the Kennedy Institute at various times. Also in the 1970's, a Protestant counterpart to the Kennedy Institute opened with Dr. Edmund Pellegrino as its first Director, the Institute on Human Values, sponsored by the United Ministries in Education, a partnership of the Methodist and Presbyterian churches.

Many of the conference participants of the 1960's and the think–tank scholars of the 1970's were among those testifying before the Mondale and Kennedy congressional hearings that led to the passage of the National Research Act of 1974. Many in this army of secular scholars also sat on the committee that later issued the Belmont Report with its three principles. Those scholars were the midwives at the formal “birth of bioethics” that the 1974 act mandated. They were also the first formally designated "bioethicists."

The three Belmont Principles — respect for persons, justice , and beneficence — were supposedly derived from the works of leading secular moral philosophers of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, chiefly Kant, John Stuart Mill, and John Rawls, a highly influential Harvard University philosopher whose 1971 book, A Theory of Justice, was a blueprint for certain radically egalitarian legal and social theories of the 1970's, such as affirmative action and wealth redistribution.

Predictably, the new bioethics was anything but systematic. The commission selectively took bits and pieces from different and contradictory ethical theories and rolled them up into one ball. Furthermore, each of the three principles of the new bioethics was prima facie: no one principle could overrule any of the other two. In dealing with real–life medical and scientific problems, the bioethicist was supposed to simultaneously reconcile the values of all three principles.

Inevitably, theoretical cracks began to form in the very foundation of this new bioethics theory. In fact, because the Belmont principles were derived from bits and pieces of fundamentally contradictory philosophical systems, the result was theoretical chaos. More problematically, when people tried to apply the new theory to real patients in medical and research settings, it didn't work because, practically speaking, there was no way to resolve the inherent conflicts among the three principles.

Furthermore, while the Belmont Report gave a nod to the traditional Hippocratic understanding of beneficence as doing good for the patient, it also included a second definition of beneficence that was essentially utilitarian: doing “good for society at large.” The report even declared that citizens have a “strong moral obligation” to take part in experimental research for the greater good of society. This obviously contradicts the Hippocratic interpretation of beneficence, and it also violates time–honored international guidelines, such as the Nuremberg Code and the Declaration of Helsinki, which bar physicians from experimenting on their patients unless it is for the patient's benefit.
The second Belmont principle, justice, was also defined along utilitarian lines, in terms of “fairness”: allocating the benefits and burdens of research fairly across the social spectrum. This Rawls–influenced definition is very different from the classic Aristotelian definition of justice as treating people fairly as individuals.

Even the third Belmont principle, respect for persons, ended up serving utilitarian goals. Respect for persons is supposed to be a Kantian notion, in which respect for the individual is absolute. But the Belmont Report blurred that idea with Mill's utilitarian views of personal autonomy. In Mills' view, only “persons” — that is, fully conscious, rational adults capable of acting autonomously — are defined as moral agents with moral responsibilities. However, those incapable of acting autonomously — infants, the comatose, those with Alzheimer's — became defined in bioethics theory as non-moral agents and thus “non–persons” with no rights. It is only a short step from this kind of reasoning to that underlying Princeton ethicist Peter Singer's “preference” utilitarianism, in which animals have more rights than young children.

BREAKING RANKS

Eventually, discontent began to smolder within the brave new discipline. Even the founders of bioethics have recently admitted that the Belmont principles present grave problems as guidelines for physicians and researchers. The Hastings Center's Callahan has baldly conceded that after 25 years, bioethics simply has not worked. The University of Washington's Jonsen recently wrote that principlism should now be regarded as “a sick patient in need of a thorough diagnosis and prognosis.” Gilbert Meilaender, a Christian medical ethicist at Valparaiso University, has noted “how easily the [reality and worth of the individual human] soul can be lost in bioethics.”

Another reason for the theoretical and practical chaos surrounding bioethics these days is that almost anyone can be a bioethicist. Few “professional” bioethics experts, the doctors, researchers, and lawyers who sit on hospital and government bioethics committees, have academic degrees in the discipline, and even for those few who do, there is no uniform or standardized curriculum. Most professors of bioethics don't know the historical and philosophical roots of the subject they teach; the courses vary from institution to institution; there are no local, state, or national boards of examination; and there are no real professional standards. There is not even a professional code of ethics for bioethicists.

Because of these criticisms, many bioethicists now prefer to say that their field is more a form of “public discourse” than an academic discipline, a kind of “consensus ethics” arrived at by democratic discussion rather than formal principles. The problem with this line of reasoning is that the ethical principles used in the 'discourse" are still the same–defined bioethics principles, and those who typically reach the “consensus” are the bioethicists themselves, not the patients, their families, or society at large, so the process is not exactly neutral or democratic. And if bioethics is just a “discourse,” then why are its practitioners regarded as “ethics experts”?

Furthermore, the three principles of bioethics — respect for persons (now almost always referred to as autonomy), justice, and beneficence — still pop up everywhere in the literature of a myriad of public policymaking bodies with jurisdiction over medical, social, and political decisions.
The President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research, created by Congress in 1978, has cited the three principles in presumably definitive reports on such wide–ranging medical–moral issues as the definition of death; informed consent; genetic screening and counseling; regional and class differences in the availability of health care; the use of life–sustaining treatment; privacy and confidentiality; genetic engineering; compensation for injured subjects; whistle–blowing in research; and guidelines for the institutional review boards set up by universities for research on human subjects.

The National Institutes of Health's 1988 Human Fetal Tissue Transplant Conference, its 1994 Human Embryo Research Panel, and the National Bioethics Advisory Commission set up by President Bill Clinton in 1995 also cite the Belmont principles as norms in their determinations of what is “ethical.” The list of bioethics-based government regulations and policies is endless.
The principles of bioethics now also pervade the “ethics” of other academic disciplines, such as engineering and business. Many colleges, universities, and medical schools require a course in bioethics in order to graduate. Bioethics has also heavily influenced legal and media ethics and is even taught in high schools.

Peter Singer

Furthermore, the principles of bioethics themselves have led to radical consequences. Peter Singer is teaching undergraduates at Princeton that the killing of even healthy human infants can be “ethical.” Or ponder the thought of Tristram Engelhardt, a bioethicist on the faculty of the Baylor College of Medicine: “Persons in the strict sense are moral agents who are self–conscious, rational, and cable of free choice and of having interests. This includes not only normal adult humans, but possibly extraterrestrials with similar powers.” Bioethicist Dan Wikler of the World Health Organization has declared, “The state of a nation's gene pool should be subject to governmental policies rather than left to the whim of individuals.”

As bioethics supplants traditional ethics before our very eyes, few seem to question its underlying premises. But we should know it for what it is: a form of extreme utilitarianism in both its theoretical and practical forms.

It bears no relation to the patient–centered Hippocratic ethics that for nearly 2,500 years required physicians to treat every human being in their care as worthy of respect, no matter how sick or small or weak or disabled. It certainly bears no relation to Catholic medical ethics, which continue the Hippocratic tradition in light of church teachings on moral law. And bioethics offers little concrete guidance to physicians and scientists even on its own terms.

Perhaps one of these days, society will come to grips with the moral and practical mess that bioethics has created and come up with something to replace it. This time society will perhaps not rely so heavily on the self–proclaimed scientific and moral experts.

2012-04-07T09:31:00.000-07:00

Mark Davis Pickup

See my Good Friday blog on the Crucifixion of Christ at http://markpickup.org

Maundy or Holy Thursday

2012-04-05T20:38:00.002-07:00

Read about Maundy or Holy Thursday at http://markpickup.org

MDP

MORE ON "AFTER-BIRTH ABORTIONS"

2012-03-27T20:00:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HvSP9K6aCY

The above link is to a British television report on "after-birth abortions." See HumanLifeMatters' blog of March 4th 2012 on this topic.

HLM

CAN WE FINALLY GET IT STRAIGHT AFTER 19 YEARS? TRACY LATIMER WAS THE VICTIM NOT ROBERT

2012-03-24T18:06:00.000-07:00

Robert Latimer

In response to the previous blog entitled "Canada's Seething Prejudice Against The Disabled" a comment was received by somebody identified only as Anonymous. He/she commented about the tragic case of Robert Latimer murdering his disabled daughter Tracy nearly twenty years ago. The comment about the blog post was typical of people who relied on the gross distortions presented by much of Canada's secular, liberal media throughout the years about the case. Anonymous wrote:

"I am pro-life and anti-euthanasia but I don't agree with you about Latimer. There are always exceptions. My experience with the medical system has shown me that there are times, rare but they do happen, when a situation really is dire. I have never seen any evidence that Latimer seethed with resentment of his daughter. She was in pain and was going to be in more and more pain and she couldn't take pain meds because of the anti-convulsants she was on. How long is a parent supposed to live with that? They could have put Tracey in a home and left her there but in homes she didn't thrive, so they could have chosen slow death for her and looked away. And that would have been morally alright? Latimer is an inarticulate, not-Godless Saskatchewan farmer who doesn't expect or ask a nanny state to solve his problems for him. I just can't see what he did as evil. I can see killing a child in pain who faces more and more pain out of love."

"I don't see discussing this as being wrong either. We need to discern the difference between someone in a situation where there is no answer and the other woman who simply doesn't want her children to live as they are -not in pain."

"Having said that, I do agree that this is not a good time to be disabled. Surely it doesn't do the disabled any service to cover over the really hard questions?"

UNDERCURRENT OF PREJUDICE

You may have not seen evidence that Robert Latimer seethed with resentment for his daughter but, as the title of the previous blog states, there is seething undercurrent of public and media resentment and prejudice in Canada toward the disabled. It's often disguised in false yet noble sounding phrases such as "freedom of choice in dying" "death with dignity"and "mercy killing", but the effect is always the same: Get rid of the sick and disabled.

It's interesting to note that in October 2011, Canada's Parliament gave all Party support to developing a National Suicide Prevention Strategy yet there were MPs who supported it who also support assisted suicide for the disabled. So let me get this straight: The healthy and able-bodied population deserve suicide prevention but the disabled deserve help to commit suicide. What other conclusion should a Canadian with a severe disability (like me) draw from this?!

TESTIMONY UNDER OATH

Back to the Latimer case. I am going to make some comments based on the court transcripts of the second trial, not articles in the popular press. (Remember the testimony given was under oath by various witnesses close to the case.) Anonymous says Tracy was in pain and the pain would only increase because of the anti-seizure medication she was on conflicted with possible pain medications. Tracy was only given Tylenol. Firstly, let us establish that according to testimony of a Theresa Huyghebaert, group home manager in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, Tracy did not have grand mal seizures rather only short milder petit mals. The prospect of pain management was not properly explored by Robert Latimer when the last surgery was planned on October of 1993. According to his confession, he started thinking about killing Tracy right after the doctor appointment. (Incidentally, only after toxicology tests revealed lethal levels of carbon monoxide in Tracy's system (from Latimer's truck) were the police finally able to pry a confession of murder from Robert Latimer. Tracy did not die in her sleep as he initially maintained.)

MISERY MYTH

Tracy Latimer

Anonymous says they could have put Tracy in an institution which would have amounted to a slow death for her. Sounds terrible, but is it a true reflection of Tracy Latimer's life? No. If Anonymous took the time to read the court transcripts rather than rely on the Globe and Mail newspaper or some other liberal media outlets, she would know that Tracy did not need institutionalizing and there were plans in the opposite direction of institutionalizing her.

The idea that the sum total of Tracy Latimer's life was misery and pain was inaccurate. Even though Robert Latimer's wife (Laura) tried to portray Tracey's life that way to protect her husband and support the defence strategy to fixate on Tracy's disability and pain, the Prosecution was able to get her to grudgingly admit that Tracy had good times.

Was Tracy's life completely miserable as the media and Robert's defence lawyers maintained? Was Tracy's life unworthy of living? Was her life one of continual suffering? Did Tracy have no happiness, no joy? Did her life have no redeeming qualities as the defence lawyer, media and Laura Latimer portrayed?

Laura told court that Tracy's last surgery left her utterly miserable. She said: "Tracy was in a lot of pain. Tracy was miserable. She used to be a happy little girl, and she turned into someone who just sat slumped, just waited to be moved. She was -- she was very unhappy." The image of Tracy painted at the trial, and reported by the media, was untrue and this was revealed numerous times during the court proceedings.

Misery and pain were not the sum total of Tracy Latimer's life any more than pain and misery are the sum total in the lives of countless other people with severe disabilities.

TRACY WAS HAPPY

Tracy was a happy child. Professionals who worked with Tracy contradicted Laura's dismal portrayal of Tracy. Even Laura contradicted herself through her handwritten notes in a communication book that always accompanied Tracy for caregivers to read. Samples of Laura's notes alluding to Tracy being a happy child included comments like "Tracy was happy", "Tracy ate a good ham supper, she was a very happy girl", "When I came home, I gave Tracy a pudding. She was a happy girl.", "Tracy seems cheerful and more like her old self.", and "Tracy was very cheerful".

Tracy did have joy -- the irrepressible joy of childhood, despite her disability. According to testimony by family physician, Dr. Robert Kemp and Laura Latimer, Tracy loved music. Others testified that Tracy loved sleigh rides, television, games, parties, the circus, and pets. The Halloween before she was murdered, Tracy was dressed as a princess. On her last Easter, Laura Latimer wrote in Tracy's communication book "Brian and Linday [Tracy's siblings] got up at 5:30 to hunt for eggs. We spent most of the day at Tracy's cousin Lynn's place. ...Tracy spend a happy day, she ate a nice supper, and really enjoyed the desserts."

Tracy enjoyed sleep-overs and had a kean sense of mischief and fun. Her mother wrote in Tracy's book: "Tracy was the worst little girl at the sleep-over, up at ten to seven, laughing and vocalizing."
In another place Laura wrote: "After supper, we had a bonfire and Tracy sat outside until about nine o'clock. It was a beautiful night. Tracy seemed alert and happy." Laura continued, "Tracy had a good weekend, sat out on the deck lots. Grandma and grandpa came yesterday, she was so happy to see grandma."

Tracy Latimer went to a developmental centre Monday to Friday for regular school days. She came home each day on the same school bus as her siblings and other children, and did so right up to the Friday before she was murdered by her father. There were discussions about integrating Tracy into the regular school system. All of this information was brought out at the trial was available to read in the court transcripts if anybody cared to research it.

Apparently Anonymous has not done such research or she would not put forth the assertion that Tracy's parents could have put her in an institution ... at least I hope she would not. Even so, an institution is far better than a grave.

SEARCH FOR LIFE WITH DIGNITY

Millions of people with disabilities have had misery in their lives. Many live alone, unloved and sometimes in pain. Sadly, that has been the reality for people with disabilities throughout history. But being miserable is not a reason to kill us. If misery were a reason for death, then who among us would be safe! It would create an open season on the disabled. The answer is not to kill us in a flimsy excuse for stopping misery or to bestow so-called death with dignity. The answer lies elsewhere: it lies in proper pain management, and seeking life with dignity and inclusion -- especially for those who do not have it.

Robert Latimer did not behave like a good father. A good father does not murder his child. If he did the right thing -- as he still maintains -- why did he lie to police and attempt to destroy evidence? Why did he maintain Tracy died in her sleep (until evidence showed otherwise) rather than admit right away that he put Tracy in his truck and piped exhaust fumes into the cab? Own up to it and take the consequences -- if, in fact he did the right thing. The fact remains it was not the right thing. If Robert Latimer murdered one of his healthy children he would have been condemned in the eyes of the Canadian public. But he murdered his disabled child and became a folk-hero.

ROBERT LATIMER/SUSAN SMITH

Let me contrast Robert Latimer's crime with another that occured a year later. American Susan Smith put her car into a South Carolina lake, drowning her two little boys, Michael and Alex. Why was Susan Smith universally reviled for killing her children while Robert Latimer became a folk-hero after killing his child?

The difference is this: Susan Smith killed two healthy children while Robert Latimer killed one disabled child. Michael and Alex Smith were adorable. Most people would think Tracy Latimer was not even cute. What should we make of the difference in public responses? Are disabled children worth less than healthy children? Would Robert Latimer have become a folk-hero if Tracy had been a healthy child?

I don't think so. That's a reason I said Canada has a seething prejudice against the disabled -- and that prejudice extends to children. God forgive us.

MDP

CANADA'S SEETHING PREJUDICE AGAINST THE DISABLED

2012-03-21T21:07:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, Global Television Network in Canada featured a documentary about so-called mercy killing of children. The very fact that such a topic is even entertained on national television reveals something about the moral state of my country.

Annette Corriveau (R)

The documentary featured two parents: The first was Annette Corriveau who wants to euthanize her two severely disabled children who suffer from Sanfilippo syndrome. She says that her children, who live in institutionalized care, would opt for assisted suicide if they could communicate with her. How does she know that? They have been uncommunicative since early childhood. Corriveau says they wouldn't like to live the way they are. Of course they wouldn't. I don't want to live triplegic and electric wheelchair dependent from MS -- but that doesn't mean I am better off dead. Annette Corriveau's children have not expressed a wish to die, they can not communicate and it's doubtful they are aware of their circumstances or even their surroundings. It's their mother who wants them dead.

The second case featured on the Global documentary was that of Robert Latimer. He is the Saskatchewan farmer who murdered his disabled daughter Tracy back in 1993. She had cerebral palsy. A protracted legal saga ensued in Canada that eventually saw him him convicted of second degree murder. I will not go through the details of the trials.

What shocked me during the time that the case moved through various legal avenues, up to and including Canada's Supreme Court, was the sympathy and support Robert Latimer enjoyed from the courts, media and general public in ways he would not have had if he had murdered one of his healthy children. I was shocked because I did not fully realize at that time what low regard Canadians have for people with serious disabilities!

A trust fund was established for Robert Latimer's legal costs; it received close to $100,000 from across Canada! Many Canadians felt that Robert Latimer should not serve any time for killing his disabled daughter. Television interviews with people on streets of Canadian cities revealed stunning levels of public support for Robert Latimer. One man said that Latimer did a favour for his daughter by killing her. Others thought he did what was best for Tracy and should not have been charged with a crime. The judge Latimer's first trial issued an unprecedented "constitutional exemption" to Robert Latimer. Members of the jury in Latimer's second trial asked that he serve no more than one year in prison. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association petitioned the Justice Minister to reject Latimer's second degree sentence. Public opinion polls consistently revealed that over 70% of Canadians supported euthanasia for the terminally and chronically ill and assisted suicide for the disabled. Disabled people like me began to understand that the lives of chronically ill and disabled Canadians are viewed as having less worth than healthy Canadians and not deserving the same legal protections as the rest of the population.

In the Global TV program last weekend, journalist Jennifer Tryon said that the Latimer pitted morality against law. That is a view but not in the way Latimer and Tryon might think. Many of us within Canada's disability community believed it was profoundly immoral to murder Tracy Latimer and show lenience toward her killer in ways that would not have been shown if Latimer killed one of his healthy children.

At a personal level, I thought Robert Latimer should have been convicted of 1st degree murder not 2nd degree murder and evidence established during his trial showed premeditation.

There is a seething undercurrent of hostility against Canadians with disabilities -- and that hostility extends to children.

MDP

MEN & ABORTION

2012-03-12T12:10:00.000-07:00

I was recently asked to speak to representatives of the Knights of Columbus in Edmonton (Canada). Below is text of my presentation.

Mark Davis Pickup

__________________

I usually speak about euthanasia and assisted suicide. As someone who has been crippled with an aggressive and degenerative disease I am deeply concerned at devaluing of human life of Canadians who are chronically ill and seriously disabled. As you may or may not know, there is currently a legal challenge to Canada’s laws against euthanasia and assisted suicide that is coming out of British Columbia, and another out of Quebec. Public opinion polls have consistently revealed that 70% of Canadians are in favour of assisted suicide for the terminally and chronically ill and severely disabled. It is hard to believe that so many of my fellow Canadian citizens hold people like me in such low regard.

Keep in mind, legal challenges to Canada’s law against assisted suicide are happening in the wake of Canada’s Parliament giving all-party support last October to the idea of a national suicide prevention strategy – yet many of those same MPs also support assisted suicide for people like me. Although unstated, I hear what is being said. There is a common view that healthy but suicidal people should be prevented from taking their lives while suicidal disabled people should be helped to take their lives. People like me are seen in many circles as having less value than the rest of the population.

I don’t know why this should surprise me. Canada aborts unwanted or inconvenient preborn babies yet will go to extraordinary measures to save a wanted unborn child. Why does being wanted or unwanted, convenient or inconvenient define human value? (I thought civilized societies move toward enlightenment, not away from it.)

Civilized societies, by proper definition, protect the weakest, the unwanted and unloved, in all circumstances and eventualities. The great statesman and American founding father Thomas Jefferson said “The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.” This is true.

As you know, every year in Canada there approximately 100,000 abortions. Former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien once said there is social peace about this issue. He was wrong. His comment showed the difference between a politician and a statesman.

There is not social peace about abortion. It continues to tatter at the social fabric of this great nation. In Alberta, there are 12,000 abortions each year and they are all paid for by the taxpayers. A woman can have an abortion for any reason at all or no reason whatsoever and she can have as many abortions as she wants at taxpayer expense. This must not continue. People of good will, such as the Knights of Columbus, have an important role to play in turning around our culture. In many ways, Canada lost its moral compass on the critical life issues of our day.

Alberta is facing a provincial election in the near future. Ask your candidates where they stand on tax funding of abortion. If they say are pro-choice, tell them that 6-8 million dollars goes to pay for abortions annually in Alberta. Are they equally committed to providing that same amount of money to provide women with life-affirming alternatives to abortion? If their answer is no then they are not pro-choice, they are pro-abortion, and are unworthy of holding public office.

Personally I am even harder lined. If someone is so-called “pro-choice” I consider them unfit for public office. This has resulted in the accusation that I'm a one issue voter over this stand. No, I am concerned about many issues but this disqualifies a candidate in the same way that an anti-Semite disqualifies himself from public office. The right to life is the first and highest human right because all other human rights depend upon the right to life. A person who is pro-choice is not committed to universal human rights -- rather selective human rights.

In May, in cities across Canada, people of will participate in the annual March for Life. On May 17^th in Edmonton, it will begin at the provincial legislature and go to Churchill Square and back to the legislature. It provides an opportunity to send a message to those with the power to change things – that killing the most vulnerable Albertans is an outrage and barbaric. Paying the killers to do it is intolerable.

Beyond taking to the streets, pro-Life people have done many things to reach out to abortion-minded or post-abortive women. Pregnancy Counselling Centres in various communities reach out to women contemplating abortion. Project Rachel reaches out to post-abortive women.

Knights of Columbus have been a supportive part of the pro-Life equation. The purchase of an ultrasound for the Pregnancy Counselling Centre was a wonderful contribution.

Let me make a proposal: A few years ago, Columbus Magazine carried a story about a Knights' sponsored conference in San Francisco for men affected by abortion. If memory serves me correctly, they were not sure what kind of response they would get. They were stunned as men from across America registered for the conference. I would like to see a similar event for men in Alberta that would help them reconcile with God and themselves about something that may have bothered them for years and they kept in silence.

You see, for decades feminists told society that abortion was a women’s issue and only affects women. That is not true. For every abortion there is a man involved too. Let me tell about my experience.

When I was a teenager, my girlfriend and I found ourselves faced with an unwanted pregnancy. I pressured her to have an abortion. I did not want a baby, I wanted to party and have sex without consequences. She didn’t want to do have an abortion but I pressured her. Eventually she gave in to my pressure. She didn’t really know what an abortion was or that we were going to kill a child, not removing a blob of tissue as it was presented then (and still is). That woman later became my wife, LaRee. We have regretted our abortion for 40 years. Eventually LaRee sought counselling to help her resolve her grief. I was left to my own means.

In the years after the abortion, particularly after our next child and was born, there was the unstated remembrance that she was not my first child. Fatherhood fit me like a glove. I was the loving protector and provider for my children ― except for one. I poured myself into the pro-Life movement as penance for what I had done and to assuage my remorse.

There may be other men who have regrets about abortion. When a man is young and sowing his wild oats, so to speak, he may not care. That comes later. As he matures, his family takes on increasing importance. His careless and false start as a young man can become an underlying or private sorrow for him.

Why not sponsor a retreat/conference for men of abortion? How many men in Edmonton grieve lost fatherhood because of abortion! Are there one hundred or a thousand men? Until someone reaches out, we will not know.

In this city of a million people, even if there are only a hundred men who need to work through an abortion in their life, then a retreat or conference to help them is worth it. They need to forgive themselves and be reconciled with God.

This is one way the Knights of Columbus can contribute to the tragedy of abortion and encourage healing. Thank you.

MDP

AFTER-BIRTH ABORTION

2012-03-04T19:03:00.000-08:00

In a recent blog I addressed the idea of Christian perinatal hospice. It is a concept whereby parents facing a pregnancy involving a terminally ill unborn child are supported to carry their baby to term and prepare for their child’s death. It is a ministry of loving care for the entire family while honouring the humanity of their baby.

No sooner had I written the blog and I came across a disturbing article published in the March 23^rd 2012 edition of the Journal of Medical Ethics entitled “After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?” It was written by Dr. Alberto Giugilini at the University of Melbourne in Australia and Francesca Minerva who is associated with Oxford’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics in the United Kingdom.

AFTER-BIRTH ABORTION

In the article, Giugilini and Minerva state: “We claim that killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be. Such circumstances include cases where the newborn has the potential to have an (at least) acceptable life, but the well-being of the family is at risk.” They argue that newborn babies are only potential persons without any interests and should be subject to the interests of actual persons of their families. They try to extend the abortion mentality beyond birth: “If criteria such as the costs (social, psychological, economic) for the potential parents are good enough reasons for having an abortion even when the fetus is healthy, if the moral status of the newborn is the same as that of the infant and if neither has any moral value by virtue of being a potential person, then the same reasons which justify abortion should also justify the killing of the potential person when it is at the stage of a newborn.” Giugilini and Minerva do not identify when they think newborn babies should become actual people.

Their argument is not new, nor are they the only ones to advocate such things in the callous Brave New World of secular bioethics. American ethics professor at the University of Virginia and Harvard, Joseph Fletcher (1905-1991) was a pioneer of bioethics. Forty years ago, he advocated “post-birth abortion” for disabled newborns. His criteria for “post-birth abortion” was simple: If a baby does not increase happiness or reduce human suffering then the baby should die.

Princeton University professor Peter Singer has argued that infants have no moral right to life because they are not “persons.” In an interview he was asked when he thought an infant becomes a person? He said “sometime during the first year of life.” He has advocated the killing of healthy babies for more than 30 years. In 1981, Singer wrote:

Now it must be admitted that these arguments apply to the newborn baby as much as to the fetus. A week-old baby is not a rational and self-conscious being, and there are many non-human animals whose rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel pain (sentience), and so on, exceed that of a human baby a week, a month, or even a year old. If the fetus does not have the same claim to life as a person, it appears that the newborn baby is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee [Peter Singer, "Taking life: abortion", in Practical Ethics (London: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 118] (emphases added)

Princeton University

One might be inclined to relegate such ideas to quacks but that’s not true. These barbaric views come from professors at prestigious universities. More and more, what they espouse is being accepted in elite society and put into practise.

Why is the term “after-birth abortion” used instead of infanticide? Could it be that abortion is so pervasive and the abortion mentality so widely accepted, that couching infanticide in the abortion mentality is perceived as an easier sell to society? After all, the culture has coarsened to the point where killing disabled newborns is accepted, but not yet so coarse as to sanction the killing of healthy but unwanted babies. The idea will require some – how should I say it? – marketing.

Remember that abortion had to be marketed in the 1960s to soften public attitudes. Previous generations would be horrified at the wide-spread abortion we now have in Canada, the United States and Europe. What was unacceptable in the past, becomes tolerable today and commonplace tomorrow, unless checked by moral absolutes.

People who believe in a just and compassionate society of inclusion must stand up for the value of every human life even in a culture that no longer believes it (especially in a culture that no longer believes it).

MDP

RICK SANTORUM REPRESENTS THE BEST OF AMERICA

2012-03-01T12:48:00.005-08:00

Read Mark Pickup's latest blog "Rick Santorum Represents The Best of America" at http://markpickup.org

CHRISTIAN PERINATAL HOSPICE

2012-02-25T12:15:00.000-08:00

I do not know what it’s like to lose a child and I hope and pray I never do. All my children, and now grandchildren, are healthy and strong. My family is truly blessed and I try not to forget that fact.

There are expectant parents who face the terrible reality that their baby will be born with a terminal condition. They are usually told after a prenatal test and are given the choice of continuing the pregnancy or aborting their baby. Parents are often pressured to make their decision quickly, particularly later in pregnancy, given the complications that can arise. The problem is that they are overwhelmed by the devastating news; they are hardly in a position to make such a heavy decision.

According to Bill Saunders of Americans United for Life, only twenty percent of couples will bring their pregnancy to term.[1] Saunders also reveals that parents who chose abortion have deep regrets. Perinatal hospice can provide options that comfort, nurture and support for parents and also honours the humanity of their babies.

Perinatal hospice provides a continuum of medical, emotional and spiritual support and nurture for the family and their terminally ill baby. Working in concert with the obstetrical team, the perinatal hospice team provides support to the family -- in as much as they choose. It is important that perinatal hospice be Christian to help ensure the sanctity of all lives are upheld. (A secular perinatal hospice can't be trusted to understand the innate value and sanctity of the terminally ill unborn child.)[2]

This may involve helping prepare for the baby’s arrival and death, answering questions and concerns, or helping to create memories that will last and comfort the family in their loss. Perhaps it might include ultrasound images during the pregnancy, video recordings, making cast impressions of the baby’s hands and feet or taking snippets of hair for a memory box or scrapbook, and involving siblings and grandparents. Perinatal hospice can empower grieving parents to prepare for their baby’s birth and death. They may have months or only days to prepare. The goal is to support the parents to make the time they have uniquely theirs’.

When the baby arrives perinatal hospice ensures he/she is treated with love and respect by health care professionals the parents have come to know and trust. Perhaps a professional photographer of parents’ choice will be present to capture images and memories to be treasured. A priest may be on hand to give last rites. Perinatal hospice helps ensure Interdisciplinary plans are in place to ensure support for the family.

Time between the family and baby is respected. Even when the baby dies nurture for the parents does not stop because the family has had the support to say goodbyes to their baby. Any fears of abandonment are removed even after baby passes by perinatal care that encourages healing.

This is a dramatic contrast to the sudden separation that occurs when the pregnancy is terminated by abortion. In areas where perinatal hospice programs are available, up to eighty percent of parents facing a fatal anomaly of their unborn child will choose the perinatal option.[3]

Christian perinatal hospice options should be available in communities. Wouldn't it be a wonderful witness of Christ’s love for hurting parents? The following link is to a beautiful and sensitive video highlighting perinatal hospice. Is it an idea that's appropriate for your community?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tY7mq1g9pGk

MDP
NOTES
[1] See "Give Parents Perinatal Hospice Option Instead of Abortion" by Bill Saunders | Washington, DC | LifeNews.com | 1/4/11. http://www.lifenews.com/2011/01/04/give-parents-perinatal-hospice-option-instead-of-abortion/

[2] Regarding secular hospice, Founder and President of the Hospice Patients Alliance, Ron Panzer, voiced similar concerns about secular perinatal hospice. He observed "Giving birth to the baby and seeing how the baby does while giving all needed treatments and nourishment would be the expected choice for those who value the life of the baby. However, if one gives birth to the baby and then withholds food and fluids, and most likely terminally-sedate the baby, one is imposing death, just the same as is done with some elderly and severely disabled in hospice."

Panzer continued, "I am certain that the ability to use hospice for the newborn will be misused to end the lives of some babies who are not truly "terminal," but have congenital defects or chromosomal abnormalities/differences in the manner of pure eugenics. What is to stop "perinatal hospice" from being used to end the lives of say, Downs syndrome babies? The public (the parents) may "feel better" because they get to hold their baby for a while and love it, while its life is being ended "peacefully" as it sleeps to death. What's to stop terminal sedation from being applied here again? I have grave reservations about this because I know the hospice industry and how they think. " This is why perinatal hospice in the hands of secular bioethicists would prove disastrous. What's to stop the sorts of practices outlined by Mr. Panzer is to have an orthodox Christian foundation that is loyal to historic Church teaching and morality.

[3] M. D’Almeida et al., Perinatal Hospice: Family-Centered Care of the Fetus with a Lethal Condition, J. AMER. PHYSICIANS & SURGEONS 11:52 (2006); B.C. Calhoun & N. Hoeldtke, The Perinatal Hospice: Ploughing the Field of Natal Sorrow (2005).

ORGAN PHARMING IN MARYLAND?

2012-02-24T08:54:00.000-08:00

Top American bioethical thinker, writer and speaker, Wesley J. Smith, wrote a disturbing piece on his blog Secondhand Smoke published by First Things. He has given HumanLifeMatters permission to re-publish. See below. It is a frightening harbinger of the 21st Century world in which we live. Keep reading.

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Good grief! A Maryland state legislator has filed a bill that would allow surrogate decision makers to “donate” kidneys and liver lobes. From HB 449:

THIS SUBSECTION APPLIES ONLY TO A PATIENT WHO HAS BEEN CERTIFIED UNDER § 5–606(B) OF THIS SUBTITLE TO BE IN A PERSISTENT 8 VEGETATIVE STATE.
(3) A PERSON AUTHORIZED TO MAKE HEALTH CARE DECISIONS FOR ANOTHER UNDER THIS SECTION MAY AUTHORIZE THE DONATION OF A NONVITAL ORGAN IF THE DONATION IS BASED ON:
(I) THE WISHES OF THE PATIENT AS PREVIOUSLY EXPRESSED BY THE PATIENT; OR
(II) A DETERMINATION BY THE SURROGATE THAT THE DONATION IS CONSISTENT WITH THE PATIENT’S RELEVANT RELIGIOUS AND MORAL BELIEFS AND PERSONAL VALUES.

Unconscious patients would hardly seem to be in a state of health to permit such surgeries. But surely when people can’t make their own decisions, surrogates–as fiduciaries–must work solely for the medical benefit of the incompetent person.

I know people will say, “What if it is the patient’s child” or some such. But we can’t do it! We can’t treat incompetent patients as objects for the benefit of others. This proposal is merely the latest attempt to permit unconscious patients to be used as so many organ farms. And if the surgery kills the patient, why then other organs might be available. I repeat: Good grief.

HLM

(Wesley J. Smith's original blog of February 23rd 2012, can be accessed under the title "Bill To Allow Organ Farming From Unconscious Patients!" at http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/secondhandsmoke/)