We must transfer our collective faculty for care and compassion from thwarted or struggling adults to those children who need us. This need not be a matter of cruelty or stigma, but rather of reordering our priorities to what we know to be true. This is urgent: If we can’t even mount a normophilic defense of a baby’s need for his or her mother, we will have few resources left to defend our own organismic fundamentals in the face of the seemingly endless ambitions of biotech. Some are already preselecting IVF embryos based on genome analysis. Others propose the accelerated “evolution” of humans by means of in vitro gametogenesis. Others again propose gene-editing embryos. Just recently a breakthrough was announced in the synthetic creation of human embryos: in theory, children wholly without ancestors.

No one is coming to save us. We cannot wait for the “silent majority” to rise up and demand a return to common sense, or mumble about postponing action until we’ve re-Christianized the West, or until we’ve devised a fully worked-out post-Christian metaphysics of human nature. We may lament the Christianity-shaped hole in our discourse, but just because much of modern culture is post-Christian doesn’t mean we no longer have a nature. All we’ve lost is our common framework for naming that nature. We must speak the truth anyway. And wherever possible, we must redirect law and policy from the abolition of human nature to its flourishing.

Should this project be accused of oppressing or stigmatizing “the vulnerable,” we must recall that in reasserting the necessity of norms we are not attacking the most vulnerable. We are defending them. Normophobia imposed on babies and children an obligation to sacrifice their needs for the sake of our wayward desires. We must lift this burden from their little shoulders.

Read it all (registration or subscription).

Of Note: "Children’s needs have not changed just because adult desires have grown more unruly." https://t.co/awSIeT6jFW @moveincircles

— Inst. Family Studies (@FamStudies) March 13, 2024

In a statement, the Roman Catholic lead bishop for life issues, the Rt Revd John Sherrington, an auxiliary bishop in the archdiocese of Westminster, welcomed the committee’s decision “not to recommend the legalisation of assisted suicide”.

He continued: “As highlighted in the Committee’s report, experts have noted that there have been major problems in safeguarding the vulnerable and those without full mental capacity when assisted suicide and/or euthanasia has been introduced in other jurisdictions.

“Recognising the distress and suffering of those who are sick and vulnerable, I welcome the Committee’s recommendation that the accessibility and provision of palliative and end of life care needs to be improved — something the Catholic Church has consistently called for.”

Read it all (registration or subscription).

The Bishop of London @bishopSarahM has welcomed a report by MPs which calls for palliative and end-of-life care to be made more widely available https://t.co/5liE9iClCh

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) March 1, 2024

Sir Stephen has been Labour MP for East Ham in London since 1994, having first come to the area as part of a Christian mission to the East End while a university student…

He is on record as opposing legislation to introduce assisted dying, saying in a Westminster Hall debate in July 2022: “If we were to legalise assisted dying, we would impose an awful moral dilemma on every conscientious frail person nearing the end of their life. . . If ending their life early were legally permissible, many who do not want to end their life would feel under great, probably irresistible, pressure to do so. There is no way to stop that happening.”

On the Labour List site, he writes that “the radical individualism of some Conservatives” can prompt support for the legalisation of assisted suicide, “even at the risk of dire societal outcomes for the vulnerable. But in my view that should not be the position of those of us on the left.”

Read it all.

The Labour MP Sir Stephen Timms @stephenctimms has urged members of his party to give “careful thought” to the issue of assisted dying, arguing against that idea that it might be a party-political matterhttps://t.co/nXXt4xalNi

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) January 25, 2024

It is unsurprising that euthanasia consistently breaks its boundaries, always presented as an expansion of choice as the route to kindness. This is rooted in liberalism’s fundamental presuppositions, for as George Grant wrote, “it is the very signature of modern man to deny reality to any conception of good that imposes limits on human freedom … man’s essence is his freedom. Nothing must stand in the way of our absolute freedom to create the world as we want it. There must be no conceptions of good that put limitations on human action.” If there is no ultimate value towards which our lives point, then “the vaunted freedom of the individual to choose becomes either the necessity of finding one’s role in the public engineering or the necessity of retreating into the privacy of pleasure”. We are reduced to utilitarian measures of the good, achieved through harm reduction and happiness maximisation, materialistically defined.

The result of the liberal conception of the human person is expressive individualism, where “persons are conceived merely as atomized individual wills whose highest flourishing consists in interrogating the interior depths of the self in order to express and freely follow the original truths discovered therein toward one’s self-invented destiny”. This conception of the human person privileges cognition, will, rationality and autonomy in defining full personhood. Our nature as embodied souls is largely ignored: if one cannot employ one’s body to achieve the desires of one’s autonomous, rational, willed cognition, then one cannot achieve full personhood.

As a result, the constraints of our existential finitude made so explicit by disability are seen as immoral barriers to maximal autonomy attained through rational will. The unchosen bonds of interdependence, obligation, reciprocity and mutual loyalty that comprise the texture and meaning of life are denigrated. Liberalism discards the weak just as the Greco-Roman world once did, now done for reasons of supposed benevolence. From Locke onwards, liberalism has always seen some more capable of, and suited to, forming political society than others. Mill took this furthest in his proposal of colonisation and slavery for those less capable of freedom.

It is not such a stretch from liberalism’s definition of the individual’s capacity for personhood to advocating the killing of disabled infants deemed incapable of fulfilling this. As Leon Kass has written, it is no surprise that those Germans who coined the phrase “life unworthy of life” were two liberals: a jurist and an academic. Better to curb the depersonalised source of the suffering with all haste. James Burnham viewed liberalism as the ideological legitimator and enabler of Western suicide. I’m not sure he meant for the title of his book to be taken so literally, across so many countries.

Read it all from 2022.

As assisted suicide is in the news again, re-upping my piece for @TheCriticMag from last year, in which I argue that assisted suicide is not only wrong in itself, but that it’s the logical endpoint of the liberal view of the human person https://t.co/ZMK8sy5Pyh

— Henry George (@intothefuture45) December 22, 2023

Assisted suicide is banned in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, with a maximum prison sentence of 14 years. While there is no specific offence of assisted suicide in Scotland, euthanasia is illegal and can be prosecuted as murder or culpable homicide.
Rantzen says she’s joined assisted dying clinic

Mr Stride, one of 27 Conservative MPs who voted for the 2015 bill, said he thought some MPs could be wondering “whether this should be something we look at again”.

“The government has not decided to bring forward legislation,” he told the Today programme on Wednesday, “but if Parliament in some form or another decided that it wanted to have a fresh look at this, given it was some years ago that we last did so, that’s not something that I would be resistant to.”

Read it all.

Glad this article calls this for what it is: assisted suicide. I have argued against this in all my episcopal roles and will continue to do so. Investment in palliative care is essential. It will so often be the vulnerable who would suffer most in this. https://t.co/g94iLf0yQZ

— Bishop of Newcastle (@BishopNewcastle) December 20, 2023

Five years ago, Tiffany Gardner learned she had another father. She already had two.

One had colon cancer and died when Gardner was 4 years old. Her adoptive father taught her to drive and walked her down the aisle at her wedding. At 35 years old, when Gardner received news of a third, “I remember the room spinning,” she said.

Gardner had been in her mother’s kitchen. During the conversation, her mother let go of a long-held secret about the man Gardner had long believed to be her father. He was in an accident, her mother said. He had to relearn how to walk and talk. I couldn’t get pregnant. The doctors said the accident had likely left him infertile. We used a sperm donor.

“I felt I was falling backwards trying to process the moment,” recalled Gardner, a lawyer in the Atlanta area and the mother of three boys. Among her feelings was a desire to meet her newly uncovered biological father. It didn’t take long to find him online.

Read it all.

“There’s nothing comparable to your genetic parent breaking up with you." Amazing journey from @AmyDMarcus on how we're defining family in the age of assisted fertility technologies and DNA testing. https://t.co/bLm7bgMuzo via @WSJ

— Stefanie Ilgenfritz (@stefaniei) June 16, 2023

There is no near-term prospect of the synthetic embryos being used clinically. It would be illegal to implant them into a patient’s womb, and it is not yet clear whether these structures have the potential to continue maturing beyond the earliest stages of development.

The motivation for the work is for scientists to understand the “black box” period of development that is so called because scientists are only allowed to cultivate embryos in the lab up to a legal limit of 14 days. They then pick up the course of development much further along by looking at pregnancy scans and embryos donated for research.

Robin Lovell-Badge, the head of stem cell biology and developmental genetics at the Francis Crick Institute in London, said: “The idea is that if you really model normal human embryonic development using stem cells, you can gain an awful lot of information about how we begin development, what can go wrong, without having to use early embryos for research.”

Read it all.

This is a significant development that raises important questions about both the boundaries of human life and the future of the family. https://t.co/nLuWEdWJ6q

— Matthew Lee Anderson (@mattleeanderson) June 15, 2023

Hannah Daniel, the ERLC’s policy manager, told Baptist Press, “We believe all people are made in the image of God and possess immeasurable worth and value. Life is precious from the earliest moment of conception to natural death. Those who are struggling physically, mentally or emotionally should be met with the highest quality of care and compassion, not given assistance to end their life.”

The legislation “would have established Nevada as a destination for assisted suicide, and we joined arms with Nevada Baptists in urging Governor Lombardo to veto it,” she said in written comments.

The legislation would have allowed a doctor or advanced practice registered nurse to prescribe a lethal dose of a drug for an adult patient. The proposal gained narrow passage in both houses, 23-19 in the Assembly and 11-10 in the Senate. The majorities were far short of the two-thirds vote required to overturn a veto.

In a written veto message, Lombardo, a Republican, said the bill was unnecessary because of “expansions in palliative care services and continued improvements in advanced pain management.”

Read it all.

"Life is precious from the earliest moment of conception to natural death. Those who are struggling physically, mentally or emotionally should be met with the highest quality of care and compassion, not given assistance to end their life." – @hannahedaniel https://t.co/9Ngp5C5Lcd

— ERLC (@ERLC) June 9, 2023

It is not often in life when you have the choice to discover something about yourself, which could potentially rock your equilibrium and throw you into a completely unknown direction. Do you stay comfortable in the known, never really risking what it would take to understand a mystery, or do you trust in a faithful God, taking the chance that after the door has been opened, only one thing is certain: life will never be the same as it was before?

That was the position Father Chris Culpepper (52) found himself in 22 years ago, when as a 30 year-old youth minister at Saint Andrews parish in downtown Fort Worth, Texas, he received a call out of the blue from his parents asking him to come over to talk and go for a walk.

“That’s always how you know something happened in my family when you’re asked to go for a walk–usually it’s good, but sometimes you don’t know. And so, we went for the walk as we always did, and they asked me if I knew a lady named Sharon Kolb. And I mean, I was racking my brain from all facets of my life and just could not come to recognizing the name. And they said, ‘Well, she’s your birth mother.’”

Read it all.

Watch the heartwarming story of a rector who was adopted at birth and reunited with his birth mother later in life. https://t.co/ZOTlWzGYdf Read the full story or watch the full interview at https://t.co/M2J9O8ciEe #nationaladoptionmonth #adoptionstories #Adoption

— ACNA (@The_ACNA) November 8, 2022

How then can we as Christians respond to the matter of physician-assisted death? First, we can call upon reason and the light of nature to affirm absolutely the value of life. Assisted death and suicide is said to be a matter of respect.

But to value a person is to value their existence. A willingness to deliberately end someone’s existence therefore necessarily devalues the person. If people matter, we must not intentionally end them.

Second, our churches can be communities where assisted death is inconceivable because the weak, the aged, the disabled, and the dying are regarded as priceless members of the community. We can be a place where those who suffer enjoy the devoted companionship, love, and support that reminds them of their value and bears them up through pain. This is, after all, what all of us long for.

Third, we can advocate for access to the very best medical and palliative care for those who are suffering or dying. The palliative care movement was started by a Christian physician, Dame Cicely Saunders, and has transformed medical care at the end of life. Yet access to good palliative care in the US, Canada, and the rest of the world is still far too limited.

Read it all.

“Assisted death is no longer seen as a desperate option of last resort but rather as one ‘therapeutic option’ among many … offered to those whose lives are not regarded as worth living.”https://t.co/jqTcFTWzIP

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) October 18, 2022

Krista Carr, executive vice president of Inclusion Canada, is one such Canadian. “Most families of children born with disabilities are told from the start that their child will, in one way or another, not have a good quality of life,” she told the National Post. “Canada cannot begin killing babies when doctors predict there is no hope for them. Predictions are far too often based on discriminatory assumptions about life with a disability.”

Roy’s statement is merely the latest episode in a series of euthanasia horror stories from Canada that are shocking even to dulled Western sensibilities. Canada’s Supreme Court overturned criminal prohibitions on assisted suicide in Carter v. Canada in 2015. Shortly afterward, parliament passed Bill C-14 in 2016, which legalized “medical aid in dying” (or MAiD) for adults with “enduring and intolerable suffering” and a “reasonably foreseeable death.” In 2021, Bill C-7 was passed, which legalized MAiD for those struggling with mental illness. Canada has become an international cautionary tale.

Impoverished people are turning to MAiD out of desperation because they cannot access the resources they need or the treatments they require in Canada’s broken healthcare system. The Toronto Star—the largest and most liberal newspaper in the country—called it “Hunger Games style social Darwinism.” The story detailed how one woman is considering assisted suicide because she cannot find an affordable place to live in her city with wheelchair access. Her tale is becoming a common one.

Sixty-three-year-old Alan Philips, who has lived with chronic pain for almost two decades, recently got approved for assisted suicide after trying for eighteen years to get spinal fusion surgery to relieve his agony. He cannot get the surgery and has been prescribed opioids instead. “I cannot get adequate healthcare,” he said.

Read it all.

Canada will soon offer doctor-assisted suicide to patients who suffer from something which (to quote the law) “cannot be relieved under conditions that you consider acceptable." A nightmarish dispatch from @JVanMaren https://t.co/qevH7bVE3L

— Samuel D. James (@samueld_james) October 19, 2022

Dr Simon Eyre (Chichester), a retired GP, moved a private member’s motion on the subject on Sunday afternoon. “Hospices are suffering from a lack of funding,” he said, and linked this to a pressure to change the law to allow assisted suicide. People might choose to end their lives prematurely rather than face suffering exacerbated by poor-quality palliative care, he said.

“Sanctity of life is central to our understanding as Christians,” he said, and cited Psalm 31: “Our times are in his hands”.

Terminally ill people with depression, and people with disabilities, including learning disabilities, would be put at risk if legislation was changed, Dr Eyre said.

The Suicide Act 1961 prohibits assisted suicide, although directions from the Crown Prosecution Service published in 2010 require that any prosecution be in the “public interest”.

Several attempts have been made in recent years to introduce legislation that would permit assisted suicide in some circumstances, most recently in the form of a Bill in the House of Lords, which failed to reach a Second Reading before Parliament was prorogued in April.

Dr Eyre conceded that palliative care “sometimes fails to deliver”, but said that “the response to this should be to improve palliative care rather than make changes to the Suicide Act.”

Read it all.

“Hospices are suffering from a lack of funding.” https://t.co/opyIeRrAcA

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) July 11, 2022

Following a debate, members backed a Private Member’s Motion (PMM) paying tribute to the ‘enormous and untiring’ efforts of health professionals working in palliative and end of life care.

They called on the Government to guarantee adequate funding and resourcing of palliative care services to ensure the highest possible standards of care for all. Members further affirmed that the law on Assisted Suicide should remain unchanged.

General Synod member Dr Simon Eyre, from the Diocese of Chichester, introducing the PMM, called for the Government to ensure adequate funding for hospices over the next decade.

He said palliative care was currently ‘insufficiently comprehensive’ with only one palliative care consultant per 100,000 of the population.

Read it all.

Synod rejects assisted dying by a large majority – via @ChurchTimes https://t.co/YXZ508Ss4b

— Religion Media Centre (@RelMedCentre) July 11, 2022

Yet even though she is grateful that Roe has been overturned, Prior cautioned Christians against being hasty with how they move forward, saying that Roe’s absence gives us a unique opportunity to create beneficial legislation.

“For example,” said Prior, “we need to learn the difference between between intervening in the case of an ectopic pregnancy, which is going to be fatal to both mother and child and an abortion.” Because Roe was the law of the land for so long, Christians haven’t had to think through how the answer to such questions will impact the laws we create—but now in some states we have new opportunities.

Said Prior, “We’re going to have to educate ourselves quickly and thoughtfully and not just rush to put legislation in place that would be disastrous or uninformed or medically irresponsible. Of course, we want all of these laws to protect all of the human lives involved, but that’s not something that happens quickly and overnight. We have to really understand what it means to be pro-life and how to apply that in principle.”

Read it all.

While the American church has much to be thankful for with the reversal of Roe v. Wade, says Karen Swallow Prior, it is important to move forward with caution, nuance and compassion. @KSPrior https://t.co/PD9l2eKvxs @ChurchLead #KarenSwallowPrior #abortion

— ChurchLeaders.com (@ChurchLead) June 30, 2022

People often say that abortion isn’t mentioned in the Bible. But the command to protect and honor Life is implicit in every word of Scripture.

First, we need to understand that the value of human life is based in our creation by God and in our redemption through Jesus. “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own, you were bought at a price. Therefore, honor God with your body.” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). Our lives have value not because they are ours but because they are His! For this reason, we must live our lives giving glory to God and living in His statues. In this way, Scripture firmly contradicts the “my body, my choice” mantra of abortion supporters.

Second, because our lives have value in Him, we as His people are called to protect and honor all Life. The clearest evidence of this is in the commandment, “You shall not murder.” (Exodus 20:13) But even earlier, in the book of Genesis, God declares that the spilling of man’s blood is inherently wrong, due to our status as God’s beloved creation: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man.” (Genesis 9:6)

True, society in general believes that murder is wrong. However, Scriptures show that “valuing” Life goes beyond avoiding the act of killing. Honoring the sacredness of Life means serving those in need and sharing the love of God. Christ demonstrates how we should do this: “For I was hungry, and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty, and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in…Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for Me.” (Matthew 25:41-45) Being a life-affirming Christian means more than opposing death—it means serving those who are hurting, lonely, and broken. It means caring for the “least of these,”—the unborn, the homeless, the single mothers, the elderly, and the handicapped. Because our lives are valuable to God, so theirs must be to us.

God didn’t “forget” to talk about abortion, assisted suicide, or euthanasia in the Scriptures. The gift of Life is proclaimed in all of God’s commands and in everything that God has created, including us.

Read it all.

Why are Anglicans Pro-Life? https://t.co/oQXLUB6xDW

— The Diocese of Western Anglicans (@westernanglican) June 29, 2022

The U.S. Supreme Court’s courageous decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is a win for life and the Constitution. That historic ruling finally reverses the court’s disastrous opinion in Roe v. Wade—a decision that made up a constitutional right to abortion and resulted in the deaths of more than 60 million unborn children. Because of the court’s ruling in Dobbs, states may now fully protect unborn life.

The Mississippi law at issue in the case, the Gestational Age Act, protects unborn children and the health of their pregnant mothers based on the latest science. It protects unborn life after 15 weeks of gestational age—a point in time when babies can move and stretch, hiccup, and quite likely feel pain. It permits abortions to save the life of the mother or for severe fetal abnormalities. Despite the modesty of Mississippi’s law, the lower courts struck it down because no matter what science showed, or how strong a state’s interest in protecting unborn life was, under the Roe regime, states may not protect life until viability—about 22 weeks of gestational age.

Dobbs is a win for life. Fifty years of scientific progress and innovation establish what the Bible has always taught: Life begins at conception. Ultrasound technology allows expectant parents to see the truth of Psalm 139: Children are fearfully and wonderfully made from the very beginning.

Under Roe v. Wade, moreover, the United States has been an extreme outlier in abortion law and policy. As the chief justice noted during oral arguments, the United States is one of only six nations, including China and North Korea, that allow elective abortions through all nine months of pregnancy. The Washington Post recently ranked the United States as the fourth most liberal abortion country in the world. Most countries do not allow elective abortions at all, and 75 percent protect life after 12 weeks of gestation.

Read it all.

Here's is WORLD Opinions' second special edition editorial from @ADFLegal's Erin Hawley and @KWaggonerADF https://t.co/DPENWC7lgK

— Andrew T. Walker (@andrewtwalk) June 24, 2022

Today the United States Supreme Court ruled that “the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion,” overruling Roe v. Wade (1973). The decision will “return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives … to be resolved like most important questions in our democracy: by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting.” In the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a five Justice majority of the Supreme Court overruled both Roe and the 1992 decision Planned Parenthood v. Casey.[1]

The inherent value of human life is revealed in the Scriptures, and this biblical commitment is reflected in the Anglican Church in North America’s Constitution and Canons which calls all members and clergy “to promote and respect the sanctity of every human life from conception to natural death” (Title II.8.3).

Archbishop Beach commented:

While this decision doesn’t end abortion in the U.S., it will lead to fewer children being killed through abortion. We thank God for this limited victory, and the Anglican Church in North America recommits itself to serving mothers so they can embrace motherhood and welcome their children. We also continue to point the way to God’s healing and forgiveness for all who suffer physically and emotionally from their abortion experiences.

Read it all.

Let us give thanks to God for this decision and continue to work to safeguard and promote life. Let us also continue to care and minister to those who continue to suffer from the effects of abortion in their own lives. Read more at:https://t.co/tht8oSTEAl #SCOTUS

— ACNA (@The_ACNA) June 24, 2022

The Supreme Court on Friday eliminated the constitutional right to obtain an abortion, casting aside 49 years of precedent that began with Roe v. Wade.

The decision by Justice Samuel Alito will set off a seismic shift in reproductive rights across the United States. It will allow states to ban abortion, and experts expect about half the states to do so.

In one of the most anticipated rulings in decades, the court overturned Roe, which first declared a constitutional right to abortion in 1973, and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which re-affirmed that right in 1992. The decision followed the leak in early May of a draft opinion showing that a majority of the justices were privately poised to take that step. On Friday, they made it official.

The vote was 6-3. Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett joined Alito’s opinion. Chief Justice John Roberts did not join the opinion but agreed with the result and filed a separate opinion. The court’s three liberals, Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, filed a joint dissent.

Read it all.

The Supreme Court voted 6 to 3 to overturn Roe v. Wade, ending the constitutional right to an abortion.

Read the majority opinion of the court: https://t.co/gGGw6aW8zs

— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 24, 2022

The Supreme Court has voted to strike down the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito circulated inside the court and obtained by POLITICO.

The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – that largely maintained the right. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes.

“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” he writes in the document, labeled as the “Opinion of the Court.” “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

Read it all.

Breaking news: A majority of the Supreme Court is prepared to overturn the right to abortion established nearly 50 years ago in Roe v. Wade, according to a leaked draft of the opinion published Monday by Politico. https://t.co/kNmy2LFGnU pic.twitter.com/YFzp6Iy2OD

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) May 3, 2022

A Japanese woman has given up her baby for adoption after discovering the sperm donor lied about his education and ethnicity.

The woman, identified only as a Tokyo resident in her 30s, is suing the man in a case that has cast light on Japan’s widely unregulated sperm donation industry.

She is seeking around 330 million yen (£2m) for emotional distress, claiming he lied in order to have sex with her, in the first legal case of its kind, according to Japanese media.

The woman and her husband reportedly came into contact with the man, who is in his 20s, via a social media sperm donation account while trying to conceive their second child.

Read it all (registration).

A Japanese woman has given up her baby for adoption after discovering the sperm donor lied about his education and ethnicity https://t.co/xbsCPVRiiC

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) January 13, 2022

[Warning: contains difficult subject matter] As Matthew van Antwerpen, a 17-year-old in suburban Dallas, struggled with remote schooling during the pandemic last year, he grew increasingly despondent. Searching online, he found a website about suicide.

“Any enjoyment or progress I make in my life simply comes across as forced,” he wrote on the site after signing up. “I know it is all just a distraction to blow time until the end.”

Roberta Barbos, a 22-year-old student at the University of Glasgow, first posted after a breakup, writing that she was “unbearably lonely.” Shawn Shatto, 25, described feeling miserable at her warehouse job in Pennsylvania. And Daniel Dal Canto, a 16-year-old in Salt Lake City, shared his fears that an undiagnosed stomach ailment might never get better.

Soon after joining, each of them was dead.

Read it all.

As a reporter covering mental health & a mother I am horrified by ⁦@nytimes⁩ reporting. And think if we don’t recognize & stop this we will keep losing people. (huge warning-deals with suicide) https://t.co/eFhSBEfvUQ

— Kate Snow (@tvkatesnow) December 9, 2021

Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) act began to operate in 2016. It is a laboratory for how legalised euthanasia will operate in a largely English-speaking country. And, according to an article in the journal Palliative Care written by five Canadian specialists, it has had a very negative effect upon palliative care.

The authors interviewed 13 doctors and 10 nurses about their impressions. Some of the feedback is unexpected.

First, all of them spoke about an inherent conflict between the provision of palliative care (PC) and eligibility for MAiD. To ensure that their patients remained eligible, they had to withhold medications which would have otherwise removed or alleviated their pain. “Maintaining lucidity and eligibility for assisted death, by avoiding sedative medications, took priority over achieving good symptom control for some patients,” they write. Both the patients and the PC providers found this distressing.

Read it all.

"13 #doctors and 10 #nurses… spoke about an inherent #conflict between the provision of #palliativecare (PC) and eligibility for #MAiD. To ensure that their #patients remained #eligible, they had to withhold [#pain] #medications" https://t.co/xd1X3UHJXU#nursing #medical #VAD

— BioEdge (@bioedge) November 8, 2021

Foes of mandatory coverage of abortion in New York State insurance law will have another hearing after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a New York state court to reconsider their decision. The law’s narrow religious exemption wrongly disqualifies many religious groups which object to providing abortion, critics said.

A group of Anglican nuns is among the objectors.

“We believe that every person is made in the image of God,” said Mother Miriam of the Sisterhood of Saint Mary, an Anglican body. “That’s why we believe in the sanctity of human life, and why we seek to serve those of all faiths—or no faith at all—in our community. We’re grateful that the Supreme Court has taken action in our case and hopeful that, this time around, the New York Court of Appeals will preserve our ability to serve and encourage our neighbors.”

The Sisterhood of Saint Mary, also known as the Sisters of the Community of St. Mary, is aligned with the Anglican Church in North America. It was founded in 1865 and claims to be the oldest Anglican religious order in the United States.

Read it all.

"We’re grateful that #SCOTUS has taken action in our case and hopeful that, this time around, the New York Court of Appeals will preserve our ability to serve and encourage our neighbors.” #ReligiousFreedom #ProLife @BECKETlaw https://t.co/UeeOUmfVke

— Catholic News Agency (@cnalive) November 1, 2021

Sadly, I believe this Bill to be unsafe. As a curate and parish priest I spent time with the dying, the sick and the bereaved. I still do. All of us have personal experience. I have as well. We know that the sad truth is that not all people are perfect, not all families are happy, not everyone is kind and compassionate. No amount of safeguards can perfect the human heart, no amount of regulation can make a relative kinder or a doctor infallible. No amount of reassurance can make a vulnerable or disabled person feel equally safe, equally valued, if the law is changed in this way.

All of us here are united in wanting compassion and dignity for those coming to the end of their lives.

But it does not serve compassion if by granting the wishes of one closest to me, I expose others to danger.

And it does not serve dignity if in granting the wishes of one closest to me I devalue the status and safety of others.

Read it all.

No amount of reassurance can make a vulnerable or disabled person feel equally safe, or equally valued, by the changes that the Assisted Dying Bill seeks to make.https://t.co/Lnl7elrR7U

— Archbishop of Canterbury (@JustinWelby) October 22, 2021

We largely have Christianity to thank for our faltering modern belief that human life is sacred. The ancients took a much more casual approach. Unwanted babies were abandoned to die or be rescued by strangers: like Romulus and Remus, Rome’s mythical founders, who were raised by a wolf.

Much as new lives were not automatically worth preserving, taking your own life in the ancient world wasn’t automatically bad either. Socrates’ decision to drink hemlock rather than face exile, was deemed honourable by many ancient philosophers.

Christian doctrine, though, taught that human life is sacred, because it holds a spark of the divine. Thus only God should be permitted to give or take life. The 325AD Council of Nicaea decreed that every Christian village should have a hostelry for the sick, a principle which extended to abandoned children. For the same reason, a long-standing Christian tradition forbids suicide. But as the Christian era has faded, so old debates about the beginning and end of life have re-surfaced – most recently, in the accelerating campaign to legalise assisted dying.

Read it all.

An excellent and very moving piece from @moveincircles in @unherd, with a historical view to what happens when societies sacrifice the worth of each human life on the altar of the supposed prize of "choice". @holland_tom might find this interesting! https://t.co/ctHMpgQrzN

— Lois McLatchie (@LoisMcLatch) October 22, 2021

In the coming days this issue will return to Parliament as Baroness Meacher seeks to bring forward legislation which will allow assisted dying.

Or, in the words of some opponents of the Bill, it will enable state-approved euthanasia.

Previous attempts at changing legislation have argued that such a move would offer empowerment to the dying and increase choice for those with life limiting conditions on how to end their lives.

But the impact of enabling such choice has consequences which we have seen elsewhere in countries which have already gone down this road. In Belgium and the Netherlands, where assisted dying laws were passed under the banner of enabling choice for those with terminal conditions, assisted deaths are now legal on the basis of mental illness, learning disability and autism. Is it any wonder that of the 12 organisations representing disabled people in the UK none of them supports an Assisted Dying Bill?

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My piece for @TheNorthernEcho ahead of Friday's debate in the House of Lords.
We should assist people to live – not to die https://t.co/wy7UDHAqpm

— Arun Arora (@RevArun) October 20, 2021

The three faith leaders highlight the risks and dangers entailed in the provisions of the Bill and the ‘real-life’ practical inadequacies of its proposed safeguards.

The common good is not served by policies or actions that would place very many vulnerable people in more vulnerable positions, they warn.

They appeal for people of all faiths and none to join with them through the ‘common bond of humanity’ in caring for the most vulnerable in society.

In contrast to the Bill, the faith leaders call for measures to make high-quality palliative care available to all at the end of their lives.

The aim of a compassionate society should be ‘assisted living’ rather than an acceptance of assisted suicide, they note.

Read it all.

The aim of a compassionate society should be assisted living rather than an acceptance of assisted suicide.@CardinalNichols, @chiefrabbi and I appeal to all people – of whatever faith or belief – to care for the most vulnerable within our society:https://t.co/jMK1IRUysd

— Archbishop of Canterbury (@JustinWelby) October 20, 2021

The authors speak of ‘safeguards’ to ensure that vulnerable people are not put at risk and reference the provisions of the ‘Meacher Bill’. Safeguards on paper, however, are worthless unless they can be consistently, universally and comprehensively translated into practice.

It is a tragic irony that on the day the authors’ article was published, news headlines were dominated by the deaths of three vulnerable adults in Care. In spite of every written policy, protocol, and approved practice, their reality was tragically different.

These were not isolated incidents; we have only to think of the hundreds of avoidable deaths in the Mid-Staffs hospital scandal, abuse of residents with learning disabilities in Eldertree Lodge and ‘systemic biases contributing to unequal mortality outcomes in ethnic minority women and women facing multiple problems and deprivation’.

We can add to this, the recent experience of many elderly care home residents in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic who were given DNACPR notices without proper protocols being followed.

Human lapses and failings build upon one another until catastrophic outcomes ensue…a process that, in too many instances, no amount of assumed monitoring or paper safeguards has been able to capture, never mind stop.

What can possibly give us confidence that similar safeguards will provide a better outcome if the law on assisted suicide were to be changed?

Read it all.

"We must not gamble with vulnerable people's lives."
– Revd Dr Brendan McCarthy

Our adviser on medical ethics has responded to calls for 'doctor assisted dying'.

Read the full response at https://t.co/ds1sDdkFGz.

— The Church of England (@churchofengland) September 14, 2021

When it comes to stories about prolific gamete donors, it’s typically sperm donors and sperm banks who get the attention for producing donor siblings families in the dozens—and sometimes in the hundreds. In recent years, stories have surfaced about donor siblings connecting through private Facebook groups, and often finding their donors through DNA tests. Who can forget the 2013 Vince Vaughn comedy, Delivery Man, about a childless man having a midlife crisis who discovers that he had fathered over 500 kids conceived with sperm he donated in his youth. These are the extreme consequences of the age of “collaborative reproduction,” a term coined by the late John Robertson, a law professor and bioethicist at the University of Texas at Austin, to describe the expanded array of civil rights for LGBTQ+ families, lifestyle choices, and medically assisted methods of reproduction available to 21st century families. A large and growing component of collaborative reproduction is the increasingly open roles that surrogates and gamete donors often play in these modern families.

It’s less common, however, to hear stories of such prolific egg donors like Tyra. At a time when so many Millennials like her have become less interested in marriage and children and are also delaying having children for their careers, she is a new kind of female fertility archetype: nurturing and distant at the same time. She fulfills her sense of altruism and her desire to procreate, but in a directly transactional way, selling access to her body and body parts for her own financial gain and freedom. “I’d say it’s 50 percent business, 50 percent having a purpose,” she says. “I never fall into a career. I always thought I’d be a professional athlete between volleyball and golf. And I got my pilot’s license at a young age, but I never fell into my niche. I feel like maybe procreating for others is it.”

Read it all.

With 27 biological children and three surrogate pregnancies under her belt, it’s all business as usual for Tyra Reeder.https://t.co/P9V4PthXDW

— NEO.LIFE (@NEOdotLIFE) July 15, 2021

Farron also believes that honesty and integrity in public office holders are key factors that have been largely missing in much of public life both in government and the church. He said, “we’ve almost got to the point where there’s little accountability”. He went on, “All lead by example—either good or bad”.

He thinks JKA Smith’s book, ‘Awaiting the King’ offers a pretty good explanation of the current situation. Farron said in one portion, “King refers to ‘western liberal democracies bearing the crater marks of the gospel’ and agreeing explained; “even though we may not largely be a Christian country today, our values, norms and institutions are nevertheless based on a Christian world view: justice, grace, personal responsibility, care for the needy, the knowledge that if people are sinners then you don’t want power concentrated in the hands of too few of them! The ‘crater marks’ point is more that as we move away from Christianity, then those marks will become fainter and fainter until such point that integrity may matter less and less”.

When asked about what he sees as the next big moral issues facing the nation he was quick and to the point: 1.) “the effort to decriminalise all abortion up to the point of birth”; and, 2.) “assisted dying”. He does not believe that the former will find the support necessary to be approved by parliament and that assisted dying will be a big battle.

Read it all.

.@timfarron interviewed by @1761Ec: 'When asked about what he sees as the next big moral issues facing the nation he was quick and to the point: 1.) “the effort to decriminalise all abortion up to the point of birth”; and, 2.) “assisted dying”.'
Quite so.https://t.co/CAstW3TNCw

— Adrian Hilton (@Adrian_Hilton) July 16, 2021