The Holy Orthodox Christian Faith is unabashedly pro-life. The Lord Jesus Christ was recognized and worshipped in His mother’s womb while yet unborn by the Holy Forerunner who was also still in his mother’s womb (Luke 1:44); St. Basil the Great (4th Century), one of the universal teachers of the faith, dared to call murderers those who terminate the life of the fetus. The Church has consistently held that children developing in the womb should be afforded every protection given to those outside the womb. There is no moral, religious or scientific rationale which can justify making a distinction between the humanity of the newly-conceived and that of the newly-born.

Abortion on demand not only ends the life of a child, but also injures the mother of that child, often resulting in spiritual, psychological and physical harm. Christians should bring the comfort of the Gospel to women who have had abortions, that our loving God may heal them. The Orthodox Church calls on her children, and indeed all of society, to provide help to pregnant mothers who need assistance brining their children safely into the world and providing these children loving homes.

On the occasion of this sorrowful anniversary, and as we mourn the violence we all too often visit upon one another, as exemplified by the recent mass killings in Aurora, Colorado and Newtown, Connecticut, we pray for an end to the violence of abortion. Surely the many ways in which we as a people diminish the reverence and respect for human life underlie much of this violence. The disrespect for human life in the womb is no small part of this. Let us offer to Almighty God our repentance for the evil of abortion on demand and extend our hearts and hands to embrace life.

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“We the People” have not and will not ratify the lethal logic of Roe v. Wade. That notorious decision of 1973 is the most consequential moral and political event of the last half century of our nation’s history. It has produced a dramatic realignment of moral and political forces, led by evangelicals and Catholics together, and joined by citizens beyond numbering who know that how we respond to this horror defines who we are as individuals and as a people. Our opponents, once so confident, are now on the defensive. Having lost the argument with the American people, they desperately cling to the dictates of the courts. No longer able to present themselves as the wave of the future, they watch in dismay as a younger generation recoils in horror from the bloodletting of an abortion industry so arrogantly imposed by judges beyond the rule of law.

We do not know, we do not need to know, how the battle for the dignity of the human person will be resolved. God knows, and that is enough. As Mother Teresa of Calcutta and saints beyond numbering have taught us, our task is not to be successful but to be faithful. Yet in that faithfulness is the lively hope of success. We are the stronger because we are unburdened by delusions. We know that in a sinful world, far short of the promised Kingdom of God, there will always be great evils. The principalities and powers will continue to rage, but they will not prevail.

In the midst of the encroaching darkness of the culture of death, we have heard the voice of him who said, “In the world you will have trouble. But fear not, I have overcome the world.” Because he has overcome, we shall overcome. We do not know when; we do not know how. God knows, and that is enough.

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The only time my fondness for [New York Times columnist Gail] Collins takes a hit is when she writes about abortion, and not only because we disagree. On that subject I find she writes, like so many other progressives, as though there are no difficult questions left, and support for unrestricted access to abortion is the only decent position a right-thinking, non-woman-hating person can hold. Obviously I’m a bit insulted by that approach. But I’m also disappointed whenever I encounter it. It doesn’t sound like an earnest attempt to grapple with a tough issue; it sounds to me like an attempt to convince oneself that there is no more thinking to be done. Coming from either side, self-satisfied absolutism is a dead end.

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Those who thought that the decision of the Supreme Court would settle the issue had reason for that hope. On other controversial questions, the court’s rulings had produced initial furor and outrage, but the nation rather quickly accommodated itself to those decisions. Take integration in public schools.

Not so with abortion.

Why? Professor Lawrence H. Tribe of the Harvard Law School, an ardent defender of abortion rights, recognized that the abortion question presents nothing less than a “clash of absolutes.”

Tribe attempted to propose a means of avoiding “pitting these absolutes against one another.” All such efforts have failed, precisely because the competing claims are indeed absolutes.

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The Abortion Statistics for England and Wales in 2010 were published in May 2011…tell us (Table 9) that in 2010 there were only 482 abortions for Down’s syndrome, 164 for Edwards syndrome and 51 for Patau’s syndrome. Together these made up 30% of the 2,290 abortions carried out for congenital abnormalities (ground E) in that year. But the total with one of these three conditions is only 697.

The disparities are astounding. 740 babies aborted with one of the three trisomy conditions, or 51.5% of the NDSCR’s total of 1,437, were apparently not reported by the Department of Health. For Down’s syndrome 460 out of 942, or 49%, were not reported.

If the NDSCR statistics are accurate, and there is no reason to doubt them, then this means that the Department of Health is being notified about less than half of the abortions carried out for trisomy 13, 18 or 21.

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Darrel W. Ray, a psychologist in the Kansas City area who runs the Web site The Secular Therapist Project, made a similar point in a recent interview. As someone who was raised as a believing Christian and who holds a master’s degree in theology, he was uniquely able to identify what humanism needs to provide in a time of crisis.

“When people are in a terrible kind of pain ”” a death that is unexpected, the natural order is taken out of order ”” you would do anything to take away the pain,” Dr. Ray, 62, said. “And I’m not going to deny that religion does help deal with that first week or two of pain.

“The best we can do as humanists,” he continued, “is to talk about that pain in rational terms with the people who are suffering. We have humanist celebrants, as we call them, but they’re focused on doing weddings. It takes a lot more training to learn how to deal with grief and loss. I don’t see celebrants working in hospice or in hospitals, for example. There are secular people who need pastoral care, but we abdicate it to clergy.”

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Those who have followed the Korean soap opera need to remember what this is really all about. As the tale has unfolded of Dr. Hwang and the lies, frauds, and evasions that have plunged the scientific community into a tailspin, the baseline question is the question of Christmas. What are the bioethics of Bethlehem? In fact, the question breaks into two. Did God truly take human nature to himself in Jesus Christ? And, did he really take it at its beginning? Because for all the focus of our Christmas story on the stable and the baby in a manger, the truly startling event had taken place nine months before.

Behind Christmas lies what Christians in churches that still dare use long words know as the annunciation””the announcement of Gabriel to Mary that she would be with child of the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:26-31).
While Christmas reveals the Incarnation to the rest of us, it had already happened back then. Mary was the first to know; and her cousin Elizabeth’s unborn baby John (the Baptist) was the first to bear witness. His leaping in the womb was the first act of Christian testimony, a fetal response to a gospel first preached by an embryonic Jesus (perhaps two or three weeks old). As we read this narrative of theology from the womb, our minds turn to a near contemporary who would in due time electrify the ancient pagan world and lay the foundations of its collapse: Saul of Tarsus, also set apart from his mother’s womb (Galatians 1:15). Three unborn children in whose hands lay the destiny of humankind. And one of them was not merely the tiniest of humans, he was the cosmic creator, the Word by whom the Godhead has spoken into existence the vastness of time and space. And the One who will one day be our Judge.

I often wonder how many people who hear the famous Bible text that begins “In the sixth month” are aware of what is going on (Luke 1:26). It does not refer to the month of June, or for that matter to Elul, the Hebrew sixth month of the year. The reference is gynecological: the dating is by Elizabeth’s pregnancy. And it focuses us on the design of God to use the weak things of the world to confound the strong. The divine conspiracy is hatched within the walls of the womb.

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For the first time ever in Denmark, a survey has shown how many foetuses show signs of life following a late term termination, according to Kristeligt Dagblad.

Previously, conventional wisdom has suggested that 10 per cent of foetuses gasped or showed other signs of life following a late term abortion between the 12th and 22nd week of pregnancy.

But statistics from Denmark’s second largest maternity clinic at the Aarhus University Hospital Skejby show that out of 70 late terminations between August 2011 and November 2012, 11 ”“ or 16 per cent – showed signs of life.

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The Government’s announcement that a combination of legislation and regulations will be introduced to comply with the European Court of Human Rights ruling in the A, B and C case should be “of the utmost concern to all”, the four Catholic Archbishops of Ireland have said.

Minister for Health James Reilly presented a memorandum to this morning’s Cabinet meeting. The decision was taken to follow this route ”“ the fourth option from the expert group on abortion – rather than proposing guidelines, an option favoured by anti-abortion campaign groups.

Responding tonight to the announcement, the Archbishops said the proposal would “pave the way for the direct and intentional killing of unborn children. This can never be morally justified in any circumstances”.

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Human life is sacred and precious. Every human being must be treated with the greatest respect. This is true at every moment of life, from its first beginnings to its natural death. In the womb we grow and develop as full human beings, not as potential human beings. We read in the Old Testament: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I sanctified you” (Jeremiah 1:5).

The child in the womb must enjoy the same rights as all other people, among which is the unassailable right of an innocent person to life. This includes our responsibility as a society to defend and promote the equal right to life of a pregnant mother and the innocent and defenceless child in her womb when the life of either of these persons is at risk. They have an equal right to life. The Catholic Church has never taught that the life of a child in the womb should be preferred to that of the mother. In situations where a seriously ill pregnant woman needs medical treatment which may put the life of her baby at risk, such treatments are morally permissible, provided that every effort has been made to save the life of both the mother and her baby.

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Mr. [Mark] Warawa said his concern about sex-selective abortion was prompted by a CBC investigation into the ultrasound clinics that aired last June. “The practice of aborting females in favour of males is happening here is Canada,” he said, though the MP acknowledged he did not know how widespread the practice is or how many girls are aborted in Canada because of their sex.

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Growing into a fully formed human being is a long process, and scientists have found that unborn babies not only hiccup, swallow and stretch in the womb, they yawn too.

Researchers who studied 4D scans of 15 healthy fetuses also said they think yawning is a developmental process which could potentially give doctors a new way to check on a baby’s health.

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Dr. Ernest Zeringue was looking for a niche in the cutthroat industry of fertility treatments.

He seized on price, a huge obstacle for many patients, and in late 2010 began advertising a deal at his Davis, Calif., clinic unheard of anywhere else: Pregnancy for $9,800 or your money back….

People buying this option from Zeringue must accept concessions: They have no genetic connection to their children, and those children will probably have full biological siblings born to other parents….

“I am horrified by the thought of this,” said Andrew Vorzimer, a Los Angeles fertility lawyer alarmed that a company ”” not would-be parents ”” controls embryos. “It is nothing short of the commodification of children.”

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Amid the furor of the United States elections last week, one surprising story stood out. Against all odds and prognostications, the citizens of Massachusetts voted to reject physician assisted suicide. It seemed impossible ”“ Massachusetts, the first state in the Union to allow homosexual marriage, with a media machine that was favorable to the referendum ”“ appeared sure to win.

The “Dignity 2012” campaign proposed to allow physician-assisted suicide for those diagnosed with a terminal illness with six months or less to live. The American Medical Women’s Association and the American medical Student’s Association both endorsed the act, the latter claiming that ” that quality of life is an important part of health care” the statement then explained that they “adopted the position of supporting the choice of terminally-ill patients who wish to end their suffering. Death with Dignity encompasses this principle and we thoroughly support it.”

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…religiously speaking, there are only three possible responses: you can continue to believe in a God who knows in advance the number of our days; you can sharply limit your conception of God’s power, by positing a deity who does not know in advance what we will do, or who cannot control what we will do; or you can scrap the whole idea of divinity. The problem with the first position is that most believers, as Richard Mourdock did not do, run away from the dread implications of their own beliefs; and the problem with the second position is that it is not clear why such a limited deity would be worth worshipping. So cut Richard Mourdock some slack. He’s more honest than most of his evangelical peers; and his naïve honesty at least helpfully illuminates a horrid abyss.

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The law on assisted dying is out of step with society’s standards of compassion, a public debate on the issue heard.

The debate, organised by the Christian Evidence Society, heard from Lord Falconer, who chaired the Commission on Assisted Dying, which reported earlier this year, and the Revd Professor Nigel Biggar, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology in the University of Oxford.

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As a rule, the family doctor who has known the patient for years is the best judge of her condition and of the earnestness and independence of her request. But he must also consult another doctor, an outsider, for an independent assessment; that doctor must also put his views in writing. Afterward, both reports are submitted to a monitoring committee, which may ask for further explanation and can refer problematic cases to the Inspector of Health and the Public Prosecutor. But their annual reports show that the monitoring committees do this only very rarely ”” in 2010, at the rate of one in every 300 reported cases.

We called for the consulting doctor, who spent the better part of an hour with Mathilde. Afterward, he called our family doctor and said he was not sure she was suffering enough.

What is unbearable suffering? It is an impossible question. The monitoring committees have given up trying to define it and adopted the view that the patient’s own judgment is decisive, provided the acting doctor is convinced of its earnestness and sincerity….

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[/i] Proposals to absorb the services of two specialist health watchdogs into the Care Quality Commission to save half a million pounds per year have been criticised by the Mission and Public Affairs (MPA) Council.

In its response to a Department of Health Consultation, the MPA Council warns that “there are operational risks involved in transferring the functions” from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) and the Human Tissue Authority (HTA) as “theses functions require both considerable executive expertise and detailed non-executive scrutiny”.

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Maria Miller told the Telegraph it was “common sense” to lower the legal limit at which a pregnancy can be terminated in order to “reflect the way science has moved on”.

Thanks to advances in care for children born very prematurely, it is now possible for doctors in some cases to save the lives of babies born before 24 weeks.

The medical advance raises the moral dilemma of whether it is right to end pregnancies which could result in a healthy child, or to lower the window and rob some women of the right to make their own choice.

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[Ludwig ] Guttmann was a refugee from Nazi Germany. Born into an orthodox Jewish family, by 1933 he was Germany’s leading brain surgeon. Then Hitler came to power and in 1939 he came to Britain where his skill in neurology led to his being asked by the government to set up the National Spinal Injuries Centre at Stoke Mandeville hospital, which he did in 1943.

At that time it was assumed that paraplegics would never be able to live any kind of normal life. The best that could be done for them was to keep them sedated by high doses of drugs, and left hospitalized and bed-ridden until they died.

Guttmann was appalled. He believed that they each had a life ahead of them, not just behind them. With faith and determination, they could leave their beds, go out into the world, have jobs, marry,find happiness and the dignity of achievement. The film tells how, by sheer will and unshakable obstinacy, he gave paraplegics back their life.

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More than seven out of ten MPs refuse to back calls to legalise assisted suicide, according to a new survey released last week….

The poll comes just a week after two newly appointed junior health ministers, Anna Soubry and Norman Lamb, suggested that assisted suicide should be decriminalised and just before the Liberal Democrat Conference where some MPs are expected to push for a change in the law.

It found that just 29% of MPs back moves to introduce assisted suicide, while 59% were opposed and 12% were undecided.

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(Read this for background first if you are not aware of the story).

Steven Mosher, President of the Population Research Institute, has weighed in on speculation that forced abortions in China may be halted in some areas. He says there is very little chance of that happening.

“Reports that the Chinese Party-State has ended its practice of forcibly aborting women pregnant in violation of the one-child policy are premature,” he said.

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When pregnant women in Poland decide to have an abortion, they take a common but highly secretive step. “I found some phone numbers in the newspaper; I called around,” explains a young blonde woman named Jola. The doctors are listed anonymously in the classifieds section offering to “induce menstruation” or provide “full service.” Everybody understands.

“You cannot use the words ‘abortion’ or ‘termination’; rather, ‘I am pregnant ”“ can you help me?’ Something like that,” she says, speaking of her illegal abortion in the 2009 Polish documentary, “Underground Women’s State.” None of the seven women interviewed give their full name and all are well disguised.

Although the topic has long been taboo in Poland, leaders on both sides of the abortion debate now acknowledge the existence of this hidden, private practice. And this month, the Polish parliament is expected to vote on whether to liberalize its abortion policy, one of the strictest in Europe.

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Those who stand to benefit from someone’s death are very likely, sincerely, to see the life they want to end as hardly worth living. This is a nasty fact about human nature, but any kind of humanism that isn’t grounded in human nature is no more than ludicrous and sinister self-deception. Our propensity to self-serving self-deception is one reason why Christians must insist that God loves every one of his creatures; no one except God does or could.

No wonder that the most recent piece of anti-euthanasia propaganda that I was sent highlighted a figure of 300,000 incidents of elder abuse every year. Supporters of assisted dying see this point. But it just makes them believe more firmly that the right kind of legislation, with the clearest possible safeguards, will stop unwanted grannies being liquidated for their asset value.

I can’t share that confidence. Really demented and unpleasant old people can appear rather less human than foetuses do and the changing interpretations of the Abortion Act show how little legal safeguards are worth when the sentiment behind them evaporates.

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Opposition is not uniform. A few denominations, like the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, with about 22,000 members in Massachusetts, officially support the concept. The Unitarians and other mainline Protestant denominations typically do not take positions on specific state proposals.

And, in an age when many ecclesiastical hierarchies are weakening, in a country where many people are used to filtering religious beliefs through personal and secular lenses, ­individual clergy and congregants do not necessarily follow the lead of church officials.

The national Episcopal Church, for example, officially opposes physician-assisted suicide. But the Rev. Daphne B. Noyes, a deacon at the Church of the Advent in Boston and a hospital chaplain, said her work with dying people and their families has led her to ­believe the option should be available under rigorously limited circumstances that ensure that participation by all parties is voluntary and deliberate.

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Newly-appointed health minister Anna Soubry has delivered an outspoken attack on the laws governing assisted suicide.

She told The Times: “I think it’s ridiculous and appalling that people have to go abroad to end their life instead of being able to end their life at home.”

Her intervention coincides with legal appeals for new guidelines, following the death of locked-in syndrome sufferer Tony Nicklinson.

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On August 28 the European Court of Human Rights declared that access to pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) must be allowed.

The court decision dealt with Law 40/2004 on assisted fertilization in Italy. The case of Rosetta Costa and Walter Pavan v. Italy regarded a married couple who were both carriers of cystic fibrosis who wished to use PGD to screen their children as embryos.

The couple already aborted a child suffering from cystic fibrosis and they brought their case to the court arguing that the current Italian law that prohibits pre-implantation genetic diagnosis infringes their private and family life.

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Some claim that palliative care, combined with psychological and spiritual support, can address all the problems of all dying patients. This ignores a clinical reality, in which some patients, despite the best palliative care, still have bad deaths, with some resorting to dreadful journeys to Dignitas to end their suffering. International experience also confirms that palliative care and assisted dying are not either/or options. For the last ten years, assisted dying has been legal in Oregon under the Death with Dignity Act. Of the 50 states of the USA, Oregon has amongst the best palliative care and nearly 90 per cent of those seeking assisted dying do so from within those services.

The claims that assisted dying would inhibit the development of palliative care services, and would break down trust between doctors and patients, are unsupported by international evidence. So, too, are nightmare scenarios conjured by opponents in which decriminalisation of assisted dying places us on a slippery slope that would lead to the involuntary euthanasia of people who do not want to die. The Dutch experience, frequently misrepresented by those against assisted dying, has shown how liberalisation of the law has the reverse effect. Rates of non-voluntary euthanasia (i.e. doctors actively ending patients’ lives without having been asked by them to do so) have decreased. The present clinical, ethical and legal fudge in the UK, where some patients’ deaths are hastened with no regulatory framework, is more dangerous.

Even more absurd is the claim that to accede to someone’s request for assisted dying is to devalue human life….

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The British Medical Journal (BMJ), a publication distributed to the members of the British Medical Association, devoted much of its June 14, 2012, issue to endorsing voluntary euthanasia and physician assisted suicide. Raymond Tallis, emeritus professor of geriatric medicine at the University of Manchester, argues in this issue that respect for patient desires and autonomy renders irrelevant any opinion on the matter by the Royal College of Physicians or the British Medical Association. Therefore, all opposition to euthanasia is merely inappropriate paternalism and should be dropped.

In this same issue, Tess McPherson relates the difficult last days of her mother, Ann McPherson, and uses this painful experience as a call for legalized physician assisted suicide and euthanasia. Rather than seeking better pain control, she argues that death is the best option for those suffering at the end of their lives.

Finally, Fiona Goodlee, editor in chief of the BMJ, rounds out the arguments by declaring that legalization of assisted dying is not a medical decision, but rather a societal question. She argues that the role of the physician is compatible with providing euthanasia or assisted suicide and if society wants it, they should get it.

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