Today there are 150 children, all conceived with sperm from one donor, in this group of half siblings, and more are on the way. “It’s wild when we see them all together ”” they all look alike,” said Ms. Daily, 48, a social worker in the Washington area who sometimes vacations with other families in her son’s group.

As more women choose to have babies on their own, and the number of children born through artificial insemination increases, outsize groups of donor siblings are starting to appear. While Ms. Daily’s group is among the largest, many others comprising 50 or more half siblings are cropping up on Web sites and in chat groups, where sperm donors are tagged with unique identifying numbers.

Now, there is growing concern among parents, donors and medical experts about potential negative consequences of having so many children fathered by the same donors, including the possibility that genes for rare diseases could be spread more widely through the population. Some experts are even calling attention to the increased odds of accidental incest between half sisters and half brothers, who often live close to one another.

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A form of cloning has been used to create personalised embryonic stem cells in humans, say researchers.

Genetic material was taken from an adult skin cell and transferred into a human egg. This was grown to produce an early embryo.

Stem cells have huge potential in medicine as they can transform into any other cell type in the body.

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Guidelines proposed by the pro-euthanasia Dutch Medical Association (KNMG) call on doctors in the Netherlands to refer patients for euthanasia ”” even if they have moral or religious objections to the practice of killing patients.

The Dutch medical group released the proposal, “The Role of the Physician in the Voluntary Termination of Life,” a position paper saying, “Patients, too, often have difficulty telling a physician they have an authentic wish to die. Physicians, for their part, are under an obligation to take such requests seriously. This also means that if a physician cannot or does not wish to honour a patient’s request for euthanasia or assisted suicide he must give the patient a timely and clear explanation of why, and furthermore must then refer or transfer the patient to another physician in good time.”

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“Headline: Prosecutors clear way for assisted suicides…”

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The U.S. bishops are objecting to a Health and Human Services mandate that will force private insurance plans to cover abortions and sterilizations, with an exemption for religions so narrow that not even Jesus would qualify.

In a statement to the HHS today, Anthony Picarello, USCCB general counsel, and Michael Moses, associate general counsel, called the mandate an “unprecedented attack on religious liberty.”

The mandate would force private insurance plans to cover contraception — including abortifacients — and sterilization.

And the narrow “religious employer” exception provides “no protection at all for individuals or insurers with a moral or religious objection to contraceptives or sterilization,” instead covering only “a very small subset of religious employers,” the bishops’ representatives declared.

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The Respect Life Program begins anew each year on Respect Life Sunday, the first Sunday in October. The program is highlighted in liturgies and marked by special events. The USCCB Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities publishes a program packet each year to call attention to numerous human life issues. These materials are especially helpful for priests, parish groups and other organizations.

This year’s Respect Life Program takes us back to the basics. Eight pamphlets discuss the main attacks on human life and dignity. Click around to find more information, order Respect Life Program packets, single or grouped items, or find clip art, free bulletin inserts and more information for your parish.

Check it out and there is also an article here about this.

Slightly more voters continue to classify themselves as pro-choice rather than pro-life when it comes to abortion, but a majority still believes it is morally wrong.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 48% of Likely U.S. Voters say, generally speaking, on the issue of abortion, they consider themselves pro-choice. Forty-three percent (43%) describe themselves as pro-life.

Pro-choice voters have slightly outnumbered pro-lifers in surveys for several years. Still, 55% believe abortion is morally wrong most of the time, a finding that shows little change since April 2007.

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A problematic new end-of-life medical form is rapidly gaining ascendency in U.S. healthcare. It is called the “POLST” document. (In my own state of Colorado, it’s called a MOST document.) The acronym stands for Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment….

The POLST-type legislation removes the condition that a patient is terminally ill or diagnosed in a PVS before a refusal order is actionable. In other words, the new law permits any adult patient to refuse any treatment at any time for any reason in the event they lack decisional capacity; and health care professionals, directed by a doctor’s medical order, ordinarily would be (and are) required to carry out the order. Although the law for strategic purposes is rhetorically formulated as bearing upon end-of-lifemedical decisions, it sets forth no requirement that a patient’s refusal of life-support must be limited to end-of-life conditions.

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Though not widely offered by U.S. doctors, gender-detecting blood tests have been sold online to consumers for the past few years. Their promises of early and accurate results prompted genetics researchers to take a closer look.

The authors say the results suggest blood tests like those studied could be a breakthrough for women at risk of having babies with certain diseases, who could avoid invasive procedures if they learned their fetus was a gender not affected by those illnesses. But the study raises concerns about couples using such tests for gender selection and abortion.

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Canada’s Justice Minister says the Conservative government won’t be revisiting the question of assisted suicide despite a B.C. Supreme Court ruling to expedite a case on the matter.

Rob Nicholson was commenting Thursday on the case of Gloria Taylor. The 63-year-old resident of Westbank, near Kelowna, is seeking the right to commit suicide given the amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, she is suffering from, and this week the B.C. court agreed to expedite her case….

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The Obama administration announced new expanded women’s health regulations Monday, classifying contraceptives as preventive services and requiring that health insurers provide them without co-pays for customers….

A number of religious organizations, including the Catholic Church and the Family Research Council, have opposed the new regulations. Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, who runs the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities, recently wrote in opposition to the proposal that “pregnancy is not a disease, and fertility is not a pathological condition to be suppressed by any means technically possible.”

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Guests have included the homeless, pregnant and undocumented Tanzanian who showed up sobbing on the lawn of the sisters’ retreat center in Stamford, Conn., and later likened the care at Sacred Heart to “angels planting a root and watering it every day.” Then there was the Trinidadian nanny, six months pregnant with twins, whose boyfriend was trying to induce a miscarriage by kicking her down the stairs. There was the Polish immigrant who studied for the MCAT exam while living at the convent, as well as the former network journalist whose boyfriend split when she got a Down Syndrome diagnosis, and whose friends could not believe she’d throw herself so far “off-track” to have the child.

Another alumna had just finished a graduate program in England, gotten pregnant, been dumped by her law-student boyfriend and returned to the U.S. “in a horrible state of depression.” For an educated woman with professional ambitions, she said “an abortion seems like the most practical thing in the world. But once you do get pregnant, it’s not so easy.”

She had a daughter, got a magazine job and a subsidized apartment.

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Chinese officials are fiercely attached to the one-child policy. They attribute to it almost every drop in fertility and every averted birth: some 400m more people, they claim, would have been born without it. This is patent nonsense. Chinese fertility was falling for decades before the one-child policy took effect in 1979. Fertility has gone down almost as far and as fast without coercion in neighbouring countries, including those with large Chinese populations. The spread of birth control and a desire for smaller families tend to accompany economic growth and development almost everywhere.

But the policy has almost certainly reduced fertility below the level to which it would have fallen anyway. As a result, China has one of the world’s lowest “dependency ratios”, with roughly three economically active adults for each dependent child or old person. It has therefore enjoyed a larger “demographic dividend” (extra growth as a result of the high ratio of workers to dependents) than its neighbours. But the dividend is near to being cashed out….

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England is also the scene of a vigorous dispute over euthanasia. In June the BBC broadcast a documentary made by author Terry Pratchett. He suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and has been campaigning for a change in the law regarding assisted suicide….

The program comes at a time when a privately sponsored commission — the Commission on Assisted Dying — is holding an inquiry into assisted suicide.
It is headed by a former lord chancellor, Lord Falconer. Funding comes from Terry Pratchett and businessman Bernard Lewis, the Guardian newspaper reported last Nov. 30.
Critics have pointed out that it is hardly likely to be impartial, given Pratchett’s involvement as an active campaigner in favor of assisted suicide….

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The Rt Rev Brian Castle, Bishop of Tonbridge, said many people are no longer willing to submit to the “mystery” of death and instead try to control it through assisted suicide.

He said this actually rids them of the opportunity to choose to die when they are “completely ready” with the support of religion or loved ones.

The bishop called on the church to “speak more naturally about death and dying”, by including the topic in sermons and encouraging congregations to write their own funeral services.

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Seriously ill people do not need euthanasia. We need better provision of palliative care aimed at managing symptoms and maximising function, especially as we approach death. Rather than help to die, the cause of dignity would be more greatly helped if more was done to help people live more fully with the dying process.

The proposals to make provision for a terminally ill person to request euthanasia, and a doctor to provide assistance to die, make it less likely that adequate efforts would be made to make better provision for palliative care.

Legalised euthanasia would give those responsible for funding and providing palliative care a political ”out” in that respect.

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A Russian pro-life organization is about to launch a network of clinics offering pre- and post-natal care while excluding procedures such as abortion and in-vitro fertilization that “contradict the teachings of the Russian Orthodox, Catholic and traditional Protestant churches,” said Alexey Komov, the project manager.

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Mara Hvistendahl is worried about girls. Not in any political, moral or cultural sense but as an existential matter. She is right to be. In China, India and numerous other countries (both developing and developed), there are many more men than women, the result of systematic campaigns against baby girls. In “Unnatural Selection,” Ms. Hvistendahl reports on this gender imbalance: what it is, how it came to be and what it means for the future.

In nature, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. This ratio is biologically ironclad. Between 104 and 106 is the normal range, and that’s as far as the natural window goes. Any other number is the result of unnatural events.
Yet today in India there are 112 boys born for every 100 girls. In China, the number is 121””though plenty of Chinese towns are over the 150 mark. China’s and India’s populations are mammoth enough that their outlying sex ratios have skewed the global average to a biologically impossible 107. But the imbalance is not only in Asia. Azerbaijan stands at 115, Georgia at 118 and Armenia at 120.

What is causing the skewed ratio: abortion…

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A former Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, said that the BBC had some “hard questions to address”, after broadcasting the programme. “Its own guidelines state that the portrayal of suicide has the potential to make this appear possible, and even appropriate, to the vulnerable.” He also argued that “the BBC has an obligation to provide a balanced presentation of the moral issues of the day,” but “so far, there has been little evidence of such balance in this matter.”

In a statement, the BBC said that it ac­know­­ledged that suicide was “an exceptionally difficult issue”, which “should be portrayed with the utmost sensitivity”. It argued that there was “a clear editorial justification” to broadcast the programme, which “does not encourage suicide and does not breach BBC guidelines.

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The Bishop of Exeter the Rt Revd Michael Langrish took part in a BBC2 Newsnight debate on Monday June 13 following the BBC programme ‘Choosing to Die’ presented by Sir Terry Pratchett. His main comments from the debate are below:

“I did not change my mind (after seeing the programme) but my expectations changed. I expected I would disagree with the outcome and expected to welcome the film as a contribution to a really important debate but the more I watched it the more concerned and indeed disturbed I became by it. It was very one-sided, a nod to hospice care but no showing the alternative ending, no indication that the two principals Peter and Andrew needn’t have been living the life they were leading and right at the end I questioned the whole ethical basis of programme. I felt that Peter and indeed his wife and perhaps Terry Pratchett as well had been caught up and become trapped in the storyline of programme. I felt there was a deeply coercive atmosphere in room in the end and I felt quite emotionally blackmailed by it.”

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I am instinctually in favour of assisted suicide. But the programme left me feeling uncomfortable. I have no time for the religious argument. And yet, I hesitate to fully sign up for the cause ”“ simply because I wanted to die once, and have been enormously relieved that I never did anything about it.

Admittedly I was suffering mental rather than physical illness ”“ in my case acute depression. I had been suffering agony for four years and saw no end in sight. But with hindsight it is plain to me that you can be very serious about your wanting to die, having taken all matters into account ”“ and most of those around me thought I was absolutely in my right mind ”“ then later discover that you very nearly made a literally fatal mistake….

The “thin edge of the wedge” argument is somewhat convincing. Once assisted suicide is established in law, how long before the patient and their relatives decide how serious the illness has to be before the decision is taken, rather than doctors?

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Between 01/2007-12/2009 in Leuven 17 isolated lung transplantations were performed from cardiac death donors, including four after euthanasia, Dirk van Raemdonck and colleagues (Leuven) report. “All donors expressed their wish for organ donation once their request for euthanasia was granted according to Belgian legislation. All donors suffered from an unbearable non-malignant disorder.” One recipient died from a problem unrelated to the graft. The other three patients are still alive ”“ in a good condition.

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People tend describe themselves as either pro-life or pro-choice. But a new poll by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) shows that the average American still holds conflicting views on abortion nearly 40 years after Roe v. Wade. Evangelicals remain much more opposed to abortion than other Americans, but they, too, often do not fit neatly into pro-life or pro-choice camps.

PRRI Research Director Daniel Cox said, “For some time now, Americans have held a stable tension between two views: majorities both say that abortion is morally wrong and say that it should be legal in all or most cases. The binary ”˜pro-life’ and ”˜pro-choice’ labels don’t reflect this complexity.”

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If we include euthanasia as an ”˜option’ in critical care we’re making the patient the problem and not the condition. Once we begin to cross that line, does anyone really believe that the ”˜cheaper, quicker option’ won’t begin to take precedence over good palliative care?

We should also consider the problem of elder abuse. As far back as 1994 a study in NSW found that something like 5% of people over the age of 65 were subjected to some form of elder abuse. Elder abuse has been called the epidemic of the century and is known to cost more than $2.6 billion in the US alone each year as the elderly are swindled out of their savings. Elder abuse can also be physical, emotional and even sexual and it’s not hard to imagine that, if euthanasia were an option, that vulnerable aged people might be swindled out of existence as well.

Readers will remember the famous case of Dr. Harold Shipman who, by his own admission, killed 600 elderly, vulnerable people in the UK by his own hand.

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On Monday the BBC, which has been accused of becoming a ”˜”˜cheerleader’’ for assisted suicide, defended its decision to show Mr [Peter] Smedley’s death in the film.

Sir Terry hopes it will persuade the Government to think again about the law and advocates a system in which doctors are able to prescribe take-home suicide kits to enable terminally-ill patients to choose the right moment to end their lives.

Mrs Smedley said… last night that she did not want to discuss her husband’s death.

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Living can be brutal. The other Dignitas customer in the programme ”” not filmed dying, but discussed up to the final handshake ”” is a 42-year-old man who tried suicide twice, failed, and took the journey to certainty. Again, earlier than he truly needed to. The window of opportunity, he saw clearly, would close as he travelled down “the narrowing alleyway” of disability….

The actual nature of the Dignitas experience….is grim. Even discounting the disgraceful fact that 21 per cent of its customers don’t have a terminal disease but depression, and that the Swiss authorities seem unwilling to intervene, there is something horrible ”” a condemned-cell atmosphere ”” about the process: the files, the signatures, the insistence that you practise drinking the stuff in one long draught “and do not sip”, the dreary environs, the anti-nausea drug taken beforehand so that Mr [Peter] Smedley observes how odd it is to be told “ten minutes more”.

Read it all (requires London Times subscription) and you may find a lot more articles on this there.

Carlos Álvarez, spokesman of a Dignified Life campaign being promoted by the ethicists, noted a “lack of protection” for both patients and doctors who oppose a directly-induced death.
For example, the group pointed out weaknesses in regard to regulation wording on sedation, which is presented as a right.
“To exact it as a right and to oblige the doctor to prescribe it might endanger the patient’s life — given that there are cases in which sedation is counter-indicated — and, in any case, it obliges the professional to obey criteria that are foreign to professional ethics,” the organization noted.

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Abortion rates fell among most groups of women from 2000 to 2008, but rose for those classified as poor, finds an analysis conducted by the non-profit Guttmacher Institute and published Monday in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology.

The rate for poor women increased 18%, while the national rate dropped 8%, finds Guttmacher, which has been tracking abortions since 1974.

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In Denmark, sperm donation does not have to come with a name and telephone number – unlike in Britain and in a fast-increasing number of other European countries.

That has made Denmark something of a Mecca for foreign women who want to conceive by artificial insemination, because it has no shortage of officially screened and tested semen.

Danish clinics which provide insemination (often for a fraction of the price of similar treatment in the UK) have three main types of customer: lesbian couples, heterosexual couples and single women. It is the final category which is growing – by far – the fastest.

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Swiss voters rejected a proposal to ban assisted suicide and suicide tourism in the Canton (political district) of Zurich.

In a referendum on Sunday, about 85% of voters in Zurich rejected a proposal to end legalized assisted suicide while about 78% rejected a proposal to stop the practice of suicide tourism by foreigners in their Canton.

Two conservative political parties, the Evangelical People’s Party and the Federal Democratic Union, supported the referendum, promoting palliative care as the best option to care for seriously ill people at the end of their lives. The groups argued that the presence of assisted suicide clinics run by the Exit and Dignitas organizations, and their promotion of suicide tourism, damages Zurich’s image.

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