The assault on the dignity-based vision of human rights was particularly intense at the UN’s Beijing Women’s Conference in the fall of 1995. In fact, a European-led coalition attempted to remove the word “dignity” from the Beijing documents because they suspected it might be in tension with their particular view of gender equality. They also opposed all references to the Universal Declaration’s provisions on marriage, the family, religious freedom, protection of motherhood, and parental rights. The reason, apparently, was that those provisions were regarded as obstacles to the new sexual and reproductive rights for which the coalition hoped to gain recognition.

Meanwhile, the idea of the dignity of human life was coming under attack from members of the scientific community who wished to remove obstacles to experimentation on human embryos….

Yet another offensive was launched by advocates of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide….

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Celebrities including the author Sir Terry Pratchett and the actor Sir Patrick Stewart have backed a campaign to allow terminally ill patients to receive help to die.

But a new poll found 70 per cent of disabled people were concerned that such a reform would create pressure on vulnerable patients to “end their lives prematurely”.

The survey for Scope, the leading disability charity, also found 3 per cent of the 500 disabled people questioned in the ComRes poll feared that they would personally come under pressure to commit suicide if the law were changed.

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For many old people ”” long before they become mortally ill ”” that prolonged dwindling is a worsening nightmare: a time of maltreatment in geriatric wards, lying on their bedsores in urine and excrement, of dependence on indifferent foreign minders in expensive care homes, a period of painful confusion, feeling ignored, unwanted and lonely. In a less rich society, such things will become more common.

Given all this, the taboo against suicide or assisted suicide seems incomprehensible. Religious people may think it wrong, although I have never quite understood why. It seems odd to me that they are not eager to meet their maker as soon as possible, if heaven is so devoutly to be desired. Perhaps it is different if one’s religion teaches that one might after death come back as a toad.

But, believers apart, for everyone else there is no philosophical reason against suicide that I can see. The usual slippery slope argument is purely emotional: we are all already on the slippery slope as far as any moral decisions go and constantly have to choose between two evils.

Read it all from the Sunday [London] Times (subscription required).

Voluntary euthanasia is in the news again.

At last week’s state election health forum, organised by The Sydney Morning Herald, we heard how 61-year-old Loredana Alessio-Mulhall, suffering from MS, intends flying to the Netherlands to end her life. This, of course, is illegal in Australia. Indeed, next month a man named David Mathers goes on trial in Sydney for the alleged murder of an old, sick friend. I cannot discuss that case for legal reasons, but there are a few facts about voluntary euthanasia worth putting on the record.

More than 80 per cent of Australians in opinion polls say they’d like to see voluntary euthanasia legalised. This issue is nearly unique because a majority of politicians, normally so keen to follow public opinion, refuse to change the law. One of the biggest arguments they use is that to do so would lead to a “slippery slope”. {But is the argument valid?]

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A leading IVF clinic is helping clients choose the sex of their baby by sending them to an overseas clinic it co-owns, avoiding Australian rules which allow the practice only for medical reasons.

Sydney IVF, which has several clinics in NSW as well as in Canberra, Perth and Tasmania, is part-owner of Superior ART, a Thai clinic that will provide IVF for ”family balancing” – when families with children of one gender are seeking another child of the opposite sex.

It costs $11,000 including flights and accommodation, a spokesman for Sydney IVF said.

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At issue was the fact that applicants to the nursing program’s women’s health track were asked to sign a letter acknowledging that they would be caring for women who are terminating their pregnancies.

The Alliance Defense Fund argued that the letter suggested residents would be required to participate in abortion procedures in violation of a federal law that says recipients of federal funds cannot require someone to perform or assist in abortions if it violates his or her religious beliefs or moral convictions.

Vanderbilt denied the claim….

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In the 2008 guide to The Mental Capacity Act, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England Wales stated that “Christian faith gives us reason to cherish life, as a gift from God, and also gives reason to accept death, when it comes, with hope in God”.

This statement reflects the fundamental moral teaching of the Church that human life, and every person’s right to life, must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception until death, and that when laws are passed that deprive a category of human beings of the protection which civil legislation ought to accord them”¦the very foundations of the state are undermined.

We are all older than we think ”“ around nine months older. We celebrate the anniversary of the day on which we were born, but we have actually been in existence since the moment of our conception.

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… in addition to telling us about science, a new scientific priesthood speaks ex cathedra on the whole range of “questions about the good for man, about justice, and what things are worth having at what price.”

As a recent example of this trend, consider Designer Genes: A New Era in the Evolution of Man, a new book by Dr. Steven Potter, professor of pediatrics in the Division of Developmental Biology at Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati. In his book, Potter not only provides a highly accessible, winsome tour of current genetic biology, he also (as one endorsement puts it) “ventures into morality and religious issues and does this with great capability and sensitivity.” Potter’s credentials in genetic research and developmental biology are noteworthy. In addition to his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School, Potter has published in such journals as Nature, Cell, and Science. However, a careful reading of Designer Genes suggests a healthy measure of skepticism is in order about the credibility of Potter’s priestly pronouncements on how we ought to harness the potential of genetic science.
Designer Genes is a panegyric for eugenics. At times, the tone of Potter’s praise for a genetically orchestrated future is almost ebullient. Potter writes:

But if we know our complete DNA sequences then we can be on our guard for this eventuality [genetically inherited disease], perhaps by restricting who we marry, or perhaps more likely by screening embryos through DNA sequencing when the danger of severe genetic disease is present. And in time, as such genetic screens become more common, it might be possible to completely remove such harmful versions of genes from the human population.

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This is the paradox of America’s unborn. No life is so desperately sought after, so hungrily desired, so carefully nurtured. And yet no life is so legally unprotected, and so frequently destroyed.

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Plan A ”” making babies with the tools you have around the house, as they say, the fun, free tools ”” faded into the background, and Plan B became foreground. I can count the ways Plan B is a less-desirable way to have children ”” the route seems to take you off the edge of the world and into the land of scrolly dragons. But when you actually go there, the map shifts. The brain’s ability to rewrite ”” to destinize, as it were ”” the birth story and turn a barn into a manger is so powerful that Plan B, all its unsexiness notwithstanding, became the best plan, because Plan B created the children that we have and are convinced we had to have. There had to be a soft spot in the top of Kieran’s head that seems to have been put there to make a perfect hollow for your lips to rest in a kiss. And Violet had to twirl her hair and press her tongue against her lips when she was thinking, in a pose that we call Philosophical Violet ”” you’d have to see it to see how it looks philosophical, but it does.

Third-party reproduction hardly seems a romantic beginning, but it became romantic to us when it became our story: “Baby’s Own Story,” as the vintage baby books I am filling out for each of them declare. It’s one I am always composing and that, one day, I will tell to our children, and it will take shape and grow in each of their minds, as they write the stories of their lives that become their lives.

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“Health care seems to be the fault line developing between the bishops and within wider society,” said the Rev. Steven Avella, a Catholic priest and professor of religious history at Marquette University in Milwaukee.

Earlier this year, an Oregon bishop terminated the church affiliation of a large medical center, saying it had abandoned Catholic ethical guidelines. In April, the bishop of Providence, R.I., demanded that the state’s only Catholic hospital quit the CHA over the group’s support of the health care bill.

Rusty Reno, a senior editor at the conservative Catholic journal First Things, said such conflicts are likely to continue as Catholic health care follows the lead of its secular counterparts.

“The bishops recognize they have a problem, which is that you have a health care system that calls itself Catholic, but refuses to conform to Catholic principles,” he said.

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The calls for changes in the law led to a public statement by Melbourne’s archbishop, Denis Hart, dated Oct. 7. The renewed push in Victoria and other parts of Australia to allow assisted suicide is misplaced compassion, he explained.

“Euthanasia and assisted suicide are the opposite of care and represent the abandonment of older and dying persons,” he stated.

As medical technology advances, and we have greater numbers of elderly people, they should not be looked upon as a problem for society, Archbishop Hart insisted. Instead we should see our care of the elderly: “as repayment of a debt of gratitude, as a part of a culture of love and care.”

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The Archbishop of Adelaide has called for the government to put the question of decriminalizing euthanasia to a national vote.

“If politicians believe voluntary euthanasia is a public policy priority of first importance, then let them seek an electoral mandate upon it,” Archbishop Jeffrey Driver told his diocesan synod last week.

“It is too significant an issue to be introduced any other way,” he said on Oct 21.

Dr. Driver’s comments follow upon church-wide denunciations of euthanasia in the wake of the new Labor government’s decision to debate the issue. State legislatures in Australia have also taken up the issue, with the upper house of the South Australia parliament scheduled to vote on Nov 24 on a bill sponsored by the Green Party to legalise voluntary euthanasia. A similar bill was defeated by a single vote last year.

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Bishops must guide their faithful to use their vote to oppose efforts to legalize abortion and euthanasia, Pope Benedict XVI told bishops from Brazil.

“Dear brother bishops, to defend life we must not fear hostility or unpopularity, and we must refuse any compromise or ambiguity which might conform us to the world’s way of thinking,” the pope said Oct. 28 during a meeting with bishops from northeast Brazil.

The bishops were making their “ad limina” visits to report on the status of their dioceses.

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Bishop Kevin Farrell of the Catholic Diocese of Dallas has taken issue publicly with a Southern Methodist University professor’s upcoming lecture on U.S. Catholic bishops and abortion law.

The Rev. Charles Curran is a Catholic priest and ethicist who has long taught at SMU, and who also has a history of tangling with the Vatican over social issues.

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A Charleston County mother and her 14-year-old daughter were spending some quality time together one Sunday evening when the conversation turned to sex.

She asked her daughter whether she was sexually active, and the Burke High School freshman surprised her with the news that she had sex once. After a few minutes of silence, the mother told her daughter that she wanted to call the family doctor and arrange for her to go on birth control.

This time, her daughter’s response came as an even bigger surprise: a woman at school had taken her to a clinic for a shot that would provide birth control for three months.

The mother, whose name is being withheld to protect her daughter’s identity, said she hadn’t been informed.

Read it all from the front page of today’s local paper.

More than a thousand Britons will die by doctor-assisted suicide each year if a U.S. law is imported, a think-tank will tell MPs and peers today.

Safeguards to limit the law to those patients who are terminally ill will also become meaningless as some doctors began to interpret the rules liberally in practice, the Living and Dying Well report says.

In Oregon, the first U.S. state to legalise assisted suicide, this has apparently led to ”˜doctor-shopping’ for physicians who will overlook criteria such as being terminally ill, mentally competent and making a choice to die free from coercion.

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How do we treat the dying?

We do well. But this is becoming a society which values individual rights above all else and exalts in human wisdom. As a result, once again euthanasia is being demanded. This is a debate about who we are as humans. My fundamental problem with it is that we are sinners and we do not have the moral capacity to administer it. It is the myth of so-called voluntary euthanasia. At a moment in time of adversity and suffering we ask people to make up their minds about termination of a life. We cannot – we can never – know what is going through the mind of the sufferer or of those whose lives will be changed by the death of the patient. No doubt there will be grief; but there can also be relief that I am no longer responsible; there can be pleasure in the knowledge that I stand to inherit; there can be the stress of needing the hospital bed. When the patient is very vulnerable, they are being asked whether
they wish to die early and the ones to whom they look for advice may have reasons for saying yes which are undetectable even to themselves. No system of prior decision making can get around this; nor are we to think that euthanasia will be confined to the elderly or the cancer stricken. We will also have it demanded as a right for the young and the mentally ill. After abortion on demand, this is the next stage in the unjust harvesting of innocent human life, the next and dreadful stage in a culture of expedient death.

The philosophical point in favour [of euthanasia] could not have been expressed more clearly than by the ethicist Dr Leslie Cannold writing in the Sun-Herald. ”˜Opponents of dying with dignity will tell you that the core moral principle in a civilized society is respect for life. This is outdated tosh. The central moral value in a modern multicultural society is autonomy, the right of individuals to determine the course of their own lives and deaths according to their own needs and values.’ This chilling statement has so much tendentious about it that it is hard to know where to begin dissecting it. But note this. Its basic expression, that the central moral value in a modern multicultural society is autonomy, is a boldly sectarian and secularist assertion. It is based on the denial of original sin and it leads to a denial of the full humanity of others, since it asks us to be self-centred.

Read it all (18 Page pdf).

Babies that are surviving late-term abortions at Melbourne’s Royal Women’s Hospital might be being left on shelves to die, according to an Anglican minister.

Dr Mark Durie, minister of St Mary’s Caulfield, said staff were finding it hard to cope with a reported six-fold increase in late-term abortions at the Women’s since abortion was decriminalised in Victoria two years ago. He said because conscientious objection by medical staff was now illegal, the hospital could employ only people who endorsed late-term abortions.

Dr Durie is bringing a motion about late-term abortion to the annual Anglican synod, which opened in Melbourne last night.

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An aging population and the need for more workers have prompted China’s Communist Party to consider relaxing the decades-long ban that restricts most couples to one child, a harsh policy marked by forced abortions, sterilizations and fines for those who have more than one.

In 2011, China will start pilot projects in five provinces, all of which have low birth rates, to allow a second birth if at least one spouse is an only child, says He Yafu, an independent demographer who is in close contact with policymakers.

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John Pollock says it’s unfair that he could ask for euthanasia in some countries, but not here, when he finally finds his suffering intolerable.

He has told New Zealand Doctor magazine that the law should be changed so that people have the comfort of knowing they can control their death, and says many doctors already practise euthanasia: a third of them admit to having hastened death….

Unlike Dr Pollock, perhaps, I see a difference between hastening inevitable death compassionately and killing, and I can’t reconcile having a doctor who treats me as a living person one minute having the right to kill me the next.

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Thousands of Catholic Church employees in Wisconsin are now eligible for birth control coverage through their health insurance plans, under the budget bill passed by the Legislature last year.

But because the church considers artificial contraception “gravely immoral,” at least some of those workers – including non-Catholics – could face sanctions, even termination, if they use it, one church official said Wednesday.

“Our employees know what church teaching is. And we trust them to use their conscience and do the right thing,” said Brent King, spokesman for the Madison Diocese, which began covering prescription contraception Aug. 1.

Reproductive health advocates, including the Washington-based Catholics for Choice, criticized the stand, calling birth control “basic health care.”

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The Vatican condemned the recent decision by U.S. regulators to begin using embryonic stem cells in clinical tests on human patients.

The destruction of human embryos involved in such research amounts to “the sacrifice of human beings” and is to be condemned, said the president emeritus of the Pontifical Academy for Life, Bishop Elio Sgreccia.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave final approval for a clinical trial of embryonic stem cells as a treatment for patients with spinal-cord injuries, making the United States the first country to allow the testing of such cells on human beings.

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Check out the 4 responses and see what you think.

The huge black billboard is hard to miss, looming over a stretch of Route 22 like a harbinger of death, or at least the right to die: “My Life, My Death, My Choice, FinalExitNetwork.org”

The 15-by-49-foot billboard went up June 28, paid for by Final Exit Network, a nationwide group that provides guidance to adults seeking to end a life of constant pain from incurable illness.

The billboard, along with one in San Francisco and another planned for Florida, anchors a national campaign by the network to raise awareness of itself and its mission. Members say the locations were chosen for their reputations as being socially progressive and, in Florida’s case, for its elderly population.

“What we’re trying to do is let people know that Final Exit Network exists, and that we’re here, and if they spend a little time trying to find out what we do, they might actually support us,” said Bob Levine, 88, of Princeton, who founded the group’s New Jersey chapter after his first wife died of cancer.

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There’s another side of the story, however ”” a deliberate and concerted counteroffensive that has gone largely unremarked. Over the last decade, abortion-rights advocates have quietly worked to reverse the marginalization encouraged by activists like Randall Terry. Abortion-rights proponents are fighting back on precisely the same turf that Terry demarcated: the place of abortion within mainstream medicine. This abortion-rights campaign, led by physicians themselves, is trying to recast doctors, changing them from a weak link of abortion to a strong one. Its leaders have built residency programs and fellowships at university hospitals, with the hope that, eventually, more and more doctors will use their training to bring abortion into their practices. The bold idea at the heart of this effort is to integrate abortion so that it’s a seamless part of health care for women ”” embraced rather than shunned.

This is the future. Or rather, one possible future. There’s a long way to go from here to there. Between 2000 and 2005, the last year that statistics are available, the number of abortion facilities in the U.S. dropped 2 percent ”” a smaller dip than those in the preceding five-year periods, but a decline nonetheless. “The ’90s were about getting abortion back into residency training and medical schools,” says Jody Steinauer, an OB-GYN professor at the University of California at San Francisco, the hub of the abortion-rights countermovement in medicine. “Now it’s about getting abortion into our practices.”

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The U.S. bishops’ conference pro-life committee chairman is urging lawmakers to uphold current policy prohibiting U.S. military hospitals, and other federal health facilities, from performing abortions.

Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, chairman of the Committee on Pro-Life Activities, stated this in a letter sent Tuesday to the U.S. senators.

He asked that the lawmakers, when they review the National Defense Authorization Act for 2011, would “remove from the bill a misguided committee amendment” that authorizes abortions at military hospitals both in the United States and worldwide.

The prelate backed Archbishop Timothy Broglio of the Archdiocese for the Military Services, who also sent a letter to the senators on June 17, “urging congress not to impose this tremendous burden on the consciences of Catholic and other health care personnel who joined our armed services to save and protect innocent life, not to destroy it.”

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Another difficulty sperm donor offspring suffer is the secrecy about their origins. In most cases, parents let the child believe that he or she is biologically related to both of them in the beginning. Then, when the child finally discovers the truth, the child feels lied to and the parent-child relationship is strained. This leaves a legacy of distrust, with 47% of them declaring that their mother might have lied about important matters when they were growing up. This compares with 27% for those who were adopted and 18% for those who were raised by their biological parents. Similar results were given for worrying that their father might have lied.

Not surprisingly, a substantial majority of adults conceived through sperm donation expressed support for their right to know everything. This included the identity of the donor and the right to have some kind of relationship with him. They also said they wanted to know about the existence and number of their half-siblings. As it now stands, the law in the United States does not give them any of these rights. In fact, it protects the donors and fertility clinics at the cost of the children conceived.
But the problems do not end with secrecy. The survey results showed that 44% of the donor-conceived adults were comfortable with donor conception so long as parents tell their children the truth, preferably from an early age. Nevertheless, 36% had concerns about it even if parents told the truth, and 11% said it is hard for kids even if parents handle the issue well.

In fact, the report commented that: “openness alone does not appear to resolve the potential losses, confusion and risks that can come with deliberately conceiving children so that they will be raised lacking at least one of their biological parents.”

The report concluded with a series of recommendations. Among them was the observation that no other medical procedure has such enormous implications for a person who did not seek the treatment — the offspring. And they asked: “Does a good society intentionally create children in this way?” A question well worth reflecting on.

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At least 11 states have passed laws this year regulating or restricting abortion, giving opponents of abortion what partisans on both sides of the issue say is an unusually high number of victories. In four additional states, bills have passed at least one house of the legislature.

In a flurry of activity last week, Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi signed a bill barring insurers from covering abortion in the new insurance exchanges called for under the federal health care overhaul, and the Oklahoma Legislature overrode a veto by Gov. Brad Henry of a bill requiring doctors who perform abortions to answer 38 questions about each procedure, including the women’s reasons for ending their pregnancies.

It was the third abortion measure this session on which the Legislature overrode a veto by Mr. Henry.

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During the health-care summit earlier this year, Vice President Joe Biden was roundly mocked for saying, “I don’t know what the American people think.” He was, however, showing a refreshing modesty. Especially when compared with those who believe the American people don’t know what they think””or cannot possibly mean what they say when they tell us what they do think.

Gallup provoked some of this reaction when it released new data early last month on American attitudes toward abortion. Asked to rate various behaviors and social policies (e.g., embryonic stem-cell research, adultery, the death penalty) as either “morally wrong” or “morally acceptable,” 50% called abortion wrong, as against only 38% who said it was acceptable. Even more contentious was the finding, for the second year in a row, that slightly more Americans consider themselves “pro-life” than “pro-choice” (47% to 45%).

The response to this data has been illuminating. Some blame the shift toward pro-life self-identification on abstinence-only education. Others imply that Americans really can’t mean what they say, pointing to other data showing majorities in favor of keeping abortion legal.

Perhaps the most original explanation appeared in Slate. There a writer opined that because President Obama has “softened” the Democratic language on abortion, more Americans now feel free to call themselves pro-life. Yes, let the word go forward: Some Democrats feel that the same Barack Obama who opposed an Illinois state ban on partial-birth abortion and later declared the issue above his pay grade has apparently given them permission to call themselves pro-life.

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