Abby Johnson, who had worked at the Planned Parenthood in Bryan, Texas, for the past eight years and had directed the Bryan business for the last two, resigned Oct. 6 after watching an ultrasound of an abortion procedure, reported the television station KBTX Nov. 1.

“I just thought, ”˜I can’t do this anymore,’ and it was just like a flash that hit me, and I thought, ”˜That’s it,’” said Johnson….

Johnson, an Episcopalian, has been meeting with the coalition’s executive director, Shawn Carney, and has prayed with volunteers outside Planned Parenthood. The world’s largest purveyor of abortion filed a temporary restraining order Oct. 30 against both Johnson and the Coalition for Life.

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Thomas Malthus first published his “Essay on the Principle of Population”, in which he forecast that population growth would outstrip the world’s food supply, in 1798. His timing was unfortunate, for something started happening around then which made nonsense of his ideas. As industrialisation swept through what is now the developed world, fertility fell sharply, first in France, then in Britain, then throughout Europe and America. When people got richer, families got smaller; and as families got smaller, people got richer.

Now, something similar is happening in developing countries. Fertility is falling and families are shrinking in places”” such as Brazil, Indonesia, and even parts of India””that people think of as teeming with children. As our briefing shows, the fertility rate of half the world is now 2.1 or less””the magic number that is consistent with a stable population and is usually called “the replacement rate of fertility”. Sometime between 2020 and 2050 the world’s fertility rate will fall below the global replacement rate.

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In a tacit acknowledgment that the promise of human embryonic stem cells is still far in the future, California’s stem cell research program on Wednesday awarded grants intended to develop therapies using mainly other, less controversial cells.

The $230 million in grants awarded Wednesday to California universities and companies represent a big step toward moving stem cells from basic research toward application in treating diseases like cancer and AIDS. Grant recipients are supposed to have a therapy ready for initial human testing in four years.

But only 4 of the 14 projects involve embryonic stem cells. The others will use so-called adult stem cells or conventional drugs intended to kill cancer stem cells, which are thought to give rise to tumors.

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A friend of mine, a former Anglican actually, brought up an issue that I hadn’t thought about with respect to the new Anglican rite: contraception. In 1930, the Lambeth Conference declared that contraception was not always immoral, and could be used (for serious reason) to regulate the number of children that a married couple had. That declaration prompted a negative response from the Roman Catholic Church”“the encyclical Casti Connubii, which declared that the use of contraception was never morally permissible. As most people know, that stance was reaffirmed by Humanae Vitae.

Now, the Roman Catholic Church teaches that the prohibition against contraception is not a matter of “rite” or religious practice”“it is a matter of natural law, binding not only upon Catholics, but upon all persons. So Anglicans who join the Catholic Church will be expected to conform to the prohibition There is no such thing as a dispensation from the strictures of negative moral absolutes. It’s true, of course, that many Roman Catholics make their own decisions about this matter, and come to their own private peace with God in the “internal forum” of their conscience. But the new influx of Anglicans will include people who will not be able to come to a purely private peace”“the married members of the clergy, who will be required to follow Humanae Vitae no less than other married persons.

As far as I am aware, however, the morality of contraception under certain circumstances has been more or less a settled issue among Anglicans”“even traditionally minded Anglicans. How will this change work out?

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CHARMAINE YOEST (President, Americans United for Life): Polling shows over 70 percent of Americans don’t want to see their tax dollars going for it, so that’s what this debate is over, is not whether or not you agree or disagree with abortion, but whether or not at the federal level we’re going to pay for it.

[KIM] LAWTON: Meanwhile, an interfaith group called the Religious Institute gathered signatures of more than a thousand clergy affirming access to abortion.

REV. DEBRA HAFFNER (Executive Director, Religious Institute): We believe that abortion should be safe, legal, rare, and accessible, and that a health care reform should not make it more difficult for women to get abortions in this country.

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The nation’s Catholic bishops have threatened to pull their support for health care reform unless their concerns about abortion and access for immigrants are addressed by lawmakers.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which supports universal access to health care as a “basic human right,” had been supportive of efforts to reform the health care system, but is concerned about taxpayer-funded abortions.

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FAMILY MEMBER: She’s been fighting cancer for five years, twice. She has emphysema of the lungs real bad. It’s gotten worse, they said, since she’s been in here, and right now she is fighting a bad stroke. They are not sure, but they are saying something like it could affect her left side and maybe her brain.

BETTY ROLLIN, correspondent: Did she leave any instructions about what to do?

FAMILY MEMBER: No, she did not.

ROLLIN: And that’s a major problem, says Dr. Jeff Gordon, an internist at Grant Medical Center in Columbus, Ohio. Dr. Gordon has had dying patients who have not made their wishes known and haven’t realized that some extreme measures are almost always futile.

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Scary. Like aliens. That is how Kerry Mastera remembers her twins, Max and Wes, in the traumatic days after they were born nine weeks early. Machines forced air into the infants’ lungs, pushing their tiny chests up and down in artificial heaves. Tubes delivered nourishment. They were so small her husband’s wedding band fit around an entire baby foot.

Having a family had been an elusive goal for Jeff and Kerry Mastera, a blur of more than two years, dozens of doctor visits and four tries with a procedure called intrauterine insemination, all failures. In one year, the Masteras spent 23 percent of their income on fertility treatments.

The couple had nearly given up, but last year they decided to try once more, this time through in-vitro fertilization. Pregnancy quickly followed, as did the Mastera boys, who arrived at the Swedish Medical Center in Denver on Feb. 16 at 3 pounds, 1 ounce apiece. Kept alive in a neonatal intensive care unit, Max remained in the hospital 43 days; Wes came home in 51.

By the time it was over, medical bills for the boys exceeded $1.2 million.

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Bishop Fleming continued “Each of us has a duty to care for one another and, in particular, to care for the weak and the vulnerable in our society. The parish community can play an important role both in the promotion of mental health and in the provision of the support which says to its members that approaching a professional in the area of mental health is a sign of strength rather than an indication of weakness. Through the creation of a supportive and compassionate community, each of us can reach out to those who, for whatever reason, find life a great burden.

“The Day for Life 2009 also wishes to support those who have lost a friend or a family member through the taking of their own life. In helping them to understand the forces which may draw someone to do this, we wish to show them something of the love and compassion of Christ.”

“Life matters. It is commonly accepted that those who die by suicide don’t want to die; they simply wish to end their pain. Suicide prevention is, therefore, a duty of everyone in our society. In this area we need to be particularly concerned for other people and sensitive to their difficulties.” You are Precious in my Sight addresses pastoral issues around suicide such as why some people consider suicide and the issue of assisted suicide. Bishop Fleming said “Our Pastoral Letter is for everybody. It contains a special Day for Life prayer and it reminds us that “the message of the Gospel is that, whatever has happened to us, and whatever we have done, we can never be separated from the love of God in Jesus Christ. Pain, even tragedy, are never God’s last word.'”

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Critics of pending health care reforms claim they want to ensure that the government does not thrust itself between patients and doctors to dictate what medical procedures can be performed. Yet many are trying to do just that when it comes to one legal and medically valid service: abortion.

Republicans and anti-abortion Democrats in both houses of Congress are seeking to prohibit millions of Americans ”” those who might receive tax subsidies to help them buy insurance ”” from purchasing plans that would cover an abortion.

In a rational system of medical care, there would be virtually no restrictions on financing abortions. But abortion is not a rational issue, and opponents have succeeded in broadly denying the use of federal dollars to pay for them, except in the case of pregnancies that result from rape or incest or that endanger a woman’s life.

These restrictions…constitute an improper government intrusion into Americans’ private lives….

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As religious leaders, we are committed to supporting people’s efforts to achieve spiritual, emotional, and physical well-being, including their reproductive and sexual health. We assist women and families confronted with unintended pregnancies or pregnancies that can no longer be carried to term. We are committed to social justice, mindful of the 46 million women worldwide who have an abortion each year, almost half in dangerous and illegal situations. We seek to create a world where abortion is safe, legal, accessible, and rare. Millions of people ground their moral commitment to the right to choose in their religious beliefs. While there are strong public health and human rights arguments for supporting the right of women to safe and legal abortion, here we invite you to consider the religious foundations for affirming abortion as a morally justifiable decision.

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As if it were not complicated enough, the debate over health care in Congress is becoming a battlefield in the fight over abortion.

Abortion opponents in both the House and the Senate are seeking to block the millions of middle- and lower-income people who might receive federal insurance subsidies to help them buy health coverage from using the money on plans that cover abortion. And the abortion opponents are getting enough support from moderate Democrats that both sides say the outcome is too close to call. Opponents of abortion cite as precedent a 30-year-old ban on the use of taxpayer money to pay for elective abortions.

Abortion-rights supporters say such a restriction would all but eliminate from the marketplace private plans that cover the procedure, pushing women who have such coverage to give it up. Nearly half of those with employer-sponsored health plans now have policies that cover abortion, according to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The question looms as a test of President Obama’s campaign pledge to support abortion rights but seek middle ground with those who do not. Mr. Obama has promised for months that the health care overhaul would not provide federal money to pay for elective abortions, but White House officials have declined to spell out what he means.

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Jarvis,” I asked my husband, “should we have a discussion about end-of-life care?”

“Yes,” he said. “We need that discussion — almost in religious terms.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant. The reason the whole subject comes up so much nowadays is political: Who would pay for end of life care? I reminded Jarvis that, according to a July Wall Street Journal article, most health care spending in general occurs in the last six months of life. And a recent UC Berkeley report noted that health care accounts for 16 percent of our gross domestic product; it will increase if nothing is done, providing a huge drag on our country’s economy.

“All the more reason we need that conversation,” Jarvis said.

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The Bishop of Exeter, the Rt Revd Michael Langrish, welcomed the greater clarity provided by the DPP’s guidelines, “so long as there can be confidence that it will not in prac­tice lead to an erosion of respect for the present law”. The C of E would make a formal response in due course, he said.

The RC Archbishop of Cardiff, the Most Revd Peter Smith, said that the law against assisted suicide “gives expression to a profound moral in­tuition about the value of every human life”. He conceded that not every criminal case should be pros­ecuted. “There can indeed be a par­ti­cular combination of circumstances which will justify in a specific case a decision not to prosecute, in the public interest.” But he welcomed the assurance that the present law would still be applied.

The campaigning group Dignity in Dying hailed the guidance as “a breakthrough”.

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During the George W. Bush years, stem cell advocates fought an uphill battle to expand funding opportunities and engage the National Institutes of Health in this potentially lifesaving research. The political climate improved drastically with the election of President Barack Obama, who lifted the Bush-era restrictions by executive order and freed the NIH do its job in providing comprehensive guidelines for human embryonic stem cell research.

In the long run, these actions will add much-needed funding for this basic research. But there is still heavy lifting to be done on the advocacy front.

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The key words are “abortion neutral.”

What those two words mean is that neither abortion opponents nor abortion rights advocates would use the overhaul effort to advance their agendas. Most important, they would not try to change the legal status quo regarding federal financing of abortions.

That truce did not mean that those activists ”” or Americans generally ”” were themselves abortion neutral. Far from it.

When it comes to health care, abortion rights supporters strongly believe that abortion should be treated no differently than any other medical procedure to which Americans have a legal right. Abortion opponents say that a procedure they view as lethal to a distinct member of the human species, no matter how early in its development, hardly qualifies as health care.

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There is nothing particularly newsworthy about a coalition of abortion protesters releasing a public manifesto that criticizes politicos who support abortion rights.

Nevertheless, a full-page advertisement in The New York Times during the 1992 Democratic National Convention raised eyebrows because a few prominent Democrats endorsed “A New American Compact: Caring About Women, Caring for the Unborn.”

One name in particular jumped out in this list: Kennedy.

“The advocates of abortion on demand falsely assume two things: that women must suffer if the lives of unborn children are legally protected; and that women can only attain equality by having the legal option of destroying their innocent offspring in the womb,” proclaimed the ad’s lengthy and detailed text.

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Christian Rossiter has proven his legal right to die and declared himself a champion of other quadriplegics who no longer find life worth living.

An Australian state Supreme Court ruled Friday that a nursing home in the west coast city of Perth must respect the 49-year-old patient’s decision to starve to death.

His case adds to international arguments among euthanasia advocates, religious groups, lawyers and ethicists about where the state’s duty to preserve life ends.

“I’m happy that I won my right to die,” the former stockbroker and mountaineer told reporters from his nursing home bed where he is fed by a tube.

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There is a good way to resolve a large part of the debate over legalizing physician-assisted suicide.

Two powerful establishments — religions that seek to spread dogma by force and some elements of the medical industry — have ferociously opposed any suggestion that individuals should be able to decide for themselves whether they want to spend their final days in agony.

There is no reconciliation possible for the religion-based opposition. If we allow terminally ill people to decide for themselves how and when to die, it follows that people should be allowed to think for themselves in general , which would be an anathema to tyrannical clerics.

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Have you noticed that the subject of euthanasia/assisted suicide is picking up momentum ”” that it is, so to speak, taking on a life of its own? I mean in particular that we seem to be approaching one of those interesting tipping points in public debate where the tone of those supporting a once-shocking idea is shifting from defensive to offensive.

Take for a representative example one of the “letters of the day” in the [National] Post’s July 22 edition, from Alexander McKay of Calgary. Mr. McKay argues for assisted suicide with the conviction of one endorsing, rather than flouting, received wisdom. The notion that the individual not only has the right to control his time of departure from this Earth, but has the right to society’s complicity in a death deliberately chosen, is embedded in the calm and confident air with which Mr. McKay projects his reasons for wishing, when his “wonderful life” dwindles down to a putative final season of debility and suffering, to “consider my options.”

Mr. McKay does not wish to see his life “cruelly extended” (assumption: suffering and pain are unnatural add-ons to life, not as much a part of life as youth and vigour). He says, “life is for the living” (assumption: the terminally ill no longer hold the moral status of “living”). And, of course, “Canada’s medical system is for those who need it” (assumption: medical “need” is an entirely fungible notion).

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Californians have dramatically shifted their views on the controversial issue of same-sex marriage from overwhelming opposition a generation ago to supporting it by a five-point margin today, a new Field Poll shows.

The latest Field Poll, which examined the changing California electorate over the last three decades, shows that state voters have become far more tolerant than they were three decades ago on some controversial social issues – including abortion rights and assisted suicide, both of which they now overwhelmingly support.

Major shifts on such social issues are tied to demographic changes and in large part to the growing ranks of independent voters, who now make up one-fifth of the state electorate, said Mark DiCamillo, director of the Field Poll.

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The Lords last night rejected a bid to allow relatives to help terminally ill people travel abroad to die, following an impassioned plea by a severely disabled peer.

Baroness Campbell of Surbiton, who was born with the wasting disease spinal muscular atrophy, told how doctors had persuaded her her life was at an end.

She said many would come under similar pressure from loved ones if the law was relaxed.

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The culture wars may not have ended, but on some fronts the combat has gotten rather quiet. For instance, family values.

True, David Letterman’s awkward joke about a daughter of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska prompted denunciations of the “media elite” (though it also boosted Mr. Letterman’s ratings).

But the admissions of extramarital adventures by two Republican stalwarts, Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina on Wednesday and Senator John Ensign of Nevada the week before, did not help their party’s cause and stood in dim contrast to President Obama’s recent success in co-opting parts of the conservatives’ cultural agenda ”” whether voicing his opposition to gay marriage, or delivering Father’s Day homilies on parenting.

Still another instance of what may be an emerging politics of accommodation, with both parties seeing the benefits of the center, came earlier this month when Mr. Obama announced his selection of Jim Leach, a former congressman, to head the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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When Jennifer Garcia scheduled the birth of her daughter at South Miami Hospital, nurses asked her an unusual question: “After your baby is born, are you willing to donate the umbilical cord to save someone’s life?”

She said yes: “What’s the point of throwing it in the trash if it can help other people?”

When Natalia Garcia, seven pounds six ounces, arrived at 3:56 p.m. on a recent Wednesday, the blood from the cord and placenta ”” about a quarter cup ”” was collected by those nurses, working in the hospital’s new public Cord Blood Donation Center.

They flew it to a lab at Duke University in North Carolina, and the stem cells were spun off and stored at minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit. The cells became part of a rapidly growing national bank of cord blood stem cells waiting to treat patients with leukemia, lymphoma, multiple myeloma, aplastic anemia, sickle cell and other diseases.

Read it all from the front page of the local paper.

The decision taken last March by U.S. President Barack Obama to allocate Federal funds to research on stem cells created by the destruction of human embryos (embryonic stem cells) has rekindled the polemics on a topic characterized by complex bioethical implications. The situation has been further aggravated by the nature and content of the declarations made in support of this decision, which will have a huge impact on the question of the defence of human life in the context of stem cell research.

The argument that this decision is necessary in order to defend the right of the sick to have access to possible future treatments constitutes a distortion of logic. In this approach, the rights of the sick person are used as a lever to justify measures which, given the recent developments in this field, would not be justifiable on a scientific basis. Furthermore, the contemporaneous urging to look at the facts and not to act in conformity with ideological considerations is astonishing at a time when, analyzing the objective facts, we discover that they lead to diametrically opposite conclusions that is, that there is no need to destroy human embryos in order to pursue all possible paths in the search for cures for many serious diseases by means of stem cells.

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Here, on a freeway frontage road, ground zero of the abortion wars for nearly three decades, there was, it seemed, nothing left to fight over.

Now the national conversation over legalized abortion has shifted away from Women’s Health Care Services, the beige one-story building where Tiller practiced — as one of only a handful of physicians in the country who performed late-term abortions.

Many Wichitans — even those who have dedicated their lives to the issue — say they have wearied of the abortion wars that had been fought continuously on their doorstep until Tiller was gunned down in his church lobby May 31.

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Unwed young women who attend or have attended religious schools are more likely to have abortions than their public school peers, according to a new study.

The study also found “no significant link” between abortion and personal religiosity””defined by perception of religion’s importance, frequency of prayer and other religious activities.

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The woman across the table told Dr. Jeanne Loring she was on the horns of a dilemma: feed and clothe her existing family, or continue to pay to keep frozen her embryos from an earlier fertility treatment.

The woman, a hairdresser who was married to a mechanic, had had one child and then triplets — all born after successful in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments.

“I can’t afford to keep the remaining embryos frozen,” the woman told Loring over lunch. “I can’t afford to feed the family I have.”

The question of what to do with excess (or unused) embryos is a vexing one for parents who have completed their families….

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