The cold-blooded murder of Dr. George Tiller on Sunday morning presents the pro-life movement in America with a crucial moral test — will we condemn this murder in unqualified terms?

I sincerely hope so. It takes a bad situation and makes it even worse. Read it all.

Update: The National Right to Life statement is here:

The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), the nation’s largest pro-life group, today condemned the killing of Dr. George Tiller. The following statement may be attributed to NRLC Executive Director, David N. O’Steen, Ph.D.:

National Right to Life extends its sympathies to Dr. Tiller’s family over this loss of life.

Further, the National Right to Life Committee unequivocally condemns any such acts of violence regardless of motivation. The pro-life movement works to protect the right to life and increase respect for human life. The unlawful use of violence is directly contrary to that goal.

The National Right to Life Committee has always been involved in peaceful, legal activities to protect human lives threatened by abortion, infanticide and euthanasia. We always have and will continue to oppose any form of violence to fight the violence of abortion. NRLC has had a policy of forbidding violence or illegal activity by its staff, directors, officers, affiliated state organizations and chapters. NRLC’s sole purpose is to protect innocent human life.

NRLC will continue to work through educational and legislative activities to ensure the right to life for unborn children, people with disabilities and older people. NRLC will continue to work for peaceful solutions to aid pregnant women and their unborn children. These solutions involve helping women and their children and do not involve violence against anyone.

Q: Many stories have been emerging about the pro-life response to the Notre Dame commencement ceremony. What kind of response did Notre Dame see that day from students and others who came together for the pro-life cause?

Reilly: The response to the Notre Dame scandal was immense and unprecedented.

More than 367,000 Catholics signed the Cardinal Newman Society’s petition against the honor at NotreDameScandal.com.

Bishop John D’Arcy of Fort Wayne-South Bend, the local ordinary for Notre Dame, boycotted the commencement ceremony.

Nearly 80 bishops, representing about one-third of the dioceses in the United States, spoke out against the honor, and none publicly supported it.

Mary Ann Glendon, the former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, who was to receive Notre Dame’s prestigious Laetare Medal, declined the honor rather than share the stage with America’s pro-abortion leader.

Read it all.

The Vatican’s official newspaper called President Obama’s commencement speech at the University of Notre Dame on Sunday (May 17) part of his “search for common ground” with opponents of legalized abortion.

“The search for common ground: this seems to be the path chosen by the president of the United States, Barack Obama, to face the delicate question of abortion,” said an unsigned article in the Monday (May 18) edition of L’Osservatore Romano.

The paper said that Obama’s Notre Dame speech “confirmed what he expressed at the press conference marking his first 100 days in the White House,” when he said that the Freedom of Choice Act, which would remove restrictions on abortion, was “not my highest legislative priority.”

Read it all.

Still, opposition to abortion is hard and real, the signpost at the intersection of Catholicism and American public life. And those who””by inclination, or politics, or class distinction””fail to grasp this fact will all eventually find themselves in the situation that Fr. Jenkins has now created for himself. Culturally out of touch, they rail that antagonism must derive from politics or the class envy of their lesser-educated social inferiors. But it doesn’t. It derives from the sense of the faithful that abortion is important. It derives from the feeling of Catholics that, however far they themselves may have wandered, the Church ought to stand for something in public life””and that something is opposition to abortion.

“There is a political game going on here, and part of that is that you demonize the people who disagree with you, you question their integrity, you challenge their character, and you brand these people as moral poison,” Fr. Kenneth Himes, chairman of the theology department at Boston College, told the Boston Globe about the controversy at Notre Dame. As James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal noted, this was the same Fr. Himes who in 2006 wrote the faculty letter objecting to an honorary degree for Condoleezza Rice””a letter that read, “On the levels of both moral principle and practical moral judgment, Secretary Rice’s approach to international affairs is in fundamental conflict with Boston College’s commitment to the values of the Catholic and Jesuit traditions and is inconsistent with the humanistic values that inspire the university’s work.”

Read it all.

As I considered the controversy surrounding my visit here, I was reminded of an encounter I had during my Senate campaign, one that I describe in a book I wrote called “The Audacity of Hope.” A few days after I won the Democratic nomination, I received an e-mail from a doctor who told me that while he voted for me in the Illinois primary, he had a serious concern that might prevent him from voting for me in the general election. He described himself as a Christian who was strongly pro-life — but that was not what was preventing him potentially from voting for me.

What bothered the doctor was an entry that my campaign staff had posted on my website — an entry that said I would fight “right-wing ideologues who want to take away a woman’s right to choose.” The doctor said he had assumed I was a reasonable person, he supported my policy initiatives to help the poor and to lift up our educational system, but that if I truly believed that every pro-life individual was simply an ideologue who wanted to inflict suffering on women, then I was not very reasonable. He wrote, “I do not ask at this point that you oppose abortion, only that you speak about this issue in fair-minded words.” Fair-minded words.

After I read the doctor’s letter, I wrote back to him and I thanked him. And I didn’t change my underlying position, but I did tell my staff to change the words on my website. And I said a prayer that night that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me. Because when we do that — when we open up our hearts and our minds to those who may not think precisely like we do or believe precisely what we believe — that’s when we discover at least the possibility of common ground.

That’s when we begin to say, “Maybe we won’t agree on abortion, but we can still agree that this heart-wrenching decision for any woman is not made casually, it has both moral and spiritual dimensions.

Read it all.

Father THOMAS REESE (Senior Fellow, Woodstock Theological Center, Georgetown University): I don’t think it’s a scandal. Universities should be places where we have discussion, debate, where people of different views come together to argue, and when the bishops get involved in trying to censure people, ban speakers ”” I think it’s not helpful.

Archbishop BURKE: This is a Catholic institution which is bound by ”” its title is Catholic, its identity is Catholic ”” to uphold the moral law, and that’s the source of the scandal.

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A new Gallup Poll, conducted May 7-10, finds 51% of Americans calling themselves “pro-life” on the issue of abortion and 42% “pro-choice.” This is the first time a majority of U.S. adults have identified themselves as pro-life since Gallup began asking this question in 1995.

Read it all.

To understand what the controversy surrounding Obama’s invitation is about, it is important to understand what it is not about.

Most important, the issue is not, as some commentators have suggested, whether Notre Dame should welcome, engage, debate and explore a wide range of viewpoints. Of course it should. It was, after all, a central message of the Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council that “nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo” in Christians’ hearts, and the same can be said for the work of a Catholic university. Such a university has nothing to fear from ”” indeed, it has the best possible reasons to welcome ”” inquiry, investigation, argument and testing. And so, no one could reasonably oppose inviting the president to Notre Dame for discussion and dialogue on immigration, education, health care ”” or even abortion.

The question on the table is not whether Notre Dame should hear from the president but whether Notre Dame should honor the president. A Catholic university can and should engage all comers, but in order to be true to itself ”” to have integrity ”” it should hesitate before honoring those who use their talents or power to bring about grave injustice. The university is, and must remain, a bustling marketplace of ideas; at the same time, it also has a voice of its own. We say a lot about who we are and what we stand for through what we love and what we choose to honor. The controversy at Notre Dame is not about what should be said at Catholic universities, but about what should be said by a Catholic university.

Read it all.

We now know that the reaction of right-wing Catholics to Notre Dame’s invitation to President Obama falls into the category of “more Catholic than the pope.”

To the dismay of many conservatives, the Vatican’s own newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, has offered what one antiabortion Catholic blog called “a surprisingly positive assessment of the new president’s approach to life issues” — so positive, in fact, that a spokesman for the National Right to Life Committee was moved to criticize Pope Benedict XVI’s daily.

The Vatican newspaper offered its analysis as Catholic liberals and conservatives are battling fiercely over Notre Dame’s decision to invite the president as this year’s commencement speaker and to grant him an honorary degree….

Read it all.

In the rush of opinion polls released last week (the one showing that support for torture seems to correlate with the intensity of one’s Christian faith certainly is a jaw-dropper) one intriguing survey on abortion was largely overlooked. The survey, from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, found that support for legal abortion has slipped significantly — mostly among men.

Among all respondents, the percentage of those who say abortion should be legal in all or most cases has declined from 54 to 46 since August, according to the poll. Support for abortion has declined even among white mainline Protestants, who are generally considered liberal on abortion rights issues. Just 23 percent of white evangelical Protestants now favor legal abortion, down from 33 percent in August. But the more surprising numbers are among guys.

Indeed, the change in abortion opinions is being largely driven by large shifts among men. Last August, 53 percent of men said that abortion should be legal in most or all cases. But last month, only 43 percent did.

Read it all.

A year ago, when a doctor finally diagnosed the brain disease that had been making it harder for her to walk without falling, Rona Zelniker told her son and daughter that she was going to end her life while she still could, before complete disability set in.

Her children were grateful for the way she prepared them, and for the time they had together at the end. “I must have cried 150 times in the last year,” said Keith Zelniker, 32, her son. He scheduled off the week she was planning to die, writing on his work calendar, “bereavement time.”

Zelniker felt anxiety about how she would end her life. She didn’t want to swallow pills, only to wake up even worse off, with brain damage. A gun was out of the question.

Read it all.

Bradley Mattes, Executive Director of Life Issues Institute, announced today that they will present the group’s prestigious “Hero at Heart” award to Mary Ann Glendon, former Ambassador to the Vatican. The honor is given annually to individuals who demonstrate outstanding courage or compassion on behalf of innocent human life. Recipients have included Congressman Henry Hyde and former Kansas Attorney General, Phill Kline.

Read it all.

Scientists and medical ethicists yesterday condemned the controversial fertility doctor Panayiotis Zavos for transferring cloned human embryos into the wombs of four women.

Dr Zavos claimed in an interview with The Independent that he had created 14 cloned human embryos and transferred 11 of them into the wombs of the four women, who wanted to give birth to cloned babies, although none of them had become pregnant.

Leading figures in the fertility world, including Lord Winston of Imperial College London, poured scorn on Dr Zavos’s claims, saying he had not produced any scientific evidence to support his statements, which critics said can only be done by publishing the work in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

Read it all.

A controversial fertility doctor claimed yesterday to have cloned 14 human embryos and transferred 11 of them into the wombs of four women who had been prepared to give birth to cloned babies.

The cloning was recorded by an independent documentary film-maker who has testified to The Independent that the cloning had taken place and that the women were genuinely hoping to become pregnant with the first cloned embryos specifically created for the purposes of human reproduction.

Read it all.

Surely having children is a blessing and a joy. Yet this passage from Genesis tells us that we are to have them, not just for our own delight, but also to assist in the renewal of God’s creation.

We are gifted with children, rather than entitled to them. Marrying and having children, the Book of Common Prayer declares in The Celebration and Blessing of a Marriage, are not to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly, but “reverently and deliberately.”

A recent foray into the world of assisted reproduction by a single 33-year-old woman to have more children ”“ octuplets, as it turned out ”“ to add to six under the age of 8 already living, however, leaves us perplexed and concerned. Ought we to have as many children as our bodies will bear?

Is it possible for us to cherish and nurture children as creatures with their own uniqueness and integrity if we deliberately have more than a dozen of them who are very young? What are the limits to God’s call to us to be fruitful and multiply?

Read it all.

Why is it that now, at a time when “hope” is supposed to still be resilient over despair, there would be a thriving market for choosing to love a child who looks more like you, or perhaps more like someone more aesthetically normative than your spouse? (It might be worth noting that the man now running the free world was beloved by a mother and grandmother who did not share his supposedly relevant “predictive genomics.”)

Rather than condemning the choosers, I want to ask about the context in which the choice is made, and why other choices just seem less attractive. Why does the expenditure of time and effort involved in pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) on embryos seem more worthwhile than the time and effort to prepare to adopt one of the thousands of children or teenagers waiting to be received out of foster care?

Read it all.

Dr. Ragsdale has served as vicar of St. David’s since 1996. Since 2005, she has also served as president and executive director of Political Research Associates, a progressive think tank dedicated to building a more just and inclusive democratic society by exposing movements, institutions, and ideologies on the political and Christian Right “that undermine human rights,” according to information published on the organization’s website. During her tenure at Political Research Associates, Dr. Ragsdale helped the organization successfully broaden its donor base as part of a transition from a founder-led institution.

She has also been a passionate advocate and author on abortion from a Christian perspective. She served for 17 years (eight as chairwoman) on the national board for the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC).

Read it all.

Britain, like many other countries, is debating assisted suicide and euthanasia. In Britain, the more common term is “assisted dying,” which appears to reflect a strategy to avoid using “suicide” to describe ending one’s own life. Then again, the distinction between assisted suicide and murder is itself hard to define.

In any event, proposals for the legalization of “assisted dying” are back in play and Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (also known as Llora Finlay) has entered the debate. Writing in The Times [London], Dr. Finlay argues that this world is simply too imperfect to sustain any ethical system of assisted dying.

Read it all.

In his reply to Mr. [John] Vanderstar, Bishop Howe said he had not initiated the board’s resolution to disassociate from the RCRC, but that he fully supported it.

“I am, frankly, deeply embarrassed that the Executive Council adopted this affiliation in the first place,” Bishop Howe said. He added that he would share the documents Mr. Vanderstar had included with his letter.

Bishop Howe noted that he is a past president and chairman of the board of the organization now known as Anglicans for Life, and he included with his letter a copy of a 1988 General Convention resolution he helped sponsor, which placed a number of conditions on when an abortion was morally permissible for a Christian. Bishop Howe noted that the resolution was abandoned by convention three years later.

Read it all.

Experience of treating many patients over 30 years has convinced me that doctors must accept death as a natural end to life and avoid inappropriate interventions, but that legalising euthanasia, whether indirectly, in the form of assisted suicide, or directly, via lethal injection, is a dangerous step too far.

Proposals to allow “assisted dying”, while undoubtedly well intended, have an air of unreality about them that is worrying to anyone who works with seriously ill people. They assume the existence of a perfect world – a world in which all terminally ill people are entirely clear-headed and make life-or-death decisions on completely rational grounds; and a world in which all doctors know their patients well and have limitless time and skill to assess requests for euthanasia.

The real world of clinical practice just isn’t like that.

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Bishop Patrick O’Donoghue explained in a statement released today that the proposal originated from the Independent Advisory Group on Sexual Health and HIV, and “therefore comes from the heart of the abortion industry — threatening yet another hammer-blow to the sanctity of human life in this country.”

“I am appalled that this proposal will result in the deaths of many more preborn children and cause untold harm to women,” he continued. “As a society, we need to wake up and stop treating abortion as a quick-fix solution to pregnancy and offer compassionate and practical support to women facing crisis pregnancies.”

Read it all.

In 2007, President Bush issued an executive order requiring the government to fund research into alternatives. Inexplicably ”“ and without discussing it in his speech ”“ Obama revoked this Bush order, too. He claimed he wants to fund such research, but what he did was take away the existing legal requirement that it be done. We have seen this same undermining of alternatives here in California. Last year, Sen. Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica) introduced a bill (SB 1565) that would have, among other provisions, made it easier for the CIRM to fund IPSC research. That proposed legal shift in emphasis was opposed adamantly by the CIRM, and despite overwhelming bipartisan support, fell to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s veto.

If pursuing the best and most ethical science were truly the goals, why deflect increased support for this promising research to which no one objects? Perhaps it is because this debate involves more than stem cells taken from embryos “left over” from in-vitro fertilization ”“ as the argument is usually couched ”“ which brings us back to ethics. In the wake of the Obama changes in federal policy, the New York Times editorially threw down a gauntlet, calling for both the rescission of the Dickey Amendment and federal funding of human therapeutic cloning research. Now that the Bush restrictions are history, look for these battles ”“ which again are not science debates ”“ to flare in the years to come. In this sense, embryonic stem cell research threatens to become a launching pad to an ever-deepening erosion of the unique moral status of human life.

Read it all.

Sir, It is regrettable that the Right Rev Christopher Herbert (letter, Mar 13) should suppose that the debate about assisted dying involves the question whether faith and reason are incompatible. It does not. What it involves is the issue whether, by law, one who has no faith should be restrained by those who have faith from exercising the freedom to have assistance to end his or her life.

Read the whole letter here.

But this kind of calculation is precisely what has gotten Christian political activists in trouble in the past, not just for 40 years but for 1,600 years. We gain access to Caesar in order to affect policy; we hold onto access even if it involves compromising some of what we want in policy; in the end, we can easily forget what policies we were after in the first place. I think this definitely happened to the Christian right. It doesn’t need to be repeated by the Christian center or left.

My understanding of the majestic God-given sacredness of human life tells me that a society that legally permits abortion on demand is deeply corrupt. It pays for adult sexual liberties with the lives of defenseless developing children. That practice, in turn, desensitizes society to the implications of paying for prospective medical cures with defenseless frozen embryos, which themselves are available because our society pays for medically assisted reproductive technology by producing hundreds of thousands of these embryos as spares. And yes, that same commitment to life’s sacredness has grounded my opposition to paying for national security with torture, or paying for today’s affluence with tomorrow’s environmental destruction.

Christian conscience requires me to make this case even if it has no chance of prevailing in American society. And if we lose on abortion, as it appears we will lose for a long time to come, Christian conscience requires me to ask the government not to require citizens to pay for procuring services that violate their sacred beliefs.

Read it all.

On March 9, President Obama signed an executive order lifting restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. This is not surprising. It was a campaign promise. What is surprising is that, at the very time the federal government is throwing its full faith and credit behind experimentation on human embryos, science appears to have progressed away from embryonic stem cell research, leaving the government – and politicians – in the dust.

Whatever you thought about the Bush Administration’s limitations on funding for embryonic stem cell research, that policy decision had the effect of promoting scientific research on alternative and ethical sources for stem cells. It is likely that these avenues of research would not have been pursued if all available funds had been channeled into embryo research. These avenues have been among the most successful in developing the promised cures that embryonic stem cells have failed to even begin to achieve. The most notable ethical stem cell advancements have taken place on three fronts.

Read it all.

The president fails to understand that “scientific integrity” does not exist in a vacuum; it must always answer to the demands of ethics. Science is not free to pursue what it is able to do; it must be limited by what it should do in an ethical world that seeks to protect every individual as well as benefit the whole of humanity. .

The cold calculus behind embryonic stem-cell research frankly frightens us. If it is OK to “derive” stem cells from the living bodies of human embryos, causing the destruction of those innocent human lives, what does that say but that some lives have more value than others? That we may sacrifice some human lives for the benefit of others?

Don’t fool yourself. Someday you’ll be sick and weak, aged and infirm. A society that places no value on intrinsic human value is no place you’ll want to live — or eventually be allowed to.

Read it all.

DAVID MASCI (Senior Fellow, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life): Well, there are a range of different opinions in the American religious community. Jewish denominations and mainline Protestant churches, particularly more liberal mainline Protestant churches, support embryonic stem cell research. They say that embryos have intrinsic value and worth, but the incredible possibilities that stem cell research offer ”” cures for cancer and things like that ””outweigh those concerns and considerations. On the other side, you have the Roman Catholic Church and you have more evangelical Protestant churches like the Southern Baptist Convention or the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church. These churches oppose embryonic stem cell research. They say an embryo was a person and a person has the right to life and you can’t take that life away, even for the best of reasons.

[KIM] LAWTON: What about the people in the pews? Do they agree with the leadership of these institutions?

Mr. MASCI: White evangelical Protestants tend to support their churches’ positions on this, only 31 percent of evangelicals support embryonic stem cell research, so a substantial majority say no, we don’t want embryonic stem cell research. With Catholics it’s the other way around. Fifty-nine percent of American Catholics support embryonic stem cell research, which of course goes exactly against what the Church’s leadership is saying. Now when you ask Catholics who attend Mass regularly, weekly, whether they support embryonic stem cell research, that number drops to 46 percent. So people actually in the pews, people who are attending Roman Catholic services, they do ”” they are more likely to support their leadership’s views on this than Catholics as a whole.

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Almost no one was surprised this week when President Obama lifted restrictions on stem cell research that involved the destruction of human embryos. Even jaded Washington watchers are adjusting to the idea that this is a president with an eerie determination to do exactly what he said he would do during his campaign.

Those who approve such research applauded Mr. Obama’s action. (“Fantastic,” said one stem cell scientist on PBS.) Those who disapprove condemned it. (“Deadly,” said an anti-abortion leader in The New York Times.) But some commentary focused at least as much on the nature of the president’s moral argument as on the specific conclusions he reached.

When it comes to the controversy over human embryonic stem cell research, moral argument has not been much in evidence. The president spoke of a popular consensus in favor of it reached “after much discussion, debate and reflection.” That is a kindly description of the hype, exaggeration and denunciation that have dominated the controversy.

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This was supposed to be the week that Michael Steele, the beleaguered new chairman of the national Republican Party, got his groove on, as he might put it: From filling vacancies left by the mass-firing he conducted upon taking office to issuing 100-day plans on how to make the Republican Party competitive on fund-raising and the Internet, among other things.

But no.

On Thursday Mr. Steele found himself yet again explaining what he had meant to say, this time after a lively interview with GQ in which he seemed to suggest, among other things, that women should have the right to decide whether to have an abortion. “I think that’s an individual choice,” he said.

A moment later, he appeared to clarify his remarks, saying that abortion policy should be decided by the states.

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A showdown is shaping up in some of the nation’s most conservative states over embryonic stem-cell research, as opponents draw language and tactics from the battle over abortion to counter President Obama’s plan to ease research restrictions.

Legislation granting fertilized embryos “personhood” has gained momentum in at least three state legislatures. The strategy – which has been used to try to undermine the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion – is now aimed at embryonic stem-cell research. The scientific field uses stem cells from human embryos, which can develop into different kinds of adult cells, to seek answers about human health.

Opposition to both abortion and stem-cell research hinges on the same issue: When does life begin? Embryonic stem-cell research has become the latest front in this decades-old battle.

Read it all.