Resolution:

Be it resolved that the 217th Convention of the Diocese of South Carolina dissociates itself from the affiliation of The Episcopal Church (TEC) with the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC).

Explanation:

On the 12th of January 2006, the Executive Committee of The Episcopal Church voted to formalize the relationship between The Episcopal Church and the RCRC, a registered political lobby, which advocates for unlimited abortion rights in the political realm. The literature and website of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice reveal that it advocates positions specifically at odds with those of the Episcopal Church as expressed by a resolution of the 1994 General Convention declaring that, “As Christians, we believe strongly that if [the right to abortion] is exercised, it should be used only in extreme situations. We emphatically oppose abortion as a means of birth control, family planning, sex selection, or any reason of mere convenience.” Further on this the final day of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, it must be noted that this affiliation represents yet another divergence from the normative moral teaching of Catholic Christianity.

[b]Update (from elfgirl):[/b]
For those readers who may have been unaware of the Episcopal Church’s formal affiliation with the RCRC, we’ve compiled a pretty extensive list of links which will provide much background and commentary on the topic, which has (in our opinion) flown much too far under the radar in many dioceses and much of the debate about TEC’s current beliefs and actions.

Here’s the link: http://new.kendallharmon.net/wp-content/uploads/index.php/t19/article/9529/#175687

–elfgirl

The bell rang and the eighth graders jumped up, eager to compare notes.

“I named my baby Kyle Patrick,” one shouted.

“Mine is Antonio!”

At the urging of an antiabortion activist, they had each pledged to “spiritually adopt” a fetus developing in an unknown woman — to name it, love it from afar and above all, pray daily that the mother-to-be would not choose abortion.

“Maybe one day you’ll get to heaven and these people will come running to you . . . and say, ‘We’re all the little children you saved,’ ” activist Cristina Barba said. She smiled at the students in their Catholic school uniforms. “Maybe you really can make a difference.”

Thirty-five years after Roe vs. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, opponents are pouring resources into building new generations of activists. Young people are responding with passion.

Today’s students and young adults have grown up in a time when abortion was widely accessible and acceptable, and a striking number are determined to end that era.

Pew Research Center polls dating back a decade show that 18- to 29-year-olds are consistently more likely than the general adult population to favor strict limits on abortion. A Pew survey over the summer found 22% of young adults support a total ban on abortion, compared with 15% of their parents’ generation.

Looking specifically at teens, a Gallup survey in 2003 found that 72% called abortion morally wrong, and 32% believed it should be illegal in all circumstances. Among adults surveyed that year, only 17% backed a total ban.

Read it all.

In the 10 years since Dolly the sheep briefly walked the Earth the pace of biomedical research has massively accelerated, with extraordinary prospects for serving the good of humanity. Yet science is running ever further ahead of society’s ability to reflect and assess the wisdom of the latest technological advance. We cannot stop the tide of knowledge, and nor should we want to. But we can and must find better ways of deciding how that knowledge is used, or risk the profound social consequences of what we have unwittingly allowed.

The UK is already a leader in bio-ethical research. For all our sakes, it now urgently needs to become a world leader in the quality of sustained and continuous ethical reflection that must go with it. Today the House of Lords will have the chance to help to achieve this when it debates whether to set up a National Bio-ethics Commission.

Many other countries already have such a statutory body, bringing together a broad spectrum of experts with a clear mandate and an independent advisory role. Only by establishing such an authoritative and independent body can we ensure that serious ethical scrutiny is a precondition of research and of the development of biomedical technologies. The area of embryo research, for example, is fraught with deeply contested and profound ethical questions that go to the heart of what it means to be human.

Read it all.

Such cloning represents “the worst type of exploitation of the human being,” Bishop Elio Sgreccia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, told Vatican Radio Jan. 18.

“As for the possible justification that this would be used to provide therapy, up to now there’s been no success at this, and even if there were, it would not be permissible to use the human being as a medicine,” Bishop Sgreccia said.

Read it all.

Watch it all.

Saying they are faced with a civil rights crisis that demands immediate attention, African American anti-abortion advocates will hold three events in the Bay Area later this month in an aggressive push to combat the high number of abortions among black women.

“The abortion issue is huge. It is the Darfur of America,” and it’s time to educate the public about it, said Walter Hoye, a Berkeley preacher who founded the Issues4Life Foundation, a recently formed Union City-based organization intent on drafting more African Americans into the fight against abortion.

Issues4Life has organized the events to coincide with the Jan. 22 anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Jan. 18 and Black History Month in February. All three events will feature Alveda King, the niece of the slain civil rights leader.

A two-mile Walk for Life will be held in Oakland and a conference will be hosted at a Berkeley church Jan. 18. The following day, a walk similar to the one in Oakland will take place in San Francisco.

Read it all.

major campaign to strictly limit abortion – if not effectively prohibit the procedure – could polarize Missouri’s electorate this year in this historically critical battleground state.

At issue is a measure that anti-abortion groups want to put on the November ballot.

If passed, it would stand as possibly the most restrictive abortion law in the country, requiring abortion providers to investigate each patient’s background and lifestyle in order to certify that the woman was not coerced into the procedure.

Under the initiative, doctors would not be allowed to perform a nonemergency abortion unless they believed “the imminent death or serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman” would occur.

Critics say the proposal would expose doctors to lawsuits from women who later regretted their decisions to terminate pregnancies.

To put the measure on the November ballot, the group will need the signatures of about 90,000 Missouri residents – which even critics say is attainable.

Read the entire article.

LEADERS of central Victoria’s Anglican churches have echoed calls from their Melbourne diocese to support the decriminalisation of abortion.

An all-woman taskforce from the state capital’s diocese has made a submission to the Victorian Law Reform Commission, which is reviewing abortion laws.

In it, the taskforce has said abortion remains a serious moral issue, but it should not remain a matter for criminal law.

“In our view, public acceptance of the reality of abortion, including acceptance of the practice among women of diverse religious communities, indicates that a change in the law is timely.”

Anglican Dean of Bendigo, the Very Reverend Peta Sherlock, told The Advertiser yesterday it was important to make a distinction between decriminalisation and legalisation.

“To want an abortion is not a crime for somebody who is in need – I think it’s a no-brainer,” she said.

Read it all.

It has been 50 years since scientists first created DNA in a test tube, stitching ordinary chemical ingredients together to make life’s most extraordinary molecule. Until recently, however, even the most sophisticated laboratories could make only small snippets of DNA — an extra gene or two to be inserted into corn plants, for example, to help the plants ward off insects or tolerate drought.

Now researchers are poised to cross a dramatic barrier: the creation of life forms driven by completely artificial DNA.

Scientists in Maryland have already built the world’s first entirely handcrafted chromosome — a large looping strand of DNA made from scratch in a laboratory, containing all the instructions a microbe needs to live and reproduce.

In the coming year, they hope to transplant it into a cell, where it is expected to “boot itself up,” like software downloaded from the Internet, and cajole the waiting cell to do its bidding. And while the first synthetic chromosome is a plagiarized version of a natural one, others that code for life forms that have never existed before are already under construction.

The cobbling together of life from synthetic DNA, scientists and philosophers agree, will be a watershed event, blurring the line between biological and artificial — and forcing a rethinking of what it means for a thing to be alive.

“This raises a range of big questions about what nature is and what it could be,” said Paul Rabinow, an anthropologist at the University of California at Berkeley who studies science’s effects on society. “Evolutionary processes are no longer seen as sacred or inviolable. People in labs are figuring them out so they can improve upon them for different purposes.”

Read it all.

Here is one:

In his opening paragraph, Daniel Bergner (Dec. 2) describes Booth Gardner walking along the beach, his grandchildren exploring the water’s edge. Gardner says, “I can’t see where anybody benefits by my hanging around.”

I’m sorry he must struggle with Parkinson’s. However, rather than admitting defeat and withdrawing quietly from life, he could transform his disease into a means whereby his grandchildren can explore the depths of their own strength and love for one another.

My aunt lived for decades with the increasing limitations of Parkinson’s. During those years my uncle carried her from room to room, fed her, strained to understand her words. Her journey was difficult, but in the end her greatest gift to her family was a deeper appreciation for the human spirit.

Scott T. Hunsicker

Read them all.

“This will be my last campaign,” Booth Gardner said. “This will be the biggest fight of my career.” He walked along the lane between the beach of driftwood and his compound of houses. The driftwood clotted the shore; it was the end of summer now, and the cove was still, but in winter massive branches and trunks churn up out of the water of Puget Sound. Bone-white roots clawed at the air on this late afternoon; Gardner’s grandchildren climbed across them. His walk was a vigorous lurch. One foot twisted inward, one knee buckled. His torso keeled slightly with each step. He has Parkinson’s. He was governor of Washington State for two terms in the 1980s and ’90s. He is 71, and his last campaign is driven by his desire to kill himself. “I can’t see where anybody benefits by my hanging around,” he told me, while his blond grandchildren, sticks prodding, explored the water’s edge.

From the beach on Vashon Island, where Gardner spends much of his summers, not far from Seattle, he drove me to the island’s town. His Lexus was cluttered with debris: a crushed soda can, a tattered magazine put out by a local pollster, an old plastic cup from McDonald’s, a torn T-shirt, sunglasses missing a lens. Wearing a gray fleece, he led me into a simple restaurant with rustic décor. Full cheeks and green eyes impish, he chatted with the waitress and tried to start conversations with the people at tables around us. “You’re not having dessert?” he asked a young couple immersed in each other. Almost everyone seemed to recognize him, and almost everyone was friendly ”” he’d been the state’s most popular governor in recent decades. But it wasn’t always clear how interested they were in talking. The young couple gazed back at him, perplexed. It was 14 years since he’d been in office.

“Why do this?” he asked, turning from the other tables toward me. “I want to be involved in public life. I was looking for an issue, and this one fell in my lap. One advantage I have in this thing is that people like me. The other” ”” his leprechaun eyes lost their glint; his fleshy cheeks seemed to harden, his lips to thin, his face to reshape itself almost into a square ”” “is that my logic is impeccable. My life, my death, my control.”

Read it all.

The scientists who discovered resveratrol, a substance in red wine that let mice live longer, say they’ve developed three drugs that do much the same thing. The most potent of the three controls blood sugar and is believed to fight other diseases of aging. They need regulatory approval.

Listen to it all.

Some Republican presidential candidates are breathing easier because of the news on stem-cell research, and some religious leaders are proclaiming a truce in their conflict with scientists. But I wouldn’t bet on any longterm peace, for a couple of reasons.

First, despite the breakthrough in producing stem cells without using embryos, researchers will continue working with embryos. Some still believe it’s the most promising approach for stem-cell therapy, as Nature reports. Shoukhrat Mitalipov, the scientist who reported the first creation of stem cells from cloned monkey embryos (the other big stem-cell news this month) says that the embryos is the only “perfect reprogramming machine” and is confident that this method of producing stem cells will be the first to show therapeutic value.

Second, no matter what happens with stem-cell research, there are lots more areas of conflicts between religion and biotechnology ”” and lots of religious leaders, politicians and bioethicists ready to fight. Leon Kass, the former chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics, recently gave a lecture at the Manhattan Institute in which he listed some of the threats to our “human nature” coming from biotechnology: cloning, genetic engineering, organ swapping, mechanical spare parts, performance-enhancing drugs, computer implants into brains.

Read it all.

If stem cell researchers were oil prospectors, it could be said that they struck a gusher last week. But to realize the potential boundless riches they now must figure out how to build refineries, pipelines and gas stations.

Biologists were electrified on Tuesday, when scientists in Japan and Wisconsin reported that they could turn human skin cells into cells that behave like embryonic stem cells, able to grow indefinitely and to potentially turn into any type of tissue in the body.

The discovery, if it holds up, would decisively solve the raw material problem. It should provide an unlimited supply of stem cells without the ethically controversial embryo destruction and the restrictions on federal financing that have impeded work on human embryonic cells.

But scientists still face the challenge of taking that abundant raw material and turning it into useful medical treatments, like replacement tissue for damaged hearts and brains. And that challenge will be roughly as daunting for the new cells as it has been for the embryonic stem cells.

Read it all.

The leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales has begun an unprecedented attempt to block new laws on embryo research by contacting all Catholic MPs in a personal lobbying campaign.

The Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, has invited them to a reception next week to discuss in confidence “issues likely to come before the House in the new session of Parliament”.

MPs say that the move signals a shift towards a more outspoken political role for the Church.

They told The Times that the event was the first of its kind and clearly triggered by the current legislation on fertility treatment and embryo research and by further debates on abortion law, which are expected next year.

Read it all.

Secondly, the Bill proposes to remove the need for IVF providers to take into account the child’s need for a father when considering an IVF application, and to confer legal parenthood on people who have no biological relationship to a child born as a result of IVF. This radically undermines the place of the father in a child’s life, and makes the natural rights of the child subordinate to the desires of the couple. It is profoundly wrong.

Read it all.

Update: a related article is here.

Colonies of tiny cells flourishing in petri dishes in the US and Japan are reshaping the political and ethical landscape surrounding human stem-cell research.

In the process, these diminutive colonies also may level the playing field in stem-cell research ”“ internationally and domestically.

These are some of the effects analysts say they see coming out of this week’s announcements that two teams have genetically reprogrammed skin cells so that they take on the traits of embryonic stem cells.

Embryonic stem cells are the subject of intense medical interest because of their ability to develop into any of the major cell types in the human body. Over the long term, these stem cells could become the foundation for therapies for a range of diseases, scientists say. This week’s announcement suggests it will be possible for scientists to study these cells without the ethical and political difficulties of harvesting them from unused human embryos.

Read it all.

Now that biologists in Oregon have reported using cloning to produce a monkey embryo and extract stem cells, it looks more plausible than before that a human embryo will be cloned and that, some day, a cloned human will be born. But not necessarily on this side of the Pacific.

American and European researchers have made most of the progress so far in biotechnology. Yet they still face one very large obstacle ”” God, as defined by some Western religions.

While critics on the right and the left fret about the morality of stem-cell research and genetic engineering, prominent Western scientists have been going to Asia, like the geneticists Nancy Jenkins and Neal Copeland, who left the National Cancer Institute and moved last year to Singapore.

Asia offers researchers new labs, fewer restrictions and a different view of divinity and the afterlife. In South Korea, when Hwang Woo Suk reported creating human embryonic stem cells through cloning, he did not apologize for offending religious taboos. He justified cloning by citing his Buddhist belief in recycling life through reincarnation.

When Dr. Hwang’s claim was exposed as a fraud, his research was supported by the head of South Korea’s largest Buddhist order, the Rev. Ji Kwan. The monk said research with embryos was in accord with Buddha’s precepts and urged Korean scientists not to be guided by Western ethics.

Read it all.

The promise of using cells from human embryos to treat disease has moved a tantalizing step closer to reality ”“ but without the ethical shackles that have long hindered its progress. The breakthrough is likely to bolster the cause of those who oppose embryo research, and accelerate the pace of stem cell research as scientists rush to build on the new approach.

In a compelling scientific feat, independent teams of researchers in Japan and the U.S. created human embryonic stem cells without destroying any human embryos. The technique appears to be easier, cheaper, and more ethically appealing than an alternative approach that involves a controversial form of human cloning.

Scientists said they “reprogrammed” mature human cells in such a way that they reverted to a primordial, embryonic-like state in a laboratory dish. The hope is to some day convert those cells into fresh heart, nerve or other tissue and transplant them into patients to treat diabetes, Parkinson’s and other ailments.

Read it all.

According to the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health and The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, almost 60 percent of teens with a school-age pregnancy drop out of high school. Only 2 percent of teen mothers will graduate from college. Eighty-two percent of children whose parents do not have a high school diploma live in poverty. Seventy-five percent of unmarried teen mothers begin to receive welfare within five years of their first child. Almost 80 percent of fathers to children with teen mothers will not marry the mothers and will pay less than $800 annually in child support. The daughters of teen mothers are three times more likely to become teenage mothers themselves as compared to daughters of mothers ages 20 and 21. The dismal statistics go on and on.

Read it all.

The exploration of the human genome has long been relegated to elite scientists in research laboratories. But that is about to change. An infant industry is capitalizing on the plunging cost of genetic testing technology to offer any individual unprecedented ”” and unmediated ”” entree to their own DNA.

For as little as $1,000 and a saliva sample, customers will be able to learn what is known so far about how the billions of bits in their biological code shape who they are. Three companies have already announced plans to market such services, one yesterday.

Offered the chance to be among the early testers, I agreed, but not without reservations. What if I learned I was likely to die young? Or that I might have passed on a rogue gene to my daughter? And more pragmatically, what if an insurance company or an employer used such information against me in the future?

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

The Colorado Supreme Court cleared the way Tuesday for an anti-abortion group to collect signatures for a ballot measure that would define a fertilized egg as a person.

The court approved the language of the proposal, rejecting a challenge from abortion-rights supporters who argued it was misleading and dealt with more than one subject in violation of the state constitution.

If approved by voters, the measure would give fertilized eggs the state constitutional protections of inalienable rights, justice and due process.

“Proponents of this initiative have publicly stated that the goal is to make all abortion illegal ”” but nothing in the language of the initiative or its title even mentions abortion,” Kathryn Wittneben of NARAL Pro-Choice Colorado said in a statement. “If that’s not misleading, I don’t know what is.”

Read it all.

A technical breakthrough has enabled scientists to create for the first time dozens of cloned embryos from adult monkeys, raising the prospect of the same procedure being used to make cloned human embryos.

Attempts to clone human embryos for research have been dogged by technical problems and controversies over fraudulent research and questionable ethics. But the new technique promises to revolutionise the efficiency by which scientists can turn human eggs into cloned embryos.

It is the first time that scientists have been able to create viable cloned embryos from an adult primate ”“ in this case a 10-year-old male rhesus macaque monkey ”“ and they are scheduled to report their findings later this month.

The scientists will also demonstrate that they have been able to extract stem cells from some of the cloned embryos and that they have managed to encourage these embryonic cells to develop in the laboratory into mature heart cells and brain neurons.

Scientists who know of the research said it was the breakthrough that they had all been waiting for because, until now, there was a growing feeling that there might be some insuperable barrier to creating cloned embryos from adult primates ”“ including humans.

The development will not be welcomed in all quarters. Opponents of cloning will argue that the new technique of manipulating primate eggs to improve cloning efficiency will lead to increased attempts at creating ”“ and destroying ”“ cloned human embryos for research purposes.

Read the whole article.

In Britain abortions are running at 200,000 a year, more than a quarter of the number of live births.

Yet Dawn Primarolo, the Health Minister, told the select committee last week that the Government believed that the 1967 Abortion Act “works as intended and doesn’t require further amendment”.

Works as intended? Remember that there is no “social clause” in the Act.

Decisions are meant to be made on the grounds of the mother’s health or damage to the unborn child. In reality abortion is a back-up to contraception, and mothers may be left seriously depressed and anguished by it, their lives blighted for years.

How extraordinary it is that abortion on this huge scale has become a regular part of the British way of life, for the morality of abortion, one might think, was pretty obvious.

Here is a human being that is killed, either in the womb or after induced birth.

It sounds like murder. Of course, once a moral philosopher gets to work on any bad act, the grounds of its badness prove hard to establish.

Read it all.

A San Carlos startup is offering to create “personalized” stem cells from the spare embryos of fertility clinic clients on the chance that the cells, frozen and stored away, may some day help a family member benefit from medical breakthroughs.

The novel business plan of StemLifeLine Inc. – which started promoting its service to fertility patients earlier this year as “insurance for the future” – set off a flash fire of protest from stem cell research opponents and supporters alike.

The outcry from anti-abortion groups wasn’t surprising. StemLifeLine derives stem cells from very early stage human embryos, which are destroyed in the process. Opponents of the research see this as the moral equivalent of killing a child. This belief is the basis of the Bush administration’s limits on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.

But some of the most fervent denunciations of StemLifeLine came from vigorous supporters of embryonic stem cell research. Two Stanford University critics aired their complaints in newspaper editorial pages. A prominent Stanford ethicist challenged UC San Francisco scientists who are advisers of the company to sever those ties. These critics accuse StemLifeLine of trying to profit from the promise of stem cell research in the present, even though the work may not yield medical treatments for decades, if ever.

Read it all.

A state appeals court has ruled that a Nov. 6 ballot question on a $450 million stem cell research program may not be perfectly worded, but it adequately and fairly tells voters about the plan.

With the ruling, the three-judge panel turned back abortion foes’ efforts to kill the measure, which they argued doesn’t mention cloning or describe the plan’s fiscal impact.

The court said it is unnecessary and indeed impossible to fairly summarize all views in a brief statement. Instead, such statements are meant to summarize questions in simple language.

“The religious and moral wisdom of the act cannot be encapsulated in an interpreted statement that would be both fair and balanced and still fit within the four corners of the ballot. … It does not matter that a better, more informative statement could possibly be crafted,” Judge Clarkson Fisher wrote for the unanimous three-judge panel.

Read it all.

The battle for the Republican presidential nomination might serve to clear away prevailing confusion and contradictions about public opinion on abortion. Rudy Giuliani seeks the White House by reaching out to that majority of Americans who say they are pro-choice ”” and anti-abortion.

To most pro-lifers, this position represents an absurd contradiction. Along with their militant counterparts on the opposite side of the abortion issue, they’ve reduced the controversy to a simple, black-and-white choice: You’re either “pro-life” or “pro-choice,” with no room for compromise. On that basis, many religious conservatives denounce Giuliani as “pro-abortion” and threaten to withhold support if he heads the GOP ticket.

Unfortunately, anger toward the former mayor distorts his actual position on abortion. Like most Americans, Giuliani takes a mixed, nuanced approach that defies easy categorizations.

Read it all.

With clever chemistry Ham and his team painstakingly stitched myriad tiny blocks of 50 or so letters into fewer small pieces, grew them in the bacterium E. coli, and then turned these many small pieces into a handful of bigger ones – cassettes of genes – until they got two large pieces that could be assembled into the circular genome of the new lifeform.

We had to make and manipulate synthetic DNA on a scale 10 to 20 times bigger than has been accomplished before. But we have now made the circular genome and are currently working on inserting the synthetic DNA into bacteria.

We are holding our breath to see whether one or more microbes among the 100 billion in the test tube “boots up” with a strand of our man-made DNA and reproduces the DNA so a daughter cell starts metabolising and multiplying according to our version of life’s recipe.

In readiness for experiments to transplant a synthetic genome, we have also applied for patents on how to create what we call “Mycoplasma laboratorium”. But I should stress that we have not succeeded in implanting the synthetic genome. Yet.

If our plan succeeds, a new creature will have entered the world, albeit one that relies on an existing organism’s cellular machinery to read its artificial DNA. We have often been asked if this will be a step too far. I always reply that – so far at least – we are only reconstructing a diminished version of what is already out there in nature.

Read it all.

After carefully analyzing the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice’s publications and website, it becomes clear that it is an organization that talks about “religion,” but has no foundation in Judeo-Christian principles or a worldview based on the scriptures.

In contrast, The Episcopal Church is a Christian communion that is supposed to be faithful to biblical teaching. Affiliating with the RCRC, which is a “religious” organization that promotes philosophies contrary to authorized church teachings, invalidates the mission of the church.

That is why The Episcopal Church’s membership in the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice should be terminated. As Christians, we proclaim the gospel of life. We don’t justify the shedding of innocent blood nor do we encourage people to make choices that lead to death. Christianity is about life eternal.

Read it all.

Craig Venter, the controversial DNA researcher involved in the race to decipher the human genetic code, has built a synthetic chromosome out of laboratory chemicals and is poised to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth.

The announcement, which is expected within weeks and could come as early as Monday at the annual meeting of his scientific institute in San Diego, California, will herald a giant leap forward in the development of designer genomes. It is certain to provoke heated debate about the ethics of creating new species and could unlock the door to new energy sources and techniques to combat global warming.

Mr Venter told the Guardian he thought this landmark would be “a very important philosophical step in the history of our species. We are going from reading our genetic code to the ability to write it. That gives us the hypothetical ability to do things never contemplated before”.

Read it all.