I'm in the final throes of compiling NRL News's Special January 22 Commemorative Edition, the theme of which is "Stop Obama's Abortion Agenda." If you haven't already told us you want additional copies, call 202-626-8828. (Ordering information can be found at http://nrlc.org/news/Jan222009ad.pdf)

I'm ending this year's daily TN&Vs with a quick reference to a useful survey and reproducing an encouraging item that appeared elsewhere.

An online nationwide survey "commissioned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has found that four out of five U.S. adults (82 percent) think abortion should either be illegal under all circumstances (11 percent) or would limit its legality [71%]." We learn once again that the American public is deeply uneasy with abortion on demand.

The quick rebuttal might be that there's been no dramatic increase in opposition to abortion in the last few years. A quick response to that might be to say that if you have essentially the entire media, educational, and medical establishment on one side pushing to expand abortion, and the underfunded, often under siege pro-life movement on the other side pushing to roll back the "right" to abortion, it is quite an accomplishment to hold them in check.

The other point worth making–and the USCCB does so eloquently–is that the public's support for any number of limitations on abortion runs smack dab into the let's-obliterate-every-limitation mindset of pro-abortion President-elect Barack Obama. Be sure to order extra copies of the January issue.

The following item appeared on the blog of bioethicist Wesley Smith (www.wesleyjsmith.com). It is very much worth reading. The headline is "UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown Refuses to be Bullied Into Support for Assisted Suicide":

Just as during the Kevorkian saga, some have claimed that the "cure" for "suicide tourism"--in which dying and disabled people fly to Switzerland to be made dead--has been legalization of assisted suicide. And just as in Kevorkian's day, family members and others have gone public, using their pain as a political weapon to demand that suicide killings of the ill and disabled be made easier so that family and friends can attend the demise in the suicidal person's home, rather than forcing the soon-to-be dead patient to travel elsewhere to find someone willing to give them the poison cup. But PM Gordon Brown is unbowed. From the story [found at www.inthenews.co.uk/news/autocodes/countries/switzerland/pm-refuses-legalise-assisted-suicide-$1257614.htm]

Gordon Brown has made clear the government has no intention of legalising assisted suicide. The prime minister said he was "totally against laws on that [issue]" in an interview with the leader of the Catholic church in England and Wales, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, for the Today programme.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has made clear the government has no intention of legalizing assisted suicide.

"It's not really for us to create any legislation that would put pressure on people to feel they had to offer themselves because they were causing trouble to a relative or anything else," he said on the Today programme.

"I think we've got to make it absolutely clear the importance of human life is recognised in this."

Good for Gordon Brown. He's not only right morally, but it is the right policy. If society doesn't value everyone's life equally, the result will be discrimination and oppression--as in the Netherlands where doctors kill hundreds of patients every year who have never asked to be euthanized. Moreover, legalizing assisted suicide for the terminally ill--the first stop on that particular train--would not stop suicide tourism.

Many of those who go to Switzerland to die are not terminally ill. Hence, once it became legal for one category of patients to receive assisted suicide, once society deemed suicide to be a necessity in some cases, the same whipsawing would take place to force society to expand the law to permit others to be killed.

The best way to stop suicide tourism is for family members and society to refuse to accommodate the desire by compassionately and lovingly help the patient search for another way of dealing with their pain and disapproving of actions that cooperate with the death circus. Acceding to the culture of death merely whets its appetite.

Please send your comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com.