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NRL News
Pro-Life
News in Brief British Amnesty International Section Supports Abortion Amnesty International UK, the British arm of the worldwide human rights group, officially endorsed abortion “in cases of rape, incest, sexual assault and when the mother’s life is at risk,” according to Catholic News Service (CNS). The British group did so, in spite of results from most members saying they wanted Amnesty International to remand neutral on abortion. Represented by a 12-member National Board, Amnesty International adopted the abortion policy at its meeting March 23–25 in Edinburgh, Scotland. “I feel very disappointed and let down,” Michael Hill of Rotherham, England, told CNS. “They [the board] have manipulated the decision-making process until they got what they wanted.” Before the policy was adopted, Amnesty International UK asked its members to comment on the proposal. Despite results showing that most members wanted to keep a neutral position on abortion, CNS reported, the motion passed. The policy was “imposed from top down,” according to Debby Wakeham, a member from Luton, England. The call for an abortion policy “has not come from the membership, and it has not come from the countries in which Amnesty works,” Wakeham told CNS. “I’m extremely angry. I think it is outrageous that the views of the membership are being disregarded in this way.” The British section’s action comes as the entire Amnesty International is poised to discuss a policy on abortion at its International Council Meeting in Mexico in August 2007. The group is expected to discuss questions of “decriminalization of abortion, access to quality services for the management of complications arising from abortion, and legal, safe and accessible abortion in the cases of rape, sexual assault, incest and risk to a woman’s life,” according to CNS. Many supporters of Amnesty International’s work on behalf of human rights warn that an abortion policy would be extremely harmful to the organization’s aims. It “would be a tragic mistake,” Bishop William S. Skylstad of Spokane, Washington, told CNS, “diverting Amnesty International from its central and urgent mission.” Hawaii Assisted Suicide Bill Stalled in Committee The Health Committee of the Hawaii House turned down a proposed bill February 8 that would have legalized physician-assisted suicide. The committee, on a 6–1 vote, ordered the bill “held,” meaning that it will not reach the House floor in this legislative session. According to the bill’s description, House Bill 675 would have allowed “a terminally ill, competent adult to get lethal dose of medication to end life.” A similar bill has also been introduced in the Senate, but there has been no action in committee so far. Hawaiians have expressed strong opposition to the bill. House Health Committee members received 300 written testimonies running 10–1 against assisted suicide, according to the Star-Bulletin. About 100 people attended a hearing February 7, with most opposing the bill. “This is about giving a new power to physicians, a power that we don’t want,” said Daniel Fischberg, medical director of pain and palliative care at the Queen’s Medical Center, according to the Star-Bulletin. He added that “increased education and access to hospice and palliative care, which are underutilized, are needed,” the newspaper reported. Assisted suicide supporters have tried to pass a bill in Hawaii since 1999, according to the Star-Bulletin. Before this session, it was last defeated in 2005. Oregon Assisted Suicide Report Shows Highest Number of Deaths The Oregon Department of Human Services (DHS) reported in March that 46 people died from physician-prescribed drugs last year, bringing the total number of legal suicides in the state to 292, according to the Associated Press (AP). It was the largest number of any year since the state’s “Death with Dignity” Act went into effect in 1997. Pro-life groups were quick to point out serious deficiencies in the report and in the oversight of the practice in Oregon. By contrast, assisted suicide supporters seemed almost blasé about the report. “Here in Oregon it’s getting to be ho-hum,” George Eighmey, executive director of the state’s Compassion & Choices pro-euthanasia group, told The Oregonian. “The practice has settled into a nice, safe, conservative practice,” added the group’s president, Barbara Lee, according to the AP. According to Physicians for Compassionate Care Education Foundation (PCCEF), the report does not enumerate how many doctors wrote the prescriptions; only two of the patients who died last year were referred for psychiatric evaluation; the prescribing physician was present at just 15 of the 46 deaths; doctors knew the patient for an average of only 15 weeks; and the time between first request for lethal drugs and death ranged from 15 to 747 days. “As we have previously noted, many non-terminal patients are dying from assisted suicide,” PCCEF stated in a press release. In addition, “we know that many of these patients are receiving prescriptions for lethal medications from doctors that are new to them, rather than from their usual doctor.” Even the language used in the report downplayed the practice of assisted suicide. “This year, rather than reporting on ‘physician-assisted suicide’ as in prior years’ reports, DHS is now reporting on ‘those patients who participated in the Act,’” stated PCCEF. “Despite this euphemism for state-sanctioned medical killing in Oregon, we need to remember that this report is about physician-assisted suicide.” New Livers Grown from Bone Stem Cells Doctors in Germany report that they have successfully grown new livers in patients using stem cells taken from the patients’ own hips, according to the Daily Mail. “We hope that in the not too distant future this will become a standard way of helping patients re-grow their livers,” surgeon Jan Schulte Am Esch told the newspaper. Six of the eight patients in the study, who had been suffering from advanced stages of liver cancer, are alive and cancer free two years after receiving the cells, the Daily Mail reported. Often, patients with liver disease can be saved if the damaged portion of the organ is removed, since the liver regenerates on its own. However, more than 60% of healthy liver must be present for such a procedure to work. In this study, the patients only had 20% of nondiseased livers remaining, according to the Daily Mail. Doctors at the University of Dusseldorf harvested stem cells from the patients’ hip bones and injected them into the healthy portions of the livers. Cutting off the blood supply between the healthy and the diseased portions, the new cells multiplied and began to grow as liver cells, the Daily Mail reported. Within five weeks, most of the livers had doubled in size, allowing the damaged sections to be removed. “What we have shown is that there is an alternative to transplantation of the liver,” Professor Gunther Furst told the Daily Mail. “We’ve also demonstrated that in the short term you save the life of a terminally ill cancer patient for whom previously there was no hope.” County Pays $2,000 for Inmate’s Abortion Citing a 1987 federal court decision, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, officials determined that they were legally obligated to transport and pay for an inmate’s second-trimester abortion, according to the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader. The county paid $2,000 for the late abortion in March. “We were not in favor of it, but we can’t sidetrack the law,” Warden Gene Fischi told the Times-Leader. The unidentified woman requested the abortion while she was in jail awaiting trial for forgery. Officials tried but failed to get her released temporarily so they would not be responsible for transporting her and paying for the abortion, the Times-Leader reported. “It costs taxpayers a lot of money, but sometimes we just can’t let them go,” Fischi said. Prison officials took the woman to a clinic in Philadelphia that specializes in late abortions soon after the request was made. “She was over 20 weeks. They would not take her over 21 weeks, six days,” Fischi told the newspaper. Although Luzerne County has a policy that it would pay for an abortion only in cases of medical emergency, lawyers consulted by the prison advised that a 1987 federal court ruling “mandated that pregnancy options, including counseling and abortion, be provided to incarcerated women, and that the facility pay for the procedure if she could not,” according to the Times-Leader. British Report Supports Surgical Abortions by Nurses A report in the April Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care presents a new interpretation of British abortion law, arguing that under the 1967 Abortion Act nurses should be allowed to perform early surgical abortions. “Do nurses really want to perform abortions, the killing of innocent human beings?” said Anthony Ozimic, political secretary of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, in a press release. “This proposal would seem to have less to do with women’s health and more to do with an ideological agenda to maximise the numbers of abortions, in the light of fewer and fewer doctors willing to butcher babies in the womb.” According to authors Vincent Argent and Lin Pavey, the abortion law “demanded a registered doctor carry out the termination,” BBC News reported. However, a 1981 court decision ruled that nurses could administer “medical” abortions—using abortifacient drugs—as long as they were supervised by a doctor. Argent and Pavey concluded that nurses should also be able to abort babies using surgical methods, since “the judgement made no distinction between a surgical abortion or medical abortion,” according to BBC News. The British Department of Health does not currently endorse such an interpretation. “We will consider this article in more detail,” a spokeswoman told BBC News, “but the Department of Health currently takes the view that the case law referred to in the article does not authorise a nurse to perform a surgical abortion.” Pro-life groups argued that broadening the law to take surgical abortions out of doctors’ hands would be risky for the mothers. “The pro-abortion lobby claim that so-called safe, legal abortion was necessary to safeguard women’s health,” Ozimic added, “yet having achieved legal abortion, the pro-abortion lobby now wants to remove safeguards by getting nurses to do doctors’ dirty work for them.” Trial Confirms Promise of Adult Stem Cell Drug An early trial of a drug developed by Osiris Therapeutics from bone marrow stem cells showed remarkable promise in treating heart and lung disease. The small trial, involving 53 patients, was just the first step in a lengthy process to develop a new drug called Provacel, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “We went into this trial looking to see if we have a cardiac drug,” Randal Mills, chief executive of Osiris, told Bloomberg.com. “We confirmed that, and we also found out that we might have a drug for” respiratory disorders like chronic asthma or emphysema. Led by University of Miami cardiologist Joshua Hare, the researchers gave patients intravenous injections of either the stem cells or a placebo within 10 days of a heart attack, the Star Tribune reported. The hope was that the stem cells would travel through the bloodstream to the heart, to help the heart heal and reduce damaging arrhythmias. “This is the first in a series of attempts to heal heart patients after a heart attack,” Hare told Forbes.com. “We think the stem cells stimulate the healing properties of the heart.” In the months after the injections, only 9% of patients who received stem cells experienced arrhythmias, while 37% of those with placebos did, according to the Star Tribune. In addition, the stem cells also helped improve lung function by reducing inflammation and scarring, Bloomberg.com reported. Researchers, while cautioning that much more work needs to be done before an adult stem cell-derived drug can be placed on the market, said that these early results were remarkable. “It’s very exciting, perhaps a sea-changing trial for the field,” Marc Penn, director of the Bakken Heart Brain Institute at the Cleveland Clinic, told Bloomberg.com. South Korea Lifts Human Cloning Ban Months after South Korea banned experiments into cloned human embryos in the wake of the Hwang woo-suk research fraud scandal, a presidential panel voted March 23 to partially lift the ban, according to Korea Herald. Researchers can now use embryos “left over” from in vitro fertilization procedures to clone and kill human beings to obtain embryonic stem cells. Using eggs donated by women expressly for the experiments is still banned, UPI reported. “Research into the cloning of embryonic stem cells will be allowed but conditionally,” Cho Han-Ik, deputy head of the National Bioethics Committee, told Agence France-Presse. The Hwang scandal erupted when papers published in the journal Science in 2004 and 2005, purporting to show that Hwang and his colleagues cloned human embryos and extracted patient-specific stem cells, were false. Hwang has been indicted for embezzlement and violating bioethics laws, according to Korea Herald. In lifting the ban, the South Korean government continues its support for embryonic stem cell research. The Ministry of Science and Technology announced March 23 that it would spend 34.2 billion won ($36.4 million) on such destructive research in 2007, up 2.7% from last year, Korea Herald reported. The government will spend such large amounts of money even though “questions remain as to whether stem cell research on human embryos will ever be successful because even Hwang, who violated bioethics guidelines and used over 2,000 eggs, failed to extract one stem cell line,” according to Korea Herald. Mexicans Protest Abortion Proposals Nearly 10,000 Mexicans attended a Pilgrimage for Life in Mexico City March 25, protesting proposed laws in the federal Congress and the legislature of Mexico City that would legalize abortion in the first three months of pregnancy, according to Catholic News Service (CNS). Current law in the overwhelmingly Catholic country allows abortion only for rape, incest, or threats to the mother’s life. The law differs slightly from state to state, CNS reported. The federal district of Mexico City, where the government is controlled by the pro-abortion Democratic Revolution Party, is poised to pass a bill in April allowing abortions in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP). “Unfortunately we have a problem here in the capital—the majority of the local congress belongs to the Democratic Revolution Party,” Mexico City resident Francisco Rivera told CNS. “We think the party is in favor of death, and we will do anything we can—from prayers to peaceful protests—to try and stop them.” The prospects for such a bill in the national legislature are less certain, since the government is led by the conservative National Action Party, AFP reported. Catholic leaders have led the campaign against changing the abortion law. “In the name of Jesus Christ and his Gospel, we ask, we implore they do not approve an unjust and bloody law that kills the innocent,” said the Rev. Hugo Valdemar, spokesman for the Catholic Archdiocese of Mexico City, according to the Associated Press. |