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NRL News
Pro-Life
News in Brief Continuing a disturbing trend that is spreading across Asia, Vietnam’s gender ratio is tilting heavily towards boys. A report from the United Nations Population Fund states that there are now 110 boys born to every 100 girls in the country, according to the Associated Press (AP). “Reasons for this include pressure to adhere to the two-child policy coupled with a preference for sons and the ready availability of ultrasound and abortion,” said the report, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP). “In some locations the preference for a son is simply stronger than others, and with high-tech ultrasound, sex can be detected at an early stage and a female fetus can be aborted.” China, with its oppressive one-child policy, has the most lopsided gender ratio, measured in 2005 at more than 120 boys born to 100 girls, while India’s last census in 2001 showed 108 boys to 100 girls, according to the AP. The ratio in the rest of the world is about 105 boys to 100 girls.
Gender
imbalance leads to social problems such as violence against women,
sex trafficking, and a shortage of brides forcing men to remain
unmarried. “The consequences are already happening in neighboring
countries like China, South Korea, and Taiwan. They have to import
brides,” Tran Thi Van, assistant country representative of the
Population Fund in Hanoi, told the AP. While many brides are
currently brought to those countries from Vietnam, “I don’t know
where Vietnam could import brides from if that situation happened
here in the next 10 or 15 years.” On November 2 the Alaska Supreme Court struck down a law requiring minors to obtain the consent of one parent or a judicial bypass before an abortion. After it passed in 1997, the law was immediately challenged by pro-abortionists and has never gone into effect, according to the Anchorage Daily News. “It is outrageous that a minor girl can get an abortion without parental consent,” Governor Sarah Palin said in a press release. “The State Supreme Court has failed Alaska by separating parents from their children during such a critical decision, moving in the exact opposite direction from the law’s intent.” In a 3–2 decision, the court based its decision on the minors’ right to privacy it had previously found in the state Constitution. “The State’s asserted interest in protecting a minor from her own immaturity by encouraging parental involvement in her decision-making process is undoubtedly compelling,” Chief Justice Dana Fabe wrote for the majority. “But by prohibiting a minor from obtaining an abortion without parental consent, the Act effectively shifts that minors fundamental right to choose if and when to have a child from the minor to her parents. There exists a less burdensome and widely used means of actively involving parents in their minor children’s abortion decisions: parental notification.” Justice Walter Carpeneti authored a stinging dissent, stating that the legislature crafted “the least restrictive alternative which will effectively advance the state’s compelling interests while protecting the child’s constitutional right.” He added, “That law is fully consistent with United States Supreme Court precedent, yet today’s opinion strikes it down. Because this court’s rejection of the legislature’s thoughtful balance is inconsistent with our own case law and unnecessarily dismissive of the legislature’s role in expressing the will of the people, I respectfully dissent.”
The state
filed a petition November 13 asking the court for a rehearing. It
asserted that the case was never focused on notification versus
consent, but rather if the law violated equal-protection rights, the
Daily News reported. Therefore, the court should hear more expert
testimony before it invalidates the consent provision based on
Fabe’s stated reason Jack Kevorkian, the convicted practitioner of euthanasia recently released from prison, will be the subject of a movie being developed by HBO Films, according to Hollywood Reporter. Comments from executive producers Steve Jones and Glenn Rigberg and writer Adam Mazer seemed approving of Kevorkian and his “principles.” Kevorkian has admitted to “assisting” in 130 deaths between 1990 and 1999, according to the Detroit Free Press, including several people whose autopsies showed no evidence of any disease. “He’s a living icon, and he’s led one of the most unique lives there is; there’s not a dull moment,” Jones told Hollywood Reporter. “He doesn’t grant interviews readily, but now he wants his story to be told. Whether or not you agree with his views or actions, one thing is for sure: His passion is something to be in awe of. He gave up eight years of his life to make a point.”
Mazer, who is
adapting the book Between the Dying and the Dead: Dr. Jack
Kevorkian’s Life and the Battle to Legalize Euthanasia into a
screenplay, agreed. “At the time of his sentence, he was probably
the most recognized doctor in the world,” Mazer told Hollywood
Reporter. “Most of what we know of him has been told through the
media and headlines, but he’s a very complicated and complex man,
and a lot of things about his personality and background have never
really been shared with the public, including his great intelligence
and terrific sense of humor.” A unanimous Texas Court of Criminal Appeals November 21 upheld a 2003 law allowing an unborn baby to be treated as the second victim in a criminal attack against a pregnant woman. Terence Lawrence, serving life In prison for killing Antwonyia Smith and her four- to six-week-old unborn baby in 2004, appealed his capital murder sentence, according to the Austin American-Statesman. Prosecutors contended that Lawrence found out Smith was pregnant with his child and told another woman that he would “take care of” it. He killed Smith and the baby with three blasts from a shotgun, the American-Statesman reported. In his appeal, Lawrence stated that the U.S. Supreme Court’s rulings in abortion cases have established that states have “no compelling interest to interfere before a fetus is viable,” according to the American-Statesman. However, the appeals court ruled that this standard only applies when the woman chooses to abort her baby. “The ‘compelling state interest’ test, along with the accompanying ‘viability’ threshold, has no application to a statute that prohibits a third party from causing the death of the woman’s unborn child against her will,” Presiding Judge Sharon Keller wrote for the court. “The Legislature is free to protect the lives of those whom it considers to be human beings.”
Thirty-five
(35) states now have laws that recognize that an unborn child can be
the victim of a homicide. Of these, 25 apply throughout the period
of pre-natal development. Federal and state courts have consistently
rejected legal challenges to these laws. Factsheets describing the
specific state laws and pertinent court decisions can be viewed in
the Unborn Victims section of the NRLC website, at http://www.nrlc.org/Unborn_Victims/index.html Seen by many as a controversial but potentially lucrative future technology, nations have invested millions of dollars in research that destroys human embryos to extract their versatile stem cells. However, In the wake of the U.S. and Japanese reports that skin cells can be reprogrammed to change to embryonic-like stem cells, governments around the world have announced shifts in their research funding goals. In Japan, the government’s Education, Science and Technology Ministry plans to spend 7 billion yen ($65.4 million) in the next five years on nonembryonic research, according to the Daily Yomiuri. The new technology, pioneered in Japan by Kyoto University Prof. Shinya Yamanaka, involves manipulating human skin cells to become induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. The iPS cells, like those found in an embryo, have to potential to become any type of cell in the body. The Japanese government plans to use the new funding for “mass production of human iPS cells”; “tests on animals, such as monkeys, as part of cell regeneration medical studies”; “establishing an iPS cell bank”; and “clearing safety concerns,” the Daily Yomiuri reported.
Other
countries are following suit. Germany will increase its spending on
nonembryonic stem cell research to 10 million euros (almost $15
million). “From now on we are going to double the annual funding
total for adult cell recoding techniques, in order to push forward
advances in this area,” research minister Annette Schavan told
Agence France-Presse. “Over the next few years Germany must be a
motor in adult stem cell research so that we can expand on the
results already obtained.” The British legislature is considering a bill that would loosen regulations for research and experimentation on human embryos, allowing the creation of human clones for training exercises as well as interspecies hybrids. “The principal objection to the bill is the way in which it further demeans the status of the human embryo—the delicate and critical first stage of our existence,” Anthony Ozimic, political secretary of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), said in a press release. “The bill promotes a range of unethical, unnecessary and dangerous practices. Such practices include the genetic manipulation of embryonic children for research purposes, the creation of human-animal hybrid embryos, and eugenic ‘search-and-destroy’ tests for disabling conditions.” The government introduced the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill November 9, according to the Daily Mail. The bill passed through its second reading in the House of Lords November 21, meaning that members will be able to add amendments and conduct a debate beginning December 3. Pro-life and religious organizations have many serious objections to the bill. According to SPUC, the bill would allow the creation of “savior siblings,” children conceived specifically to treat a disease in their older brothers or sisters; define “embryo” to include those created by cloning and other processes, without extending any further protections; create a category called “permitted embryos,” which would allow certain cloned embryos to be transferred to a womb; permit the creation of embryos with genes from both humans and animals; and allow sperm or eggs to be taken from patients without consent. The Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, has taken the unusual step of inviting all Catholic members of Parliament to a reception, where he intends to discuss this bill along with possible changes to abortion law, the London Times reported. “New research techniques, and most recently licences for research on human-animal hybrids, have been pushed forward with inadequate attention to the long-term ethical problems they pose,” Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor wrote in the Times. “The many serious ethical issues raised by this Bill require that Members of both Houses are given a free vote in accordance with their conscience.”
“We are
disappointed but unsurprised that both the government and the House
of Lords wish to see the bill progress to the next stage,” Ozimic
said. “SPUC will continue to urge parliamentarians to reject the
bill in principle and as a whole and we will support whatever
parliamentary activity is most effective in helping to stop the
bill. We will be emphasising how advances in ethical alternatives to
destructive embryo research make many of the bill’s provisions
redundant.” Reporting in the November 14 online version of the scientific journal Nature, researchers at the Oregon National Primate Research Center in Beaverton claimed that they created cloned monkeys and then destroyed them to harvest embryonic stem (ES) cells. “[W]e used a modified SCNT [somatic cell nuclear transfer] approach to produce rhesus macaque blastocysts from adult skin fibroblasts, and successfully isolated two ES cell lines from these embryos,” the researchers wrote in Nature. “DNA analysis confirmed that nuclear DNA was identical to donor somatic cells.” This would be the first time that embryonic stem cells were harvested from a cloned primate, an animal with genetic similarities to humans. “This opens doors to human embryonic cloning,” Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, told Bloomberg.com. “I’m not sure we knew before that people and primates were cloneable. But what works in monkeys will work in us.” However, less than a week after the report’s publication came the news of a breakthrough in reprogramming skin cells to create embryonic-like cells, which would avoid the moral controversy inherent in cloning animals or humans for destructive research. (See story, page four.) Ian Wilmut, the Scottish scientist who cloned Dolly the sheep, downplayed the Oregon report as inefficient and obsolete. “It is a nice success but a bit limited,” Wilmut told The Telegraph. “Given the low efficiency, you wonder just how long nuclear transfer will have a useful life.” After the skin cell breakthrough, Wilmut said, “I have no doubt that in the long term, direct reprogramming will be more productive, though we can’t be sure exactly when, next year or five years into the future.” Stem cells obtained from the cloned embryos were manipulated into forming cell lines that were genetically identical to the donor monkey. Nature commissioned an independent assessment that confirmed that the cell lines were derived from the monkey, the Times reported. However, the fact that only two viable stem cell lines were obtained from hundreds of eggs shows that the procedure is extremely inefficient.
“The low
success rate of 0.7 per cent means that it is still too early to use
the new technique to attempt to clone human embryos, especially
given the shortage of human eggs available for such research,
scientists said,” according to the Times. “It also means the method
would not yet be a practical means of cloning human embryos for
reproductive purposes.” New Jersey Gov. Jim Corzine’s plan to establish five new centers for embryonic stem cell research was dealt a blow November 6 when voters defeated a funding proposal by a 53–47% margin, according to the Newark Star-Ledger. The state legislature had already earmarked $270 million to build the centers in New Brunswick, Newark, Camden, Belleville, and Allendale. The ballot measure would have provided $450 million in bonds to fund the centers’ embryonic stem cell research, the Star-Ledger reported. Corzine contributed $150,000 of his own money for the campaign to pass the bond, according to the New York Times. Despite the rejection of the bond measure, Corzine insisted that the $150 million Stem Cell Institute of New Jersey in New Brunswick will still be built, the Star-Ledger reported. He plans to fund the new institute’s research by using the $120 million previously reserved for construction of the other centers. Many in New Jersey are angry that Corzine is continuing to use taxpayer money on embryonic stem cell research in the face of its Election Day defeat. “The public rejected the issue of spending taxpayer funds on stem-cell research,” Republican senator Gerry Cardinale told columnist Paul Mulshine of nj.com. “It is the height of arrogance for them to spend any money at all in the face of that public rejection.” “By doing this, they’re just spitting in the face of every voter in New Jersey, even those who voted yes,” mayor Steve Lonegan of Bogota, New Jersey, added. Proponents of embryonic stem cell research attempted to cast the voters’ rejection of the bond in purely financial terms, as a statement against the state borrowing more money for a questionable return. Others, however, said that the reasons were more complicated. “Certainly a number of people in the state heard our message about ethical stem cell research, and were moved,” James G. Goodman, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of Newark, told the Times. “But there certainly were many financial reasons in people’s minds as well. |