Judicial Life Potentially Enters the Womb
550 U.S. ___ (2007)
On April 18, 2007, the Supreme Court of the United States decided, 5 to 4, in Gonzales v. Carhart (Carhart) that the Partial-Birth Abortion Act of 2003 (Act) was constitutional in view of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (PP), and Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (Roe). The Act banned the abortion procedure identified as “intact D&E” but kept legal the “standard D&E” procedure Continue reading
The media has a long, long way to go in reporting science: “South Korea to resume human egg cloning“, trumpets the United Press International article.
Umm, guys, the idea is to clone humans using eggs, but not to clone the eggs (or ova) themselves. In the defense of UPI, though, while the title is wrong, the article itself seems to that much right, in that they talking about cloning embryos.
But whether or not one is talking about clones or eggs, the work can’t be said to “resume” since the previous work was a fraud. The article is incorrect when it states that South Korea is planning “…to resume experiments with cloned human embryos next year…” .
There are no clones as of now, people! They are presumably resuming their attempts to clone, and ultimate do what Dr. Hwang had fraudulently claimed to achieve.
There is an interesting, and presumably correct detail in the article about the source of ova to be used for these experiments: only the leftover eggs from IVF work will be used from these experiments. That may prove problematic in that they will not be as healthy as ones taken directly from the woman for use in research–IVF eggs will have had more time to degrade before being worked on by the researchers. It’ll make an already hard task even more difficult, but this safeguard is not surprising in the wake of Dr. Hwang’s abuse of power of female employees and their “voluntary” egg donations.
You know what they call people who use Catholic-Church-Approved methods of birth control?
“Parents”
– comment on a Championable post
Boy, I’d love to have a dollar for every time I’ve heard that. Studies have been done before that have shown the periodic abstinence aspect of NFP to be as effective or more effective than artificial means of birth control. However, those studies weren’t widely accepted because they were regarded as Church propaganda. It seems that secular science has finally come to the Church’s defense, though.
Natural family planning as good as pill, study finds
The Catholic-backed sympto-thermal method of natural family planning has been found by a German study to be as effective in preventing pregnancies as the contraceptive pill, with researchers also surprised to find a low rate of unintended pregnancies among women who had unprotected sex during their fertile period.
The study was published on 21 February in an online report in the European reproductive medicine journal named “Human Reproduction Today” by researchers from the University of Heidelberg, Earthtimes reports.
Tobacco Regulation Smokescreen
Have you ever seen anyone sit down at the breakfast table and pour themselves a big ol’ bowl of cigarettes? Of course not. Why not? Because cigarettes aren’t food, that’s why.
Have you ever seen someone at the drug store waiting for their prescription of Marlboros? Of course not. Why not? Because cigarettes aren’t drugs.
Fatuity, thy name is Chuck Muth. Lots of things – chewing gum and lip balm, for instance – are neither breakfast cereal nor prescription drugs, but they’re still regulated for the sake of public safety. Of course protecting public safety couldn’t possibly be the reason being efforts to regulate tobacco as food and/or drug. Nope; the boogymen in the DNC are to blame.
The National Catholic Bioethics Center, which is notable for its training programs in healthcare ethics and its fine quarterly publication, has an anonymous donor who has issued a matching grant (the 2007 Challenge Fund) as the Center works to pay off the mortgage on its new office in Philadelphia. Your donations count double if you mark off the box that says it’s for the challenge fund on the donation form.
I’ve been a member for two years, and they’ve impressed me as technically proficient thinkers who are rigorous with the science, philosophy and theological problems underlying bioethics. If you, like my wife or myself, watched House, MD and were angered by how he handled that pregnant rape victim, give your upset a productive vent by making a donation in House’s name to the NCBC. 🙂