| Could prenatal DNA testing open Pandora's box?
By MALCOLM RITTER, AP Science Writer – 1 minute ago
NEW YORK (AP) — Imagine being pregnant and taking a simple blood test that lays bare the DNA of your fetus. And suppose that DNA could reveal not only medical conditions like Down syndrome, but also things like eye color and height. And the risk for developing depression or Alzheimer's disease. And the chances of being gay.
So far that's still science fiction. But scientists have been taking some baby steps in that direction. And some ethics experts say it's time to start talking now about what that could mean for parents and society.
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"If no limitations are put on, you can have a couple get a prenatal genetic test in the future saying their fetus has ... a 60 percent chance of having breast cancer at the age of 60 and a 30 percent chance of being gay," says Dr. Brian Skotko, a board member of the National Down Syndrome Society.
Since such information would come early enough for an abortion, Skotko says, "The ultimate question for society is, What forms of human variation are valuable?"
Then there's the possibility of direct-to-consumer companies stepping in to fill demand, King said. Couples who go that route may miss out on getting help in understanding the nuances of what the test results really mean, said Dr. Mary Norton, a Stanford professor of obstetrics and gynecology.
Once the prenatal information is available, another question arises, King said: Should a woman be allowed to get an abortion for any reason, even a trivial one like test results about height or eye color? Some state governments have passed laws outlawing abortions on the basis of sex, she said. But it's not clear whether those are constitutional, and a woman might simply not reveal her true reasons for wanting the abortion, King said.
Skotko points out that people use their own personal perspective in deciding what they want for their children. Some couples who are deaf from a genetic condition already use current technology to avoid having children with normal hearing. "It's their lens by which they view the world, and they want a child who views the world through that same lens," he said.
Greely sees other concerns. Will the testing become so routine that women won't even realize they authorized it, and then be faced with information and an abortion decision they didn't necessarily want? How can they be helped to make an informed decision on whether to be tested? And if offered a choice of genes to be tested, or results to be told about, who will help them sort through the long list to decide what they want to know? Few doctors are informed enough, and there aren't enough genetic counselors go around, he said.
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http://www.fresnobee.com/2011/06/12/2424219/could-prenatal-dna-testing-open.html | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment   |
| | I'm often shocked by how little most people, even well educated intelligent people, know about fetal development. I have often heard people claim that the thing being killed in an abortion is 'just a few cells' or 'just a ball of cells'. In reality fetal development occurs very quickly in the early stages of pregnancy. I find this website fascinating: The Visible Enbryo. It gives detailed information about development particularly the early stages. It's produced by a scientific institute for training scientists and medical students, so people can't claim that it's pro-life propaganda. (Well they can but they won't have much of a leg to stand on, not that that will necessarily stop them.) | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| Dr. Nathanson died last Monday
Dr. Nathanson, an obstetrician-gynecologist practicing in Manhattan, helped found the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (now NARAL Pro-Choice America) in 1969 and served as its medical adviser.
After abortion was legalized in New York in 1970, he became the director of the Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health, which, in his talks as an abortion opponent, he often called “the largest abortion clinic in the Western world.”
In a widely reported 1974 article in The New England Journal of Medicine, “Deeper into Abortion,” Dr. Nathanson described his growing moral and medical qualms about abortion. “I am deeply troubled by my own increasing certainty that I had in fact presided over 60,000 deaths.”
His unease was intensified by the images made available by the new technologies of fetoscopy and ultrasound.
“For the first time, we could really see the human fetus, measure it, observe it, watch it, and indeed bond with it and love it,” he later wrote in “The Hand of God: A Journey from Death to Life by the Abortion Doctor Who Changed His Mind” (Regnery Publishing, 1996). “I began to do that.”
Despite his misgivings, and his conviction that abortion on demand was wrong, he continued to perform abortions for reasons he deemed medically necessary.
“On a gut, emotional level, I still favored abortion,” he told New York magazine in 1987. “It represented all the things we had fought for and won. It seemed eminently more civilized than the carnage that had gone on before.”
But, he added, “it was making less and less sense to me intellectually.”
The Realchoice blog has more on some of the shady tactics of the early days of NARAL | | comments: Leave a comment |
| DA: Pa. abortion doc killed 7 babies with scissors
PHILADELPHIA – A doctor whose abortion clinic was described as a filthy, foul-smelling "house of horrors" that was overlooked by regulators for years was charged Wednesday with murder, accused of delivering seven babies alive and then using scissors to kill them.
In a nearly 300-page grand jury report filled with ghastly, stomach-turning detail, prosecutors said Pennsylvania regulators ignored complaints of barbaric conditions at Dr. Kermit Gosnell's clinic, which catered to poor, immigrant and minority women in the city's impoverished West Philadelphia section.
Prosecutors called the gruesome case a "complete regulatory collapse."
"Pennsylvania is not a Third World country," the district attorney's office declared in the report. "There were several oversight agencies that stumbled upon and should have shut down Kermit Gosnell long ago."
Gosnell, 69, was arrested and charged with eight counts of murder altogether in the alleged killings of seven babies and the death of a woman from an overdose of painkillers. Nine of Gosnell's employees — including his wife, a cosmetologist — also were charged.
Prosecutors said Gosnell made millions of dollars over three decades performing thousands of dangerous abortions, many of them illegal late-term procedures. His clinic had no trained nurses or medical staff other than Gosnell, a family physician not certified in obstetrics or gynecology, prosecutors said.
At least two women died from the procedures, while scores more suffered perforated bowels, cervixes and uteruses, authorities said.
Under Pennsylvania law, abortions are illegal after 24 weeks of pregnancy, or just under six months, and most doctors won't perform them after 20 weeks because of the risks, prosecutors said.
In a typical late-term abortion, the fetus is dismembered in the uterus and then removed in pieces. That is more common than the procedure opponents call "partial-birth abortion," in which the fetus is only partially extracted before being destroyed. Prosecutors said Gosnell instead delivered many of the babies alive.
He "induced labor, forced the live birth of viable babies in the sixth, seventh, eighth month of pregnancy and then killed those babies by cutting into the back of the neck with scissors and severing their spinal cord," District Attorney Seth Williams said.
Gosnell referred to the practice as "snipping," prosecutors said.
Prosecutors estimated Gosnell ended hundreds of pregnancies by cutting the spinal cords, but they said they couldn't prosecute more cases because he destroyed files.
"These killings became so routine that no one could put an exact number on them," the grand jury report said. "They were considered 'standard procedure.'"
( Read more... ) | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| Ran across this article from a couple of years ago and I thought it gave an interesting perspective on our cause.
Whatever else it is, the pro-life movement of the last thirty-plus years is one of the most massive and sustained expressions of citizen participation in the history of the United States. Since the 1960s, citizen participation and the remoralizing of politics have been central goals of the left. Is it not odd, then, that the pro-life movement is viewed as a right-wing cause? Reinhold Niebuhr wrote about "the irony of American history" and, were he around to update his book of that title, I expect he might recognize this as one of the major ironies within the irony.
These are the issues addressed in a remarkable new book out this month from Princeton University Press, The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right, by Jon Shields, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College. The book is by no means a pro-life tract. It is an excruciatingly careful study, studded with the expected graphs and statistical data—but not to the point of spoiling its readability—in the service of probing the curious permutations in contemporary political alignments.
The Port Huron Statement issued by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1962 called for a participatory democracy in which, through protest and agitation, the "power structure" of the society would be transformed by bringing moral rather than merely procedural questions to the center of political life. Almost fifty years later, Shields notes, "some 45 percent of respondents in the Citizens Participation Survey who reported participating in a national protest did so because of abortion. What is more, nearly three quarters of all abortion-issue protesters are pro-life, an unsurprising fact given that the pro-life movement is challenging rather than defending the current policy regime. Meanwhile, all other social issues, including pornography, gay rights, school prayer, and sex education, account for only 3 percent of all national protest activity."
Shields says there are three categories of pro-life politics: deliberative, disjointed, and radical. Representative of the "deliberative" are Justice for All (JFA) and the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR), which have trained thousands of young people to engage in nonconfrontational pro-life persuasion on college campuses. The "disjointed" politics includes innumerable and loosely organized activities such as sidewalk counseling, prayer vigils, marches, demonstrations, and counter-demonstrations. The "radical" includes what he calls "the broken remnants of the rescue movement," focusing on civil disobedience and the closing of abortion clinics. "In many respects [the radical] is the exact opposite of deliberative politics, except for the fact that it too is highly coordinated and organized."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123145161559565713.html | | comments: Leave a comment |
| A couple that aborted twin boys conceived through IVF because they wanted a baby girl are trying to win the right to choose the sex of their next child.
The couple, who have three sons naturally but lost a baby girl shortly after birth, chose to terminate an IVF pregnancy when they learned the twins they were having were both boys, The Herald Sun reports.
They have gone to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) in an attempt to to win the right to choose the sex of their next child using IVF.
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/health/8193634/desperate-couples-bid-to-have-a-girl
A lot of times you hear about the sex-selection abortions in India and China because of the cultural preference for boys in those countries, but this just goes to show that it can happen anywhere. | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| I know this is an unorthodox question, but I am currently looking for a career change and it dawned on me that one of the things I am most passionate about is the pro-life cause. So I was wondering, does anyone know if there is such a thing as having a career working for a pro-life organization? I understand that most of them are volunteer-based, and others involve people in the medical profession (I am not medically trained). Is there any room in there for people who want to work more in the area of communications, for example?
Any ideas? I realize this is a long-shot, but figured it was worth asking! Thanks! | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| I just received the latest Consistent Life newsletter and found out about a fledgling organization called All Our Lives. As they explain on their website at http://www.allourlives.org their focus is on:
"a world free of domination, coercion, and violence in our sexual and reproductive lives. We are working for reproductive peace.
"Reproductive peace" is a philosophy that combines principles of the reproductive justice and consistent life ethic movements. Like our sisters in the reproductive justice movement, we condemn and fight the many intersecting injustices that work against women's ability to live, love, and reproduce -- or not -- freely. And like consistent life ethic proponents, we reject violent solutions such as abortion and seek to respond to injustice and challenges in ways that preserve human life before and after birth."
I think it's an interesting and important concept, and I hope this new organization does well. They just recently hit 400 followers on facebook so if you're interested in this approach to the pro-life view help them hit 500. :) | | comments: Leave a comment |
| This article states something that I noticed long ago: that ancient religious infanticide (which we find repugnant) isn't really all that different, in spirit, from abortion. They are both a way of giving up something that does have value in the belief that the abortive/sacrificing parent may have a chance at a more comfortable, prosperous future. From what I've read, many women give economic stress as the reason for aborting, and many couples don't wish to "jeopardize their future" by having a child at the "wrong" time.
This article also talks a lot about the selfishness and barbarity of abortion, comparing our modern culture with other ancient cultures who were similarly advanced technologically, but who had beliefs that demanded innocent blood for the prosperity of all to continue.
The following link is NOT kid-safe, because it does have one really sad picture of a dead fetus. :o( The text is very good, though:
First, let us ask the question, "What is sacrifice?" Well, "sacrifice" (in this context) can be defined as "relinquishing what is valuable in order to secure a better future for oneself." In the Mesopotamian religions of the second and third millennia BC, for instance, the subjects of a certain kingdom would bring forth their offerings to the temple, and along with prayer and accompanying rituals, they would provide the gods their due, in exchange for health, prosperity, and well-being. In the extreme, the offering of one's child would be considered the greatest sacrifice; therefore, the subject would expect even greater rewards. Sometimes the remains of the firstborn child were even interred in the wall of the family home, thus assuring prosperity for the family.
Now although the pro-abortion community would decry such a comparison with ancient child sacrifice, if we superimpose the intents of the heart from that period onto the modern day, there is really no difference whatsoever. Essentially, we can conclude two things about abortion: First, that it is indeed a sacrifice, in that it can certainly be defined as relinquishing something that is valuable. And second, the deed is done in order for the individuals to secure a better future for themselves (the "individuals" being the birth-parents or others who benefit from the abortion -- several examples could be noted here, but this would bring about an unnecessary digression). Without getting into great detail, then, it is believed that a newborn child will be an obstacle to the future aspirations of the birth-parents and/or others. Indeed, even as it was in ancient times, the cultural mindset of the day (zeitgeist or spirit of the age) encourages and supports the abortive sacrifice of an [unborn] child in order that the participants might secure for themselves a better future. For instance, a young man and woman might decide that a child would be an obstacle to their college education, which would have implications for their future career and financial state -- thus, the abortive sacrifice is the answer. Or perhaps a single mom might decide that another child might require her to work harder in order to provide food and sustenance for another mouth. On the other hand, the abortive sacrifice sometimes benefits peripheral figures who then become instrumental in the decision-making process. For example, a wealthy father who has a reputation to protect in his community might persuade his unmarried pregnant daughter to procure an abortion in order to secure his future reputation in the community. In sum, at the heart of all these decisions is the attribute of selfishness -- even worse, it is selfishness at the expense of another -- indeed, even the death of another. However, contemporary Western man psychologically and sociologically veils this selfishness, first by denying the humanity of the [unborn] child, and then by proceeding to define the act in terms of altruism. The appeal to altruistic ideals intends to reinforce the legitimacy of abortion and provides a veil for the guilt that usually arises after the abortive sacrifice is secured (though the guilt associated with abortion is difficult to suppress, hence "post-abortion syndrome"). Some altruistic cliches which are employed to justify abortion are "Population explosion," "Individualism -- 'No one has the right to tell you what to do with your body,'" "It is unfair to bring an unwanted child into the world, especially if that child will be handicapped," "Just think, you could get a college education and do so much good for so many people," etc. But as the philosopher Ayn Rand once observed, "Every barbaric act of history has been built upon an altruistic ideal."
http://fidei-defensor.blogspot.com/2004/01/abortion-holocaust-by-william-j-tsamis.html | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| Apologies if this has been posted already, but I just learned of this amazing woman's existence and had to post here. I was linked to this video of Gianna in Melbourne in 2008 giving her testimony regarding life versus abortion. She is an abortion survivor. And she is absolutely incredible - the type of person you find yourself wishing you were more like (I do, anyway). Her story is one for the ages.
Here's Part 1 (Part 2 can be found here):
I urge you to listen to the whole thing - it is worth it! | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
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