Is conscience solely a religious matter?

I've commented on the surprising accusation that protection of the consciences of physicians is anti-gay as well as anti-abortion by the pro-abortion faction. Now, the atheists are chiming in, claiming over and over that it's just the Christians who might refuse to perform abortions and object to calling abortion standard reproductive care.

"Pharyngula," is the blog of PZ Myers, who teaches biology at the Morris campus of the University of Michigan. Dr. Myers is one of the sources of the mocking of the Catholic communion and a "Red Letter," evangelical, atheist. He's also notorius for being banned from the local free showing of "Expelled, the Movie."

His blog post, "I don't want to be healed by Jesus, I want real medicine," advocates the view that "the religious" are the only people who would advocate for regulations protecting the jobs and licensure for people who conscientiously do not perform or refer for abortion.

If Roe Goes . . .

A Washington Post editorial (free registration required) is so outrageous in its appeal to the extreme that everyone who reads it should be offended.

If Roe Goes, Our State Will Be Worse Than You Think

By Linda Hirshman
Sunday, September 28, 2008

(First come the horror stories.)

In the 1980s, when abortion was severely limited in then-West Germany, border guards sometimes required German women returning from foreign trips to undergo vaginal examinations to make sure that they hadn't illegally terminated a pregnancy while they were abroad. According to news stories and other accounts, the guards would stop young women and ask them about drugs, then look for evidence of abortion, such as sanitary pads or nightgowns, in their cars, and eventually force them to undergo a medical examination -- as West German law empowered them to do.

. . . . Even Georgia, one of the two states involved in that case, allowed some abortions for the health of the mother.

(As did Texas. Two doctors were needed to sign off on an abortion.)

. . . their children would be deformed by the anti-morning-sickness drug thalidomide. . .

. . . religions weren't much engaged in politics. Today, the politics of abortion have changed. In addition to old laws that would spring back up should Roe be reversed, the nonpartisan Guttmacher Institute

(The Guttmacher Institute is the education and research arm of Planned Parenthood, focused on advocacy of abortion. Does it really matter whether or not the Institute is partisan?)

. . . lists four states -- Louisiana, Missisippi, North and South Dakota -- as having trigger laws explicitly aimed at making abortion criminal upon Roe' s demise, and seven others that have committed to acting to the extent that the court may allow.

(The criminal penalties are restricted to the person who performs the abortion.)

. . .The difference today is that some states with criminal abortion laws will almost certainly also forbid their residents to cross state lines to obtain an abortion. Missouri already allows civil litigation against anyone who helps a minor cross state lines to get an abortion without parental consent. Congress was well along to passing a law making it criminal to take a minor from a state requiring parental consent when the Democrats won in 2006 and stopped it.

(How many of us believe that there should not be a penalty for a sexual predator or the mother of our daughter's boyfriend if they take our daughters out of State for a surgical procedure without our permission or knowledge?

In any case, we have a precedent of sorts. 70% of Texas voters passed a State Constitutional Amendment to specifically forbid same sex marriage or civil unions. However, no one attempts to prevent anyone, including gays and lesbians, from traveling to California for the weekend. We won't allow for divorces or division of property in our courts and probably wouldn't allow a woman to sue for malpractice in our courts for an illegal procedure.)

It's easy to imagine the anti-abortion states pushing the envelope with once improbably restrictive laws, such as one requiring clinics to be licensed by the state and prohibiting women from getting abortions in unlicensed clinics, either in- or out-of-state.

(And how is it wrong to require that clinics are licensed?)

. . . How would state laws forbidding pregnant women to leave be enforced? The Hope Clinic in Granite City, Ill., is just 10 minutes from the Missouri border. Police from the prohibiting state can just take the license plates of local vehicles at the abortion clinics across the state lines and arrest the women when they re-enter the state. Or a traffic stop can produce a search. Tips from pharmacy workers, disapproving parents or disappointed boyfriends can alert the police to arrest the pregnant woman for intent to seek an abortion out of state. The state law may allow interested parties to seek injunctions to stop her from leaving.

(Here we are brought back to the fear that State police will not only forcibly examine women who cross the State lines, but that they will stalk all women who leave the State. First, I don't know how any State could afford all those wages, extra patrol cars or even the medical exam kits. Secondly, I can't imagine getting the law allowing such acts by law enforcement officers.

Please do write Ms. Hirshman at the address, below.)

linda@gettoworkmanifesto.com

Linda Hirshman, a lawyer and former professor of law and philosophy, is the author, most recently, of "Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World."

Okay, how does she feel about a woman working as Vice-President with a husband and 5 kids?

The demented should want to die or feel guilty

Baroness Mary Warnock led the British ethics committee (named after her) which couldn't quite decide the status of human embryos, but allowed destructive research on them. (See this LifeEthics essay on the Baroness' 2007 apologia concerning the deliberations of her committee.)

This year, the Baroness told British journalists that she believes that the demented are wasting the lives and resources of other people and that they should be euthanized. According to the Daily Mail, she now supports a "duty to die."

Lady Warnock, 84, was the head of the committee which during the 1980s opened the way for legal research on human embryos.

Influential in education as well as in medical ethics, she became an open supporter of euthanasia after her ill husband was helped to die by his doctor in 1995.

She told the Church of Scotland's magazine Life and Work: 'I've just written an article called A Duty to Die? for a Norwegian periodical. I wrote it really suggesting that there is nothing wrong with feeling you ought to do so for the sake of others as well as yourself.'

She added: 'I am absolutely, fully in agreement with the argument that if pain is insufferable, then someone should be given help to die, but I feel there is a wider argument that if somebody absolutely, desperately wants to die because they are a burden to their family or the state, then I think they too should be allowed to die.'

There's more of the same at the BBC News.

Ignore the fact that a large part of our economy depends on the jobs created by the need to take care of people who can't take care of themselves, at all ages.

Please note that the Baroness is worried about the "wishes" of people that she dismisses as incompetent. She's proposing that other people determine when and how those wishes are implemented.

However, she also suggests that society should actually decide to go down the slippery slope of pressuring people into feeling guilty enough that they chose euthanasia.

Induced Pluripotent stem cells without viruses

"The adenovirus will infect the cells but then will clear themselves from the cells. After a few cell divisions there are no traces of the virus in the cell," Hochedlinger said. "You can't tell the virus was ever there."

Science Magazine has published a report on induced Pluripotent (iPS) stem cells from liver cells (hepatacytes) that do not show any trace of the viruses initially used to cause the regression from adult cells to embryonic-like stem cells. The report, by Hochedlinger's group at Massachusetts Gener al Hospital and Harvard, is behind a pay-wall, but there is a review here at the Washington Post.

The simple explanation is that viruses are used to carry copies of genes that turn on proteins which cause the cells to divide and produce embryonic-like stem cells. Prior research used viruses that might become permanently inserted into the DNA of the cells. These viruses did not cause an infection in the culture because the viruses used were not good at causing themselves to be reproduced or inserting themselves into neighboring cells. However, because they inserted themselves into the DNA, there was a risk that the cells could become mutated or even cause tumors due to the abnormal DNA that resulted. In the case of Hochedlinger's cells, the adenovirus used does not insert into the DNA nearly as often, and when it does, the cell is able to repair the DNA in subsequent copies of the DNA as it reproduces the nucleus of the cell in order to divide to become two cells.

The cells are infected, they change because of the infection, but their granddaughters are able to get rid of the infection, while continuing to act like embryonic stem cells instead of grown up liver cells. The new "adeno-iPS" cells pass all the tests for "stemness."

Just think, no need for egg cells, no cloning, no destruction of embryos, and we're one step closer to healing within the body - to learning how to heal without transplant rejection or tumors due to the treatment. One day, we may be able to regenerate organs and tissues in place, as needed.

"iPS cells would have never been discovered without human embryonic stem cells"

In fact, Mr. Siegal, without the objection to cloning and embryonic stem cell research, iPS cells researchers might have taken a little longer to develop therapy that holds promise for regeneration and healing in the body, without transplants, intermediate cells and without costing the life of another human being.

Bernie Siegal, that lawyer who sued the Raelians for custody of their supposed cloned children and who lauded Hu Wu Suk for his own cloned children, is hosting one of his "World Stem Cell Summits" in Madison, Wisconsin next week. He is joined by Robin Alta Charo in promoting the Summit and reminding all of us that the push is not over for more clone-and-kill embryos and federal tax funded research depending on embryo creation and destruction. No matter how successful induced Pleuripotent Stem (iPS) cells are turning out to be.

Siegal founded the Genetics Policy Institute, with the help of the National Heritage Foundation Inc:

The GPI is funded by individuals, foundations, academic institutions and scientific societies, including the American Society For Cell Biology, the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research and the Huffington Foundation, according to Siegel.

R. Alta Charo (for some reason, she drops the "Robin") is a lawyer/bioethicist ( "for Hire")will deliver a keynote address at the Summit. She lobbies against physicians with consciences and in favor of abortion, cloning and embryo stem cell research. She's especially fond of the latter two, because (as she says in this audio copy of her lecture at the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities convention in 2006)she believes they will support her Progressive politics and belief that the research will support her personal belief that there is no Creator, so humans aren't so special, after all.

For a brief review of the history of "ethics for sale," look at this set of my posts.)

Camille Paglia: abortion is murder

Just, "Wow!" Ms. Paglia and I have many points of common ground. I've admired her honesty and linear logic, even though I most certainly disagree with some of her views that are (as she says in this column) informed by her atheism.

Read the whole essay, when you can. But, for the moment, let's look at the comments on the ethics of abortion.

Let's take the issue of abortion rights, of which I am a firm supporter. As an atheist and libertarian, I believe that government must stay completely out of the sphere of personal choice. Every individual has an absolute right to control his or her body. (Hence I favor the legalization of drugs, though I do not take them.) Nevertheless, I have criticized the way that abortion became the obsessive idée fixe of the post-1960s women's movement -- leading to feminists' McCarthyite tactics in pitting Anita Hill with her flimsy charges against conservative Clarence Thomas (admittedly not the most qualified candidate possible) during his nomination hearings for the Supreme Court. Similarly, Bill Clinton's support for abortion rights gave him a free pass among leading feminists for his serial exploitation of women -- an abusive pattern that would scream misogyny to any neutral observer.

But the pro-life position, whether or not it is based on religious orthodoxy, is more ethically highly evolved than my own tenet of unconstrained access to abortion on demand. My argument (as in my first book, "Sexual Personae,") has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature's fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.

Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue. The state in my view has no authority whatever to intervene in the biological processes of any woman's body, which nature has implanted there before birth and hence before that woman's entrance into society and citizenship.

On the other hand, I support the death penalty for atrocious crimes (such as rape-murder or the murder of children). I have never understood the standard Democratic combo of support for abortion and yet opposition to the death penalty. Surely it is the guilty rather than the innocent who deserve execution?

Thanks to Vox Populi for the tip.