Tebow Super Bowl Ad Controversy Proves "Pro-abortion," not "Pro-choice"

Sarah Palin has written a note on her Facebook page on the move to oppose an ad that's scheduled to be run during the Super Bowl. The active opposition to the ad by the National Organization for Women (incorrectly named, btw) and other groups, shows just how pro-abortion, rather than pro-choice, they are.

The 30 second segment is sponsored by - and paid for by - Focus on the Family. It tells the story of Pam Tebow, mother of Heisman Trophy winner, Tim Tebow. Tebow's mother was encouraged to abort him due to medical problems.

Colorado Springs, Colo (Friday, Jan. 15, 2010) – Focus on the Family will broadcast the first Super Bowl ad in its history February 7 during CBS Sports' coverage of the game at Dolphin Stadium in South Florida.

The 30-second spot from the international family-help organization will feature college football star Tim Tebow and his mother, Pam. They will share a personal story centered on the theme of "Celebrate Family, Celebrate Life."

Jim Daly, president and CEO of Focus on the Family, said the chance to partner with the Tebows and lift up a meaningful message about family and life comes at the right moment in the culture, because "families need to be inspired."

"Tim and Pam share our respect for life and our passion for helping families thrive," Daly said. "They live what we see every day – that the desire for family closeness is written on the hearts of every generation. Focus on the Family is about nurturing that desire and strengthening families by empowering them with the tools they need to live lives rooted in morals and values."

Daly added that all the funds to air the ad came from a handful of "very generous and committed friends" who donated specifically to support the project. No money from the ministry's general fund was used.

The Tebows said they agreed to appear in the commercial because the issue of life is one they feel very strongly about.

The Washington Post reports that there has been opposition to the airing of the ad:

After learning of the ad late Monday, Women's Media Center (speaking on behalf of the National Organization for Women, the Feminist Majority Foundation and other organizations) asked CBS to pull the ad. It also questioned how and why the network, which used to forbid "advocacy" advertising, agreed to air Focus on the Family's spot, which is valued at $2.5 million to $3 million.

"An ad that uses sports to divide rather than to unite has no place in the biggest national sports event of the year -- an event designed to bring Americans together," Jehmu Greene, president of the Women's Media Center, said in a statement.

The pressure on CBS proves my earlier assertion that as a society, we in the US have moved from the 1960's slogan "Our Bodies, Our Choice," to "Our Bodies, Our Choice, and You Don’t Have Choice."

Politics bites science

For a clear outline as to why you shouldn't believe that 45,000 people die each year because they don't have insurance, read the blog entry by John Milloy, publisher of "Junk Science" on last week's report in the American Journal of Public Health.

Forget that the authors are blatantly biased members of the "Physicians for a National Health Plan."

All you need to know is:
# Among the many problems with the study, here are four of the most glaring; all of which will likely be missed by the media:

* The researchers assumed that study subjects lacking health insurance at the time of the interviews did not subsequently gain or regain insurance coverage. In fact, a study subject could have received health coverage the very next day after the interview and this would not have been considered by the researchers.
* The researchers essentially assume that lack of health insurance at the time of interview is the causal factor in the deaths that occurred. No data was gathered to back up this assumption.
* None of the data collected during the interviews, including insurance status, was validated by the researchers.
* The study result is statistically weak. Combined with the peculiar date-of-death cutoff (the year 2000 as opposed to any other year), it raises questions as to whether the study result was produced by “data dredging” – essentially cherry-picking data that provides the desired result.

Obama cancels meeting of President's Council Bioethics

I wonder whether the new commission/committee/council will have even one pro-life member? Will Robert P. George (one of only 3 or 4 conservative bioethicist with tenure at a major university), for example, have a spot?

And remember the fuss and bother when some of the members of President Bush's Council were replaced in March, 2004? Bet there's none, now!

Obama Plans to Replace Bush’s Bioethics Panel
By NICHOLAS WADE

Members of the President’s Council on Bioethics were told by the White House last week that their services were no longer needed and were asked to cancel a planned meeting, a council staff member said Wednesday.

The council was disbanded because it was designed by the Bush administration to be “a philosophically leaning advisory group” that favored discussion over developing a shared consensus, said Reid Cherlin, a White House press officer.

President Obama will appoint a new bioethics commission, one with a new mandate and that “offers practical policy options,” Mr. Cherlin said.

Human cloned embryos

Oddly, there is very little notice of the confirmation that Advance Cell Technology has created cloned human embryos. Current bioethics and science reporting evidently takes the creation and destruction of human embryos for granted. In fact, the embryonic humans were created with the intention of destroying them.

No one - or almost no one - seems to notice.


Wired Science has one of the few reports that narrows in on what should be the headline:"Research Breakthrough: Human Clones May Be Genetically Viable."

It is significant that (as reported earlier) human-animal hybrid embryos do not appear to be a practical source for human embryonic stem cells. However, after reading the article itself, it appears that the story with in the story may be - I believe should be - even more significant.

The article, "Reprogramming of Human Somatic Cells Using Human and Animal Oocytes," is available online and free, here, in pdf form. Supplemental information is available here.

Lanza and his colleagues report that they used human eggs and human donor DNA to create about 50 cloned human embryos, all females. They also write that they used a human embryo started by in vitro fertilization as a "control," or material to test the validity of their other results.

Cells were removed for testing from some of the cloned human embryos and the IVF human embryo. Other than that, we do not know the fate of these embryonic human girls.

Edited January 27, 2010 to correct a "Label" typo

Texas teens form pro-life club

And, it seems that the kids in Coppell, Texas (near Dallas) are only "anti-abortion" because of the undue influence of their families and churches. From the Dallas Morning News:

Abortion rights advocates say it's even harder for them to organize high school students because of the focus on abstinence.

"We're up against a movement that has federal dollars going into public schools," said Kierra Johnson, director of Choice USA. "You compound that with what they could be learning in church, and it sets us back in terms of outreach to young people under 18."

Of course, the Dallas Morning News calls the club "anti-abortion," not "pro-life." In spite of the fact that the kids call themselves "The Pro-Life Club." The author calls for tolerance on the part of the "anti-abortion crowd but can't even bring herself to use the term the teens would prefer.

I guess the DMN doesn't keep up with the latest research. Otherwise, they'd know that the study on abstinence that was in the news earlier this month informed us that teens - whether they sign a pledge or not - who come from religious, conservative backgrounds are more likely to delay their first intercourse for about 3 years longer than their peers. I nominate the author of the article,Katherine Leal Unruth, her editor, and Ms. Johnson for Twits of the Year and definitely award them my own Yellow Brick Road award. ("Do Not Look Behind the Curtain, Ignore That Little Man." Or small woman.)

Bravo Coppell teens, their parents, and their churches!

The (manufactured) Stem Cell Debate at Dartmouth

I don't believe I've ever seen a report on a presentation that allowed half the space for "debate," after the fact.

The Stem Cell Debate at Dartmouth

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk, Ph.D. was recently invited to give a lecture entitled “Stem Cells and Cloning: Understanding the Scientific Issues and the Moral Objections” at Aquinas House, in observance of the Feast of St. Luke, the patron saint of medical professionals. Pacholczyk, or Father Tad as he encourages his audience members to call him, is the Director of Education for the National Catholic Bioethics Center. He arrived at this position after receiving degrees in philosophy, biochemistry, molecular cell biology, and chemistry, a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Yale University, and years of research in molecular biology, bioethics, and dogmatic theology. In a free public lecture lasting more than two hours, Pacholczyk outlined both the scientific and ethical considerations of human embryonic stem cell research and to a lesser extent cloning, giving justifications for the Catholic Church’s positions on these technologies.

After giving an in depth layman’s version of the science involved in stem cell research and a history of both scientific milestones and relevant policy decisions, Pacholczyk corrected what he believed were some of the most pervasive myths about stem cell research. He believes that individuals and organizations within the media and others who engage in expensive advertising campaigns have deliberately misled the American people in an effort to reframe the debate over the use of human embryos for research.

**************
The Dartmouth Review understands that this is an issue on which reasonable moral people can disagree, and so Michael S. Gazzaniga ‘61, Ph.D., Director of the Sage Center for the Study of Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara was asked to explain some of the ethical justifications. He indicated that, “The handling of human tissue has always commanded the respect of the biomedical community and always will.” However, Gazzaniga does not consider an embryo to be in possession of the same moral status as an adult human, while acknowledging that the issue has “deep meaning to millions of people.”

The Review has raised several ethics questions regarding the virtual debate they created by interviewing Dr. Gazzaniga after Dr. Pacholczyk's talk.

Will they seek out opposing views in the future or is it only Catholic priests who require such answers? Will they now give Dr. Pacholczyk an opportunity to respond?

In addition, Dr. Gazzaniga finds the determination as to when a human being becomes a human being fairly simplistic:

Asked the basic question underlying this debate and that about abortion, when a human embryo becomes a human being, Gazzaniga called it a “social decision, not unlike the kind a society makes about when to call someone legally blind.”

Does Dr. Gazzaniga's emphasis on contrasting "adult" human beings with embryonic human beings indicate that he finds differing moral values in the lives of infants, children, and "adults," does he extend these differences to the state of function of the brain, and can he justify these variations at least as well as we can our culture's definition of "legally blind?"

George on "Obama and Infanticide"

"Obama chose to defend the widest possible scope for legal abortion by building a fence around it, even if that meant permitting a child who survives an abortion to be left to die without even being afforded basic comfort care."

Two of the greatest ethics minds today explain the controversy surrounding Senator Barack Obama's blatant misrepresentation of his pro-abortion and pro-infanticide legislative and public policy. Professor Robert B. George is joined by Yuval Levin at the Witherspoon Institute as he follows up on his earlier discussion about the por-abortion views of Democratic Presidential candidate, Barack Obama.

During the last Presidential Candidate debate, Obama stated,

''There was a bill that was put forward before the Illinois Senate that said you have to provide lifesaving treatment and that would have helped to undermine Roe v. Wade. The fact is that there was already a law on the books in Illinois that required providing lifesaving treatment, which is why not only myself but pro-choice Republicans and Democrats voted against it.''

George and Levin respond:

A few years ago, after it became clear that some infants who were born alive in the course of an attempted induced abortion at Christ Hospital in Chicago and elsewhere were being left to die without even comfort care, Republicans and Democrats around the country united in an effort to make the practice illegal and declare that any child outside the womb, even if she was an abortion survivor whose prospects for long-term survival might be in doubt, was entitled to basic medical care. Even the most ardent advocates of the pro-choice position agreed that a child born alive, even after an attempted abortion, deserves humane treatment.

The tragic stories of infants being left to die moved legislators to act at both the state and federal levels. In Washington, D.C., consensus can be a rare commodity, and never more so than on the issue of abortion. But the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act of 2002 was just such a rarity. The bill passed both houses of Congress without a single dissenting vote-it was 98-0 in the Senate-and numerous states then proceeded to enact similar measures. In Illinois, however, a series of efforts to pass ''Born-Alive'' legislation from 2001 to 2003 met with stiff resistance from legislators concerned the measure would constrain the right to abortion in the state. Prominent among these opponents, and the only one to actually speak in opposition to the bill when it was debated in 2002, was state Senator Barack Obama.

Obama's case against the bill did not revolve around existing state law, as he seemed to suggest last night. The law Obama referred to in the debate was the Illinois abortion statute enacted in 1975. But at the time of the debate about the Born Alive Act, the Illinois Attorney General had publicly stated that he could not prosecute incidents such as those reported by nurses at Christ Hospital in Chicago and elsewhere (including a baby left to die in a soiled linen closet) because the 1975 law was inadequate.

Half the abortion rate

That's a quote from NARAL ("National Abortion Rights Action League" ), in a report on the effects of the Hyde Amendment (a pdf document). The Hyde Amendment restricts federal funding of abortions, including those for women who are eligible for prenatal care funding by Medicaid. NARAL urges us to examine the record of John McCain and Sarah Palin on abortion and "reproductive health." (The numbers are actually 18%-35% of women, according to this report on line at the Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI), the research and education arm of Planned Parenthood.)

Cutting the abortion rate in half is a good thing, and a benefit of the Hyde Amendment.

It will be interesting to watch the response to a National Review article, "Unholy Messaging," by Douglas Johnson, who does just that for Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama, while pointing out the bias of the New York Times editors.

The focus of the article is three specific points denied in the editorial:

. . . (free one time registration)on September 21, titled “Right to Smear.” The editorial expressed the hope that the federal courts and the Federal Election Commission would prevent a group called The Real Truth About Obama, Inc., from disseminating an ad that, the Times said, “trashes the candidate’s nuanced position [on abortion]. It even employs an Obama-like voice pledging to make taxpayers pay for abortions, help minors conceal abortions from their parents, and legalize late-term abortions."

Mr. Johnson documents the truth, one by one, of what the NYT calls "these lies."

Everyone else does it

The American Medical Association and the American Medical Student Association are both up in arms about contact between drug companies and other vendors and doctors and medical students. And yet, no one complains when a New York Times story about the fuss contains advertising. (Free registration required -- is "free" anything undue influence?)

I've said it before, perhaps I can be bought, but not for a pen, some samples or lunch.

Statistics and politics

Statistics are easily mistakenly used and manipulated. Rudy Guiliani is under attack due to statistics that he quoted in a political ad running in New Hampshire . He spoke about the odds of surviving prostate cancer, contrasting the medical systems in the United States and in the United Kingdom. I saw a link to an article titled, "Guiliani learns math is hard" (I couldn't get that link to work and had to do a search) when I was linking to the American Journal of Bioethics for yesterdays' post.

The search at the Washington Post led me to Eugene Robinson's opinion column (free registration required), which featured "Related" links to another op-ed by Libby Quaid of the AP and an AP "Fact Check" article that is almost identical to the Quaid piece. Robinson also links to the article that the Mayor's statisticsare said to have from.

Both Quaid's op-ed and the "Fact Check" article state that 15 out of 100,000 "people die from prostate cancer in the UK vs. 12 out of 100,000 in the US, a 20 percent (12 divided by 15) difference. (Or is it that people have a 25% higher chance of dying of prostate cancer in the UK, since 15 divided by 12 is 1.25?). It's odd that the rates are given as "people" who die of prostate cancer, including men and women, since only men have prostates, I would expect to see those rates given in X out of a 100,000 men.

Somehow, Mr. Robinson adds 12 and 15, and comes up with "25 men out of 100,000 die of prostate cancer each year in both countries." He guesses that Mayor Guilani "didn't really care" whether his statistics are correct. Either Mr. Robinson's math is bad, or he "didn't really care" whether his readers to assumed that that's 25 in the US and 25 in the UK.

Since I'm pro-life, I'm concerned about the possibility that Rudy Guiliani may be the next Republican candidate for President. The reason that I tend to vote Republican is because of the Republican Party Platform is pro-life.

However, I am also very concerned about the risk that Government insurance and control of medicine would bring.

While it's true that the NHS doesn't screen nearly as many men as our US docs, that hardly seems an argument for adopting the finance system of the former. Which system do you want: one that gives a 99% survival rate or one that gives 74% ?

Television Ethics: "Private Practice"

The TV show, "Private Practice," hasn't impressed me with its medical, social or psychiatric integrity. But, I found myself watching it tonight, October 24th, and was more impressed than usual. Tonight's show touches on a cutting-edge bioethics topic that was also mentioned at last week's American Society of Bioethics and Humanities.

Major Multiple Spoiler Alert!!! Don't read more if you've recorded the show to watch later.


(Let's forget the thread on the women who come in for their pelvic exam by the kid midwife - where the only exam the women are evidently getting is the actual *pelvic* exam. No eyes, ears, throat, lungs, breast or abdominal exam. My Family Physician, head-to-toe, cradle-to-grave soul can't bear it.)

(And we won't even ask the Mama in me how I feel about 13 year olds having sex. You might be surprised that I don't freak or judge, though, and pretty much treat the girls the same way that the lead doc does. The difference is that I go out of my way to explain to families when they first come to the office that I consider their child my patient in his or her own right and ask permission to treat without notifying - and, of course, without billing - them if the teen requests that I keep silent. I've always been able to convince the young person to turn to their parents for help, but manage to keep privileged information privileged as long as possible. As far as I know, I've only had one family leave my practice after I explained my policy.)

Okay, back to the cutting edge bioethics topic.

One of the guest characters asked the internal medicine doc for a medicine that helps patients forget.

Actually, the medicine, propanolol, will not help her forget. However, it can help some patients stop feeling the panic and other horrifying emotions that come after a near-death or traumatic event like a rape that causes "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder."

MSNBC had a review, here, about the treatment last year.


The technique can be used to blunt the emotional memory -- not the actual memory or physical damage -- of the traumatic event. Adrenaline or epinephrine is the "fight or flight" hormone or drug that is released when there is stress. It's what causes what I call "the near-car-wreck" feeling that we feel, well, when we nearly have a car wreck.

Epinephrine gives you a boost of energy, pumping sugar, cortisone and other hormones into the body, to allow that fight or flight response. Do you need to take off and escape or stand and battle with whatever it is that is threatening you? Epinephrine is also involved in stimulating the bone marrow to make blood and other organs to heal faster, too.

Unfortunately, sometimes the body makes epinephrine inappropriately, when there's no real danger or when the danger is not severe enough. When that happens, we call it a panic attack or an anxiety attack as people experience the physical and emotional symptoms that are associated with real danger. Their bodies are telling them that they are in danger, but there's no actual threat to confront. When it gets in the way of your life, it's a disorder. Long term panic and anxiety that can be related to a past trauma, and that sometimes causing a person to feel as though he's reliving the trauma, is called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Propanolol is a "beta blocker" that blocks epinephrine and which we often use to treat hypertension and even panic attacks. If used during the time after a traumatic event in which the long-term memories are set in the brain and/or in conjunction with behavioral therapy, it appears that the memory is disconnected, "disassociated," from the emotions that the patient experienced during the trauma and during the flashbacks when the memory makes the patient feel as though he's reliving the event, later. The treatment of PTSD that seems to work best is behavioral therapy, teaching the patient to control his own body's reaction.

Some ethicists are concerned that we may blunt a necessary healing function of epinephrine and the other body and mind effects of the stress reaction. However, I think of the treatment of stress disorders in the same way that I think of treatment of pain. Pain may help us prevent injury and warn us of a threat to our health. But we treat pain that is out of proportion or that is not useful to protect us.