Jivin J’s Life Links 4-6-11
by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat
- Democratic leaders say the Republicans’ proposed one-week Continuing Resolution will be rejected because of the prohibition to DC abortion funding and the budget cuts.
- Here’s a new one: “Diseased goo” is how Darrell Dawsey describes human embryos with genetic diseases who were recently killed at the University of Michigan for their stem cells:
Discarding diseased goo isn’t murder. And what could possibly be nobler than turning that discarded goo into a tool for studying and curing debilitating diseases and injuries?
- Michael J. New discusses the important findings of a new study on the effectiveness of pro-life legislation:
A range of statistical tests provide robust evidence that public-funding restrictions and informed-consent laws reduce state abortion rates, and that parental-involvement laws reduce the incidence of abortion among minors….
The recent gains that the pro-life movement has made in the court of public opinion have put the Democratic party in a difficult position…. They often state that they would like to see fewer abortions and claim the best path to abortion reduction is through more generous welfare benefits or greater contraception funding.
However, pro-lifers should not be fooled by this gambit. No peer-reviewed research supports the idea that increased funding for welfare benefits or public health care have any impact on the abortion rate. Additionally, no analysis of actual abortion data has found that more spending on contraception programs reduces the incidence of abortion.
- At Slate, Taffy Brodesser-Atkins has an interesting piece in which she discusses how her best friend is a pro-life Republican:
When you live, say, on a coast or in a very blue state, you grow accustomed to being surrounded by people who believe like you do. You get to thinking that the only people who would dare contradict you are ignoramuses….
And yet, I think having a Republican friend is making me a better liberal. We need friends who differ from us. It’s easy to watch Republican extremism and think, “Wow, they’re crazy.” But when someone is sitting face to face with us, when someone we admire and respect is telling us they believe differently, it is at this fine point that we find nuance, and we begin to understand exactly how we got to this point in history. We lose something critical when we surround ourselves with people who agree with us all the time. We lose out on the wisdom of seeing the other side.
I read something like this and I understand why the arguments of many feminist pro-choice bloggers don’t seem to be very well thought out.
- Michael Lisk (pictured left) has been sentenced to 21-41 years in prison after raping a 12-year-old girl and then burying the body of the child she aborted via lead pencil:
The diabetic girl was at home and on the phone with Lisk when she risked her life by using a lead pencil to abort the baby, which fell into the toilet, authorities said.
The girl was rushed to the hospital after the abortion in June 2010 and told hospital staff and then police what happened.
Police later found the aborted fetus buried in a wooded area in Polk Township and charged Lisk.
Police said Lisk initially lied, claiming to be just a neighbor helping the girl get rid of a baby that wasn’t his.
[Photo via poconorecord.com]
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
Apparently those embryos weren’t too “gooey” if they could get usable stem cells from them.
IMO, Darrell Dawsey is goo.
Has anyone with a genetic disease or spinal cord injury been cured by the use of stem cells from human embryos yet? Just wondering.
Has anyone with a genetic disease or spinal cord injury been cured by the use of stem cells from human embryos yet? Just wondering
It takes years for cures to found for any disease. Just because there haven’t been any cures from enbryos doesn’t mean it’s not possible. How many cures have been obtained from adult cells. If embryos are going to be flushed down the drain, why not use them for something positive for humanity? It’s interesting, there’s a lot of effort to ban abortions; but I’m not seeing much focus on shutting down in-vitro labs which, according to the Pro-life belief, are murder shops. Right?
And about that lead pencil abortion. I didn’t think things like that happened. I’m told that the coathanger is a myth. And if abortion is criminalized, there will be lots more of these situations – but good enough for those “promiscuous” women who want to “murder” their “baby.” Right?
Desperate people do desperate things. How did using a pencil to kill her child heal her rape?
“If embryos are going to be flushed down the drain, why not use them for something positive for humanity? ”
Because we can never do evil that good may come of it. We can ask the same question of someone who has lost all functioning in their brain but is still alive (not exactly sure if that’s possible, but you know what I mean). We would not be justified in harvesting the organs of a person who is still alive, no matter what good it may do or how soon they will die. We don’t take the organs of a small child who is born with anencephaly and will die shortly. Careful moral considerations reveal that it is wrong to kill someone who will die no matter the good that killing them may accomplish.
“It’s interesting, there’s a lot of effort to ban abortions; but I’m not seeing much focus on shutting down in-vitro labs which, according to the Pro-life belief, are murder shops. Right?”
Yes, we definitely should. There is no doubt there, and while not all the pro-lifers here will agree with that, I think most would agree that they need to be shut down.
CC, why should ESCR be used when there is an ethical alternative (one that has already shown to be much more promising to boot)? I’m referring to adult stem cell research.
darn these italics…
CC: “If embryos are going to be flushed down the drain, why not use them for something positive for humanity?”
— which is kinda like: “If we’re going to kill these homeless people anyway, why not use them for medical research in order to accomplish something positive for humanity?”
Soylent Green is made of people.