Dec 16 2012
On Guns, government funded universal healthcare, and “caring for the children”
In April of 2009, before the Obama/Reid/Pelosi jamdown on taking over the US healthcare system, I posted this article on the real causes of death (and the the most expensive demands for healthcare) in children, teens and young adults. When you read it, it will be obvious to you that I didn’t know that Obamacare was going to become law. But the same issues were under discussion then as now: what constitutes really “caring for the children”? And what will make the most difference in improving the health outcomes for children/teens/young adults, especially in reducing unnecessary death and traumatic injury?
I see nothing in the original post that requires editing, and I present it again for your attention.
Sep 05 2012
Pro-choice? Not really.
Pro-choice? Nyahhh. Certainly not on taxes or recycling or diet or…… you name it. Just pro-abort, it seems.
Jul 21 2012
The real first chapter of Genesis
Deep in the bowels of the third basement level of the Sears Tower in Chicago, a heretofore unknown manuscript has been discovered, a scroll believed by Keynsian scholars to predate the earliest known copy of the book of Genesis by at least two centuries.
It is now available for public viewing on the internet.
You only THOUGHT you knew the real story of Creation.
Jul 14 2012
Britain, R.I.P.? Part Eight
The previous post in this series is here.
John Terry, a soccer player, has been found “not guilty” of racist speech in a criminal trial in merry old England.
Chief Magistrate Howard Riddle delivered his verdict after a five-day trial at Westminster Magistrates Court in London.
He said the case was not about “whether Mr Terry is a racist in the broadest sense of the word”, telling the court he had heard “a great deal of evidence to show that he is not”.
“It is understandable why Mr Terry wants to make this point – his reputation is at stake,” he said.
He was accused of racially abusing Ferdinand during a match between QPR and Chelsea at Loftus Road in October. He was investigated and charged after a complaint from an off-duty policeman.
Riddle said Terry was a “credible witness” and “nobody has been able to show that he is lying”. He told the court: “There is no doubt that John Terry uttered the words ‘f****** black c***’ at Anton Ferdinand.
So, it seems that losing control a bit and uttering an epithet or two in the heat of battle is a criminal offense in the land that brought us the Magna Carta and the Glorious Revolution, not to mention John Locke and Edmund Burke.
Details are here, but the reason for the not guilty verdict, given that Terry did say the words, is that he claimed to be repeating back an accusation from the “victim,” Anton Ferdinand, and this produced just enough question about Terry’s intent and motivation to create “reasonable doubt.”
I have reasonable doubts that Britain is any longer anything remotely resembling a free nation. And consider: the USA’s founding fathers thought of themselves as fighting to keep “the rights of Englishmen” which they thought they had been denied.
It would seem that Englishmen lost them some time back, too.
In the meantime, consider that this five day trial has to have cost the state considerable money, which might have been better spent other ways, perhaps not withholding necessary treatment to the elderly and infirm.
Just call it an informal death panel.
Jul 09 2012
Death by political correctness
Here is a story about the death of a beautiful, intelligent young woman, a high school student, herself an immigrant, due to the incredible incompetence and immoral laxity of our federal and state governments at simply enforcing US law.
Mar 27 2012
Christians in China
Here is a very interesting article on the state of Christianity and Christians in China.
Feb 29 2012
Repeating an atrocity with “preventive” care
If you read this when it was first posted, check out the three UPDATES made to it since. Just scroll on down.
As Mrs. Miner wrote in Hey, What About MY Choice?, there is enormous pressure from the medical establishment to do invasive “prenatal testing” (including amniocentesis) under the guise of “preventive care,” as if killing a disabled child before it’s born is treatment of a medical condition, instead of simply murder of the helpless.
Mark Leach writes in the Washington Examiner about Repeating an atrocity with “preventive care”
President Obama signed “Rosa’s Law,” sponsored by Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., and named for one of her constituents, a little girl with Down syndrome, in 2010.
The law eliminates the phrase “mental retardation” from federal laws and regulations, replacing it with “intellectual disability.” Another law sponsored by Mikulski threatens to eliminate girls like Rosa and my daughter, Juliet, from future generations.
Rick Santorum recently attacked President Obama for the Department of Health and Human Services’ mandate requiring no-cost prenatal testing. This mandate is part of Mikulski’s amendment to Obamacare requiring preventive care services for women.
Genetic conditions like my Juliet’s Down syndrome and Santorum’s daughter Bella’s Trisomy 18 can be prenatally diagnosed, but not treated prenatally. The HHS mandate begs the question: How does prenatal testing for genetic conditions that cannot be treated prenatally qualify as “preventive” care?
Obama’s campaign spokeswoman responded to Santorum’s concerns by saying prenatal testing is for the health of the mother and baby and to bring about safer deliveries.
Not so in the case of prenatal testing for genetic conditions. Instead, most women terminate following a positive test result — a decidedly unhealthy and unsafe delivery for the baby.
Indeed, this is the effect of prenatal testing for genetic conditions. Last summer, a report from Denmark predicted the country would be “Down syndrome-free” by 2030, due to its prenatal testing program.
Isn’t that nice. Europe seems to have learned little of moral worth from its experience with German eugenics programs in the Nazi era.
In Switzerland, 87 percent of all Down syndrome pregnancies are terminated. In France, 96 percent of fetuses with Down syndrome are aborted following a prenatal diagnosis.
This effect is not limited to other countries. California has had a prenatal testing program for Down syndrome since the 1980s. Researchers found that 47 percent fewer children with Down syndrome were born than would have naturally occurred.
They flatly admitted that California’s prenatal testing program’s purpose is to reduce the number of children born with Down syndrome through earlier abortions.
As if we didn’t know that already. It’s made pretty explicit by the “medical providers” who pressure women to have amniocentesis. “Could you live with a Down’s child?” they say. This is exactly what Mrs. Miner experienced in the glorious people’s republic of California.
Did Mikulski intend for her preventive care services amendment to eliminate children like Rosa, Juliet, Bella and others with genetic conditions from future generations?
Well, yes. The believers in using abortion to filter out the unfit defend it on a variety of grounds, from financial burden on society to pretended concern about the “poor quality of life” the soon-to-be murdered unborn child would have without the beneficently performed therapeutic dismemberment.
We are left to wonder because, unlike Santorum, Mikulski has not spoken out on this issue. Other voices have so far been silent, too.
Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton recently stormed out of a hearing on the HHS mandate for birth control. Norton is a co-chair of the Congressional Down Syndrome Caucus and a mother to a young lady with Down syndrome.
Perhaps she’ll express the same indignation about Obamacare’s policy to prevent children like her daughter from being born in future generations? Likewise, the CDSC lists more than 50 members, including Norton’s co-chairs and fellow parents, Rep. Cathy McMorris-Rodgers, R-Wash., and Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas.
Perhaps, they, too, and many others, regardless of political party, will wonder why a regulation expresses the view that unborn children with genetic conditions should be prevented from being born.
Last century, people who thought themselves upstanding citizens stood by silently while a segment of their society was targeted for elimination based solely on their fundamental nature.
Civilized nations said “never again.” Yet, here we are at the turn of this century dealing with the next challenge to whether we believe our creed that we are all created equal.
Voices are needed to call for the rescinding of the HHS’ mandate for no-cost prenatal testing for genetic conditions as “preventive” care, before we repeat a historic atrocity.
It was always the intent of the Margaret Sangers of the world, and their ideological kin such as Planned Parenthood, to eliminate the unfit from society, hopefully by keeping them from being born in the first place, even if that involved killing them in the womb…. or out of it, for that matter.
UPDATE:
The day has brought an embarrassment of riches from the point of view of pro-life bloggers, but an embarrassment of moral poverty on the part of some “medical ethicists,” who seem to have stood on its ear the meaning of the word “ethics.” This just in:
Killing babies no different from abortion, experts say
Parents should be allowed to have their newborn babies killed because they are “morally irrelevant” and ending their lives is no different to abortion, a group of medical ethicists linked to Oxford University has argued.
The article, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, says newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life”. The academics also argue that parents should be able to have their baby killed if it turns out to be disabled when it is born.
The journal’s editor, Prof Julian Savulescu, director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, said the article’s authors had received death threats since publishing the article. He said those who made abusive and threatening posts about the study were “fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society”.
The article, entitled “After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?”, was written by two of Prof Savulescu’s former associates, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva.
They argued: “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.”
Rather than being “actual persons”, newborns were “potential persons”. They explained: “Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life’.
“We take ‘person’ to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her.”
As such they argued it was “not possible to damage a newborn by preventing her from developing the potentiality to become a person in the morally relevant sense”.
The authors therefore concluded that “what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled”.
They also argued that parents should be able to have the baby killed if it turned out to be disabled without their knowing before birth, for example citing that “only the 64 per cent of Down’s syndrome cases” in Europe are diagnosed by prenatal testing.
Once such children were born there was “no choice for the parents but to keep the child”, they wrote.
“To bring up such children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole, when the state economically provides for their care.”
However, they did not argue that some baby killings were more justifiable than others, their fundamental point was that, morally, there was no difference to abortion as already practised.
They preferred to use the phrase “after-birth abortion” rather than “infanticide” to “emphasise that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus”.
You have to give these infanticide enablers this: they’re very logical in proceeding from the starting point of abortion-on-demand. It was bound to come to this. And it has.
UPDATE #2:
I would blame this on Britain’s apparent desire to self-destruct, but we have our own apologist for the appalling, right here in the good ‘ole US of A, in the form of Peter Singer. Of course, he’s really Australian, so maybe he doesn’t count as an American. He came from the Commonwealth, after all, which may soon be commonly Islamic. Maybe there’s something in the water that people drink in Australia.
UPDATE #3:
At this link, an Australian “ethicist” argues on a radio show in Iowa that
after-birth abortions should be permitted if parents decide that they want to prevent their child from having a difficult or painful life. One of the reasons many people abort fetuses, she notes, is due to diseases or other deformities. But, some of these disorders are not detected while the child is in the womb. In cases such as this, Minerva and Giubilini argue in their paper, termination of the newborn should be allowed. This sentiment should also apply then to healthy newborns, she says, because some people abort perfectly health fetuses for a variety of personal reasons as well.
Again, this is the logical conclusion of permitting and encouraging abortion-on-demand for any reason at all, or none. So on the one hand, these “ethicists” are just being reasonable.
Reasonably monstrous, of course…. along with the rest of the pro-abort crowd.
Jan 29 2012
Hey, What About MY Choice? Part 2
The previous post in this three part series is here.
In the beginning post of this series, I told the story of how California doctors and medical providers just couldn’t get it through their heads that even though I was a 35 yr old soon-to-be-mom, I did NOT want amniocentesis, because of the risk of miscarriage and the fact that it could not reveal any information I would actually be able to use. But the medical types were really determined. Read on.
I agreed to have a high-resolution sonogram referred to by my doctor as “Level 4” (L4), to be performed by a different doctor when I was about four months pregnant. When I called to set up the appointment for this procedure, the nurse on the line began discussing the preparations for amniocentesis. I patiently explained that I had declined this procedure and would be having the sonogram only. She seemed quite surprised, but finally said that she would put a notation on my chart so that I would not be “hassled” any further. (But wait, it was ALREADY on my chart.) About two weeks later, another nurse called to confirm my appointment for the next day and began giving me instructions regarding amniocentesis. I told her, a bit less patiently this time, that I had declined amniocentesis and would only be having the sonogram. She told me that I was scheduled for amniocentesis. I said, “Read my chart.” She said, “Come prepared for amnio anyway!”
My husband (aka Harmonicminer) and I arrived at the clinic for my L4 sonogram the next day. I tried to put all thoughts of large needles near babies’ heads, prenatal child kil …. er, I mean “pregnancy terminations,” etc., out of my head. I just wanted to see my baby. I was, of course, hoping the exam would bring good news but was prepared to accept whatever the test might reveal.
The clinic’s high-risk specialist, Dr. Shah, entered the room, glanced at his notes and said, “You’re here for an L4 and an amniocentesis.” Feeling like a broken record, I explained, AGAIN, that I had thoroughly discussed my options with my obstetrician and had signed the form refusing amniocentesis and genetic counseling. I had only agreed, on my doctor’s advice, to have the L4 sonogram.
Dr. Shah snapped, “You should not have been ALLOWED to sign that refusal without first undergoing genetic counseling!” He then said, nonsensically, that amniocentesis was “for my own safety.” Furthermore, he refused to even do the sonogram until, at a minimum, I subjected myself to “counseling.” Seriously?!? Was he actually threatening to withhold medical care unless I submitted to his authority?
I was too upset to endure the heated exchange between Mr. Miner and the doctor, so I agreed to see the genetic counselor down the hall. I walked in her office in a very unhappy frame of mind, and I let her know that I was there under duress. To her credit, she was very kind, but the questions were truly useless. To paraphrase one of the more sophisticated queries, “So, is there any chance you and your husband are biologically related?”
After signing yet ANOTHER refusal of amniocentesis, I returned to the exam room where the doctor, somewhat begrudgingly, finally did the sonogram.
And there she was, my little SOMEBODY… not “potential life,” but undeniably a miniature human being with unfathomable potential. Stretching, moving, kicking, growing, EXISTING. I may have even seen her make a rude gesture to the doctor. Way to go, kid.
Part three (the last part of this series) is here.
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