Catholic Hospital Sued for Declining to Perform Transgender Surgery

Bioethics, Religious Freedom, Rights of Conscience, , ,

A Catholic hospital in Maryland is being sued for declining to perform a transgender surgery, according to news outlets.

The hospital reportedly opted not to perform a hysterectomy as part of an apparent sex-reassignment surgery. Now the hospital is being sued.

There are several problems with this case, but here are a couple:

First, Catholic hospitals operate according to the principles and teachings of the Catholic Church — including the Catholic Church’s teachings about abortion, assisted suicide, and gender identity.

It should come as no surprise that a Catholic hospital would decline to participate in sex-reassignment surgeries.

Second, Catholic hospitals generally object to performing major surgeries on healthy patients.

As bioethicist Wesley J. Smith notes,

Catholic moral principles only permit body parts to be removed to treat physical pathology. If the patient’s uterus had been cancerous, the surgery [hysterectomy] would not have been a problem.

Stories like this one underscore why Arkansas needs to strengthen its laws protecting rights of conscience for healthcare workers and hospitals.

Unfortunately the Arkansas Legislature has failed to pass measures protecting healthcare workers’ rights of conscience two legislative sessions in row — once in 2017 and once in 2019.

Conscience protections are very important for healthcare workers and hospitals.

Without them, we could end up with doctors and hospital boards who are not guided by conscience at all.

That’s a very sobering thought.

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Researchers Continue to Kill Human Embryos in the Name of Science

Bioethics, , , ,

We have written before about how scientists have tried to use the controversial gene-editing technology CRISPR to alter the human genome.

In some cases, researchers have attempted to create human-animal hybrids using this type of technology.

This week our friends at the Colson Center for Christian Worldview have highlighted yet another example of scientists using CRISPR to meddle with — and then kill — human embryos in the name of science.

John Stonestreet writes,

[A] team of researchers at the Francis Crick Institute in London used CRISPR to edit 18 donated human embryos. The purpose, they claimed, was to study “the role of a particular gene in the earliest stages of human development.” Unfortunately, around half of the embryos “contained major unintended edits.”

“Major unintended edits” is a euphemism for “mutation” and “genetic damage” which, as Medium told its readers, “could lead to birth defects or medical problems like cancer later in life.” As one genetics researcher put it, “…you’re affecting so much of the DNA around the gene you’re trying to edit that you could be inadvertently affecting other genes and causing problems.” Even worse, the Crick Institute team didn’t inadvertently mess with a gene near the one they were targeting. In other words, they “hit their targets.” The results were, however, unexpected.

Fyodor Urnov, a professor of molecular and cell biology at Berkeley, was more blunt: “There’s no sugarcoating this . . . This is a restraining order for all genome editors to stay the living daylights away from embryo editing.”

Once a “gene-editing expert” gets frightened, you’d think we might want to cool our jets in this whole “playing god” thing. I doubt it. . . . By the way, all the embryos affected by the Francis Crick Institute team were destroyed.

This kind of “create-and-kill” research is simply unconscionable.

It treats unborn children like lab material.

The unborn children created and killed as part of these gene-editing experiments had zero say in what happened to them. They were simply at the mercy of researchers in a lab.

As we have said many times, human beings are not research material. Unfortunately, gene-editing technologies like CRISPR treat them that way.

We must insist that scientific research respect the sanctity of human life at every stage of development.

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Sweden: Report Shows Elderly COVID Patients Denied Care

Bioethics, Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, , , ,

Troubling information out of Sweden shows elderly COVID-19 patients were denied care thanks to confusing guidelines from government health officials.

A recent article at BioEdge highlights the fact that half of Sweden’s COVID deaths were in nursing homes:

The health authorities have received many complaints about how elderly relatives were treated. A consistent theme is that nursing home residents with suspected Covid-19 were immediately placed on palliative care and given morphine and denied supplementary oxygen and intravenous fluids and nutrition. For many this was effectively a death sentence.

“People suffocated, it was horrible to watch. One patient asked me what I was giving him when I gave him the morphine injection, and I lied to him,” said Latifa Löfvenberg, a nurse. “Many died before their time. It was very, very difficult.”

The problem seems to be that health officials in Sweden gave doctors guidelines effectively encouraging them to ration care to prevent the healthcare system from being overwhelmed.

That led to elderly patients being placed on palliative care instead of being given treatment for COVID-19.

The article notes that giving morphine to a patient who has a respiratory illness — like COVID-19 — and then denying the patient additional oxygen effectively will kill the patient.

This story underscores why it is essential that our leaders and healthcare professionals value the sanctity of human life from conception until natural death.

Time and again we have heard stories about patients in Europe being denied care or actively euthanized thanks to bad government policies.

Similar stories have come out of states where assisted-suicide is legal here in America.

Being pro-life means believing human life is sacred from conception until natural death.

Just like abortion, euthanasia and assisted-suicide are murder, and they violate the sanctity of human life.

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