U.S. Senate Rejects Pro-Life Legislation

Abortion, , ,

Yesterday the U.S. Senate failed to pass a bill banning most abortions after the fifth month of pregnancy.

The bill is similar to one passed by the U.S. House of Representatives last fall and a law Arkansas passed in 2013.

Arkansas’ U.S. Senators John Boozman and Tom Cotton both co-sponsored this good bill and supported it yesterday.

Medical science shows unborn babies feel the pain of abortion, especially after the twentieth week of pregnancy. That’s one reason many states — as well as most countries on earth — have passed laws prohibiting late-term abortions. In fact, the United States is one of just seven countries that allows abortion after the fifth month of pregnancy.

In 2000, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Kennedy described the abortion process, writing, “The fetus, in many cases, dies just as a human adult or child would: It bleeds to death as it is torn from limb from limb. . . . The fetus can be alive at the beginning of the dismemberment process and can survive for a time while its limbs are being torn off.”

Abortion is a horrific procedure that takes the lives of unborn children.

I hope you will thank Sens. Boozman and Cotton for supporting the senate bill to ban abortion after the twentieth week of pregnancy. Links to their contact information are below.

U.S. SENATOR JOHN BOOZMAN (R – AR)

220px-John_Boozman,_official_portrait,_112th_Congress

Click Here to Email U.S. Senator Boozman

U.S. SENATOR TOM COTTON (R – AR)

Tom_Cotton_official_Senate_photo

Click Here to Email U.S. Senator Cotton

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In Europe, Euthanasia is Driving Doctors and Nurses to Quit

Bioethics, Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, , , , ,

Author, attorney, and ethicist Wesley J. Smith recently penned a column outlining a serious problem in European countries like Belgium: Doctors and nurses are quitting because of euthanasia and assisted suicide.

Smith writes,

You become a doctor or nurse to be a healer palliator of people in serious pain and distress. You have a special place in your heart for the dying, and so you enter the specialized field of palliative care and hospice medicine.

But then, your country decides you should also become killers of the patients you want to succor. If you refuse, you face public criticism, the prospect of being sued, and perhaps one day, professional censure.

What do you do? If you are an ethical professional, rather than be complicit in homicide, you leave the field.

Doctors who specialize in end of life care and pain management — such as palliative care doctors in hospices and long term care facilities — are being forced to choose between their convictions and their careers.

One Belgian doctor said, “palliative care units are . . . at risk of becoming ‘houses of euthanasia’, which is the opposite of what they were meant to be.”

This is a disturbing trend. Palliative care offers terminally-ill people relief from pain and the opportunity to spend quality time with family as they near the end of life. These doctors and nurses provide vital services to people who are dying and to their families. Unlike euthanasia and assisted suicide, palliative care offers actual relief from suffering — without poisoning or killing any patients.

As we have said time and time again, being pro-life is about much more than opposing abortion. We do not eliminate suffering by eliminating people who are suffering. We must respect the sanctity of human life at the end of life as well as at the beginning.

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An Unscientific Federal Study

Transgender,

According to various reports, the National Institutes of Health is using federal tax dollars to launch a study “proving” it’s OK to perform sex-change operations on children.

Researchers intend to show transgender affirmation therapy is safe and effective for children who disagree with their biological sex. John Stonestreet at the Colson Center for Christian Worldview writes,

Let’s be clear about what “affirmation therapy” really means: Children are given high doses of puberty-suppressing drugs. Doctors then flood their systems with testosterone or estrogen to induce the formation of opposite-sex characteristics like breasts in males and facial hair in females. Some patients, partway through this process, will undergo “sex-reassignment surgery” in which their internal and even external genitals are removed or remodeled.

This so-called “treatment” will render them infertile for life and can create a host of side-effects, like cancer, infections, gallbladder diseases, and spikes in blood pressure. There is also no long-term research on how these high doses of hormones affect bodies in the long run—bodies that weren’t designed to handle them in the first place.

There is, however, abundant data on the psychological damage of medically “transitioning.” One study from Great Britain found that 20 percent of patients who’d undergone this procedure regretted it. Walt Heyer, a man who formerly lived as a transgender woman and now identifies with his biological sex once again, thinks that’s a serious underestimation.

Advocates for children have said time and time again that encouraging kids to disagree with their biological sex is dangerous.

The American College of Pediatricians writes, “puberty is not a disease and puberty-blocking hormones can be dangerous. Reversible or not, puberty- blocking hormones induce a state of disease — the absence of puberty — and inhibit growth and fertility in a previously biologically healthy child.”

Read John Stonestreet’s entire column here.

Photo Credit: By Rafael Alcarde Palomares (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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