NEWS SHORTS FOR MONDAY
Pentagon mandates 'morning-after' pill
The Department of Defense now requires its military facilities around the world to stock a "morning-after" pill with abortion-causing effects.
The Pentagon confirmed May 14 to Baptist Press it implemented a policy in February mandating its full-service health care facilities stock the drug.
A Department of Defense (DoD) spokeswoman told BP in an e-mail that Next Choice, a brand name of the "morning-after" pill, "was added Feb 2010 to the BCF [Basic Core Formulary] following review by the DoD Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee at their Nov 2009 meeting. This means every military treatment facility must now stock the medication."
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Abortion Foes Capitalize on Health Law They Fought
Abortion opponents fought passage of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul to the bitter end, and now that it's the law, they're using it to limit coverage by private insurers.
An obscure part of the law allows states to restrict abortion coverage by private plans operating in new insurance markets. Capitalizing on that language, abortion foes have succeeded in passing bans that, in some cases, go beyond federal statutes.
"We don't consider elective abortion to be health care, so we don't think it's a bad thing for fewer private insurance companies to cover it," said Mary Harned, attorney for Americans United for Life, a national organization that wrote a model law for the states.
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Boy Gets New Windpipe Made With His Adult Stem Cells
A ten-year-old boy is now breathing easy, thanks to a world first transplant using a new windpipe grown using his adult stem cells. The young boy was born with a rare condition called Long Segment Tracheal Stenosis, with a narrow windpipe that does not grow and restricts breathing. He had undergone previous surgeries to widen his windpipe but the condition had become life threatening. A team of British and Italian doctors developed a new technique to treat the young boy’s life-threatening condition. They took a donor trachea, stripped it down to the cartilage scaffolding, and then injected adult stem cells from the boy’s bone marrow. The stem cell-coated organ was then implanted in the boy. Over time the adult stem cells will cover the windpipe; using his own stem cells means there is no transplant rejection problem.
The major step forward in this case, is that instead of re-growing the organ with adult stem cells in the laboratory for months until it is fully formed, the cells were put into the trachea just before implanting it. The team of British and Italian scientists described the procedure as a breakthrough for its simplicity in using the “ideal laboratory” of the human body to rebuild the organ.
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Nurses Surveyed on Assisted Suicide Views
A British nursing magazine is conducting an online survey to gauge the "feelings and experience" of nurses on assisted suicide. Nursing Times will print the results in an upcoming issue.
Euthanasia activists in Britain continue to work to legalize assisted suicide in the country. After years of opposition, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) moved to an official position of neutrality on the issue in July 2009, after an internal poll of members showed a split between support and opposition, according to the Daily Telegraph.
British pro-lifers criticized the RCN's neutral stance, chiding the group for retreating from principle because of a poll. "The RCN's Council have based their change on a consultation exercise in which only a fraction of one percent of their members took part," Paul Tully, general secretary of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, said at the time. "They clearly have no mandate from nurses as a whole for this move."
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Emboldened Pro-Lifers Rally in Ottawa
The headline from "The Star" newspaper reads, "Huge anti-abortion rally hails Canada's new foreign-aid stand." The reference is to the refusal by Prime Minister Stephen Harper to pour Canadian foreign aid money into the coffers of abortionists as part of Canada's G8 maternal health commitment.
"Around 15,000 pro-life campaigners, clearly buoyed by what they see as last month's victory on the foreign-aid front, cheered loudly when numerous speakers talked about the next steps in what one called bringing a 'culture of life,' to Canada," the Star reported.
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Illinois Federation for Right to Life
2600 State Street, Ste E
Alton, IL 62002
Phone: 618.466.4122
Web: www.ifrl.org
E-mail: mail@ifrl.org
