Three IFRL directors, Pat & Dick Conklin and John Ryan, attended the NRLC Convention in Louisville last Thursday - Saturday. The convention included several excellent sessions addressing issues related to fetal pain and strong responses to the real war on women. There were also several sessions addressing the critical need for a more aggressive approach to protecting life against doctor prescribed suicide and outright euthanasia, both on an individual basis and before the legislatures. With Congressional elections and state elections in the vast majority of states approaching in November there were also numerous presentations focused on what the pro-life movement needs to do to promote pro-life candidates and bring them to victory. Pat, Dick, and John also attended a number of convention sessions and meetings regarding fundraising and organization that hopefully will benefit IFRL in the year ahead.
The convention opened with a panel discussion of the appropriate pro-life response to the purported "War on Women" entitled "The REAL War on Women" featuring Kathryn Jean Lopez, Editor-At-Large of National Review Online, Dr. Jean Garton, Founder and long-time President of Lutherans for Life, and Joy Pinto, an on-air personality on EWTN radio and TV and director of a CPC in Birmingham, AL. All three were clear in the need to turn the language on the proponents of unceasing attack on unborn women and any women who do not agree with them. Dr. Garton examined the plain meaning of the word "war" to illustrate how just the use of the term suggested an attack pro-lifers and conservatives have never made, but one pro-aborts and "progressives" are willing to undertake. Lopez and Pinto both brought a strong, unapologetic, and positive energy to many of their answers.
An evening general session Thursday followed up the introduction with acclaimed breast cancer surgeon Angela Lanfranchi, M.D., FACS, presentation entitled "What if ALL Women Knew ALL the Facts?" Dr. Lanfranchi has conducted research, written, and spoken extensively on breast cancer prevention including reproductive and hormonal risk factors. She has spoken extensively around the United States, in numerous nations around the world, and at the United Nations before medical and medical training organizations, cancer organizations, and governmental bodies about the risk factors which prominently include induced abortion. Dr. Lanfranchi illustrated the depth and breadth of the research illustrating the abortion – breast cancer link and ways in which it is increased within particularly at-risk populations. Among the noteworthy populations with a substantially increased risk of breast cancer later in life is adolescents who have abortions well into a first pregnancy, something that occurs quite commonly. Even with some general familiarity with the facts, it is stunning to realize just how far our society will go to protect the abortion industry at the expense of millions of individual women.
In a presentation entitled "The Lessons of Fetal Pain and the Duty to Protect Unborn Children" O. Carter Sneed, a University of Notre Dame Law Professor and the Director of Notre Dame's Center for Ethics and Culture, started from the current efforts to protect pain-capable unborn children to suggest the critical problem in law of who is protected. While pro-lifers say that everyone is protected, everyone counts as a member in the community of persons, Roe v. Wade opened the door to exclude not only those yet to be born, but also the weak, the aged, and the handicapped. The law plays a critical role in "humanizing" at risk populations as has been illustrated with born alive infant protection acts, bans on partial birth abortions, ultrasound opportunity laws, and pain-capable child protection acts. If we continue to educate and demonstrate the humanity of the unborn child new knowledge may push the pain sensory thresholds back into the range where the unborn child responds to touch at around 8 weeks gestation. In this process there will be new opportunities to make the society aware of the beating heart and other physical proofs of the humanity of the unborn child back to the earliest stages of pregnancy. In such steps the law needs to and can continue to work with science and elements of the culture to restore the notion that everyone counts from conception until natural death.
In another general session titled "Bioethics' War on Humans" Wesley J. Smith, PhD., a renowned ethicist, author, and lawyer who is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center on Human Exceptionalism, asked why the great push for assisted suicide and euthanasia did not come 100 years ago when there was much more suffering related to many medical conditions. Smith traced the answer to the philosophy of DesCartes which proposed health as a primary good of society. Relief of pain has become a goal and relieving suffering, eliminating suffering, has become a purpose of society. Definitions of suffering have become fluid and severe disability, chronic illness, mental illness, terminal illness, and financial hardships have all entered into some definitions of suffering. Medical ethics committees, medical schools, and individual bioethicists have all moved in new and frightening directions. Smith referred to "undignified bioethics" where capacity has become more important that being. If an injury changes a person, as was the case with Terri Schiavo, then no one in our society is safe.
Smith argues that we need human exceptionalsim, or speciesism, -- our dignity is inherent in our membership in the human species. Critical threats continue to be seen in many directions. Arguments are being made for the harvesting of human organs before the donor has been declared dead. "Suicide tourism" is being seen in some European countries. Critical inappropriate legislation and ethics standards with regard to the obligations of medical professionals are being seen in various corners of the world, most notably at the moment with regard to euthanasia in Quebec and abortion in one Australian state. Smith maintains that it is our fault as a society that many elderly people have come to view themselves as a burden on their families.
As part of the same general session Jennifer Popik, the Legislative Counsel for NRLC's Robert Powell Center for Medical Ethics, outlined the legislative and judicial movement towards doctor prescribed suicide in five states where there has been overt movement in that direction. Each law or judicial opinion has been worse than the one before it, although there are definite possibilities of limiting or repealing a law passed in Vermont which included certain safeguards that would drop off in three years if the law is not repealed of amended. Burke Balch, Director of the Robert Powell Center for Medical Ethics, concluded the session with a call to arms citing the swing from the philosophy of Hypocrites towards the philosophy of Plato within the ethics communities of most hospitals today. He referred to the emphasis on quality of life today being "Himler-like" with the very clear EXCEPTION of the RACIAL component of Himler's purges of the Jewish and Black races.
By John Ryan, Illinois Federation for Right to Life
