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Judge Blocks 'Informed Consent,' Some Other Provisions Of Ariz. Abortion Law, Allows Waiting Period
An Arizona judge issued a preliminary injunction late Tuesday blocking the implementation of some provisions of a new state abortion law requiring waiting periods and specific disclosures scheduled to take effect at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, the AP/Nevada Appeal reports. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Donald Daughton said that Planned Parenthood Arizona's challenge to the law established "a strong likelihood of prevailing on the merits" of the case if it goes to trial and that women face "the possibility of irreparable injury" if he did not grant some of the group's requests.
Daughton allowed the law's 24-hour waiting period to take effect but granted PPAZ's request to block a requirement that women receive in-person disclosures from a physician before abortion procedures. Daughton said that the so-called "informed consent" consultation is still required 24 hours prior to the procedure but that qualified staff can provide the disclosures over the phone.
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Eugenics Impulse Alive and Well on Supreme Court
As I have observed in these pages before, the United States Supreme Court has a very uneven record on the issue of eugenics. Indeed, one of the justices we lawyers are taught in law school to revere without question, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was an uber-Darwinist and philosophical materialist who also happened to be, not coincidentally, a great admirer of the American eugenics project of the 1920's. In the infamous case of Buck v. Bell the court considered a Virginia law authorizing the forced sterilization of mentally challenged people. The state proposed to use the law to sterilize Carrie Buck on the ground that she was feeble minded and thus a genetic threat to society. The court upheld the law, and Ms. Buck was in fact forcibly sterilized, as were tens of thousands of other people across the nation after Buck v. Bell was decided.
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HPV Vaccine Death Raises Wider Issue
The death of a 14-year-old British girl hours after she received the Cervarix vaccine that protects against human papilloma virus, the virus that causes cervical cancer, shows how difficult it can be to assess the risk of vaccines. The problem is especially timely now because of widespread fears about the supposedly untested vaccine against the pandemic H1N1 influenza virus. Although rare, adverse effects can be caused by vaccines. The U.S. government has established a program to compensate such victims. But adverse events also occur often in the absence of vaccination, and the tendency is to attribute these events to the vaccine even though there is no physical link.
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1300 March for Life in Berlin
This past Saturday, September 26, 1300 pro-life demonstrators marched through Berlin from City Hall to St. Hedwig's Cathedral hoping to bring an end to abortion in Germany.
The participants marched silently along the route, holding 1000 white wooden crosses as a sign of protest against abortion in Germany. The 1000 white crosses symbolized the estimated 1000 unborn babies killed in Germany each day.
Abortion is technically illegal under Germany's constitution, but the German Parliament passed a law in 1995 that eliminated any punishment for abortion in the first trimester. However, the law stated that before a woman could get an abortion, she must first receive counseling and be informed that the unborn child has a right to live.
The March, which was organized by Bundesverband Lebensrecht, an organization in Germany that acts as an umbrella for other pro-life groups, drew significantly more people than it did last year when reports estimated attendance to be at 800.
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Adult Stem Cells for ALSfrom FRC Blog by David Prentice
In the news recently was the FDA approval of a clinical trial for ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis; Lou Gehrig's disease) by the company NeuralStem. Actually, the recent news was release of the FDA hold on the trial; the FDA hold was placed on the trial back on 20 Feb 2009. NeuralStem uses immature, fetal neural stem cells. The hold was placed soon after news broke about an Israeli boy who developed tumors, four years after receiving fetal stem cells. Fetal stem cell "overgrowth" has been a problem before with other attempts, e.g. experiments at using fetal neural cells in Parkinson patients (published ref from 2001, also see refs from 2003 and 1996.)
All of the recent NeuralStem stories talk about this fetal stem cell experiment being the "first" stem cell trial for ALS. Apparently no one is aware of the adult stem cell literature, only fetal and embryonic.
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Civil Rights Battle for Sanctity of Life Expands to Include Marriage, Family and Parenting
On the beautiful campus of Hampton University in Virginia, a valiant group of multi-ethnic leaders gathered this week to discuss the state of marriage in America, specifically marriage in Black America; and to sign a related declaration at the site of the historical "Emancipation Oak" where freedwoman Mary Peak taught children of former slaves in 1981. It was noted by Dr. Alveda King, Director of African American Outreach of Priests for Life and Founder of King for America, that the marriage, family and parenting efforts also have the impact of lowering abortions because women who are supported by men who engage positively in marriage and fatherhood have help in bearing the burdens that parenthood can impose on a woman alone. "This fatherhood support, plus the awareness and support of social systems that support healthy marriages will have positive impact on negating abortions in our current civil right fight for the sanctity of life," said Dr. King.
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