NEWS SHORTS FOR MONDAY

NEWS SHORTS FOR MONDAY New Bioethics Commission Gets Members The new Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, first announced over four months ago, is finally getting its members. HHS published the official announcement of the commission's establishment on March 31, and on April 7 ten Members were announced by the White House (the two co-chairs were announced previously; the Executive Order also provides for the possibility of one more member.) Click here for the new commission website . Click here for the entire article. Organs 'removed without consent' Organs may have been removed from deceased people without their consent after a data-handling error by the NHS. The blunder meant 800,000 people on the UK donor register may have had their wishes about the use of organs for transplant wrongly recorded. The Sunday Telegraph reported that 45 of them have now died - and 20 families let organs of relatives be taken based on incorrectly stored information. NHS Blood and Transplant said it was urgently investigating. Many donors give consent for some organs to be used for transplant but not others, such as eyes. But the details of many donors' preferences were accidentally deleted in 1999. Click here for the entire article. Planned Parenthood In Illinois Celebrates 70 Years of Killing Babies When it started in 1940, it was denied recognition by the Champaign Medical Society. Patients had to be "poor and married" to access its services. In its first year, what was then called the Champaign County Family Planning Center, saw 39 patients. Seventy years and tens of thousands of patients later, the organization is the local office of Planned Parenthood of Illinois, 302 E. Stoughton St., Champaign. The organization will be celebrating its 70 years in Champaign with a dinner Friday at 6 p.m. at the I Hotel. When oral contraceptives were approved by the Food and Drug Administration in the 1960s, Kanter said Planned Parenthood was allowed to offer the pill to patients who had a prescription from a private physician and could pay $2 per month – as long as the clinic did not publicize the service. Click here for the entire article. New Safety Label For Birth Control Pills Bayer HealthCare said Friday it has added new information about the risks of blood clots to its contraceptive pills Yaz and Yasmin. In cooperation with the Food and Drug Administration, the company said it added new labeling stating that the risks of blood clots with Yaz and Yasmin are similar to those with other oral contraceptives. The statements are based on two large, multiyear studies of more than 120,000 women taking contraceptives in the U.S. and the U.K. Click here for the entire article. Sarasota Baby Killer's License Revoked for Aborting Wrong Baby A Florida OB-GYN who was supposed to abort a deformed fetus in a twin pregnancy but leave the normal one alone made the worst kind of mistake. Dr. Matthew J. Kachinas got the twins mixed up and injected a killing chemical into the wrong one, records show. At a weekend meeting in Tampa, the Florida Board of Medicine revoked Kachinas' license for that and a series of other pending cases, according to Florida Health News. Kachinas, who practiced in Sarasota, was one of the few OB-GYNs in Florida who accepted abortion patients in late second trimester, records show. The ``selective reduction'' in the twin pregnancy was not considered a late-term procedure. The parents of the twins, who had achieved the pregnancy through in-vitro fertilization with an egg donor, were not identified and were not at the hearing. Records show that after the normal fetus was inadvertently killed, they ended the pregnancy altogether the following week. Records show the fetal twins were at 15 weeks' gestation when the botched ``feticid'' took place. The "normal" baby was a girl; the twin with anomalies -- Down syndrome and a possible heart defect -- was male. Click here for the entire article. Woman rejects pressure from employer to have abortion A criminal court in the Spanish city of Gerona has sentenced a restaurant owner to 19 months in prison and ordered him to pay over $6,000 for pressuring a waitress to undergo an abortion in order to keep her job. The woman refused and decided to keep her baby. According to the court, the restaurant owner insisted the waitress have an abortion after learning she was pregnant. Europa Press reported that the ruling said the woman was "about to interrupt" her pregnancy but that after "many doubts," she decided to carry her child to term.  When her employment contract was not renewed, she was presented with a pink slip without severance pay. Click here for the entire article.