Back in April, I predicted that the Obama Administration would happily concede to a trial judge’s dictat that requires the (sometimes) abortifacient pill be available to girls. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

In this case, the taken-for-granted values being furthered are that minors should have sex whenever and as much as they want, that parents should not be able to impose their own sexual morality on their children, and that the job of society is to keep “consequences” of having sex at bay for sexually active children through open access to contraception, abortifacients, and abortion–without notice or consent of parents if that is what the kids want. 

By the way, I think HHS Secretary Sebelius and Obama share these values. Thus, I predict either no appeal or a weak attempt aimed at losing the case. 

And that is precisely what happened. From The Guardian story:

The Obama administration will stop trying to limit sales of emergency contraception pills, making the morning-after pill available to women of all ages without a prescription. The US justice department said in a letter on Monday that it planned to comply with a court’s ruling to allow unrestricted sales of Plan B One-Step and that it would withdraw its appeal on the matter.

“Women of all ages!” Sickening. This is the fact: The Left thinks they, not parents, have the right to raise society’s children. And, for reasons I can’t understand, they seem to want boys and girls having sex with each other.

Child euthanasia: It’s all over but the final voting in Belgium as the Parliament agrees across party lines that doctors should be able to euthanize children. From the Presseurop story:

In the wake of several months of testimony from doctors and experts in medical ethics, a Belgian Senate committee will on June 12 examine the possible extension of the country’s euthanasia law to include children. “On both sides of the linguistic border, liberals and socialists appear to agree on the fact that age should not be regarded as a decisive criteria in the event of a request for euthanasia,”De Morgen. They want doctors to decide on a minor’s capacity for discernment on a case by case basis.

Treating a child like a sick horse is what passes for “compassion” these days. 

Scientism is often conflated with science, either explicitly, or implicitly by scientism ideologues masking as objective science commentators. But the two are mirror opposites: Science is a method of objectively obtaining and applying material facts and information. The former espouses a subjective world view using the pretense that science has the capacity to tell us right from wrong, the ethical from the unethical, best from worst, etc. Or to put it another way, scientism is the pilot fish and science is the shark.

Over at the Weekly Standard, Peter Augustine Lawler has a good article on scientism vs. the humanities. Along the way, he notes that both Marxism and transhumanism are examples of scientism. From, “Defending the Humanities:”

Scientism is a comprehensive, one-dimensional explanatory scheme of all that exists. It is, as some say, a “worldview,� an ideology, an aggressive and empirically sketchy effort to dispel all doubt from the world in the service of conscious manipulation in the service of wisdom. Scientism​�​as an ideology​�​attempts to obliterate its rivals, discrediting all other claims for truth. So scientism aims to destroy the humanities. Not only that, it aims to destroy much of what is distinctively human in each of us as a self-interpreting being. 

Consider that the most destructive form of scientism so far has been Marxism. But anyone with eyes to see fears the emergence of newly tyrannical forms of scientism as the foundation of technological solutionism. No one can deny, for example, that the movement known as transhumanism aims at “the abolition of man,� at the overcoming of the distinction between man and machine on pretty much the machine’s terms. Every competent scientist and humanist knows it will never achieve its goal, as Marxism never achieved anything like the “communism as the end of history” Marx fancifully described. But humanists are right to fear what can be lost on an ideological mission impossible.

I would add a few additional commonalities to the nexus: Both are utterly materialistic. Both reject human exceptionalism. Both claim to be based on eliminating suffering. Both seek to supplant religion as conveyors of meaning and purpose. Both are particularly antagonistic toward orthodox Christianity. And perhaps most dangerously, both are stridently Utopian.

I don’t believe that transhumanists will ever create a truly post human species. It is the values that underlie the movement that require opposition, not the dim prospects of its actual implementation. 

Many bioethicists yearn to be part of the emerging technocracy, and want practioniers in the field to become arbiters of policy in areas far beyond healthcare. So they huff and puff to find ways to imperialistically make what they do seem generally relevant across the depth and breadth of public policy discourse. 

Latest example: Global warming hysteria. How, pray tell, is global warming hysteria (accepted as a fact in the article quoted below, despite a 15-year pause) a bioethics issue? Why, bioethicists can help forge policies that reduce carbon dioxide!  From, “Climate Change is a Bioethics Problem,” by Cheryl Cox Macpherson, published in Bioethics:

The nature and history of  bioethics is such that it has a responsibility to offer analyses of the burdens and benefits of emissions producing activities; utility and distributive justice of a given intervention; and procedural justice regarding the assignment of related responsibilities…

Policies and health systems that expand access to healthy choices reduce emissions, improve health, and promote autonomy. The successful design and implementation of policies that accomplish this requires multisectoral and multidisciplinary collaborations. Whether political and financial commitment is made to such work depends largely on ethics, societal and individual values, and the contexts in which the work is needed.

Which, of course, we can’t do without them!

Climate change harms health everywhere and allowing it to worsen is a choice involving values and responsibilities. Bioethics has a responsibility to promote transparency and understanding about the actions and policies that allow climate change to worsen, and to explore the associated values and conflicts.

Bioethical and multidisciplinary analyses would enhance understanding about the utility and justice of emissions producing activities and mitigation strategies; elucidate the values at stake and inform protective responses pertinent to cultural, geographic, and other circumstances. Morality pervades choices about how to minimize and rectify the damages, and the quality and quantity of environmental resources we leave to our children and grandchildren. New conceptions of moral responsibility and virtue might help resolve some of the dilemmas about these choices.

Eyes rolling so far back in my head I can see my brain!

Cutting through the academese, this is just liberal politics–written in the gobbledygook of bioethics discourse:  

Values and virtues traditionally center on places, things, and activities that societies have cherished for centuries. These are largely being displaced by goods that offer immediate gratification like inexpensive clothes, airfares, foods, and electronics. Today the extent to which individuals purchase and own such things reflects their identity and how others perceive them, and affects their health and the health of others. Bioethics is concerned with objectivity, fairness, morality, responsibility, health, and wellbeing. Allowing climate change to continue unabated is a bioethics problem.

Here we see a vivid example of the consequences that flow from”publish or perish” in academia. Sometimes it is better to perish. 

HT: Bioedge

As we are in the midst of an elder-suicide crisis, we see elder suicide promoted within the assisted suicide movement and its camp followers in the media.

Now, continuing the recent pattern, the 2002 joint elder suicides of Admiral Chester Nimitz, Jr. and his wife Joan has been extolled in Slate. Euthanasia activist, Dr. Lewis. M. Cohen recounts how the Nimitzs’ killed themselves together. Members of the Hemlock Society, neither were terminally ill but experiencing the usual circumstances of octogenarians. According to Cohen, these suicides were, “Deaths With Dignity.”  From the piece:

Nurses were employed at their home to attend to Joan Nimitz’s worsening health problems, but the couple did not want to squander all of their money on such care. They were both appalled at the vast sums spent at the end of life to sustain people who were frail and sick and not likely to get better. They could clearly envision–and they rejected–the idea of spending their remaining years in a nursing facility. The admiral particularly worried his heart condition might suddenly worsen and his wife would be unable to commit suicide by herself. Joan Nimitz confided to the children that she, too, feared that without her husband’s help, she would not be in a position to ingest the barbiturate pills they had been stockpiling. The admiral told his daughter, “That’s the one last thing I have to do for your mother.”

It is appalling that such attitudes should be extolled rather than mourned. Anyone who loves and/or cares for elderly parents, aunts, uncles, siblings, friends, cousins, or others should understand that their loved ones are imperiled by such advocacy as explicitly promotes elder suicide as empowering and somehow the most “dignified”–at a time when elderly people worry about becoming burdens–which is our fault, not theirs. 

But this is where assisted suicide advocacy aims, with the terminal illness limitation being just a political ploy to get people to accept the principle that killing is an acceptable answer to the problems of suffering. As the Admiral’s daughter–fully supportive of her parents’ suicides–admits: 

Van Dorn appreciates that the [Vermont] law would not have directly helped her parents, as neither had a “terminal” disease. She understands that a civil rights movement, such as death with dignity, takes politically expedient and incremental steps. She anticipates that in the future the infirmities and suffering of advanced age may also qualify people to request this option (as is presently true in Belgium, Switzerland, and the Netherlands). Meanwhile, one more American state will allow its citizens further control at the end of life. And Van Dorn is looking forward to the day “when kids and their parents will regularly sit around the dining room table and talk about end-of-life issues the way you talk about college planning. Because, after all it is just another kind of planning.”

In other words, planning suicides over coffee.

So, where is the Suicide Prevention Community? Silent! Perhaps afraid of being controversial–which never stops the pro-suicide crowd–they gently discuss suicide prevention, often in the narrowest of terms, and certainly rarely (if ever) publicly opposing assisted suicide. Indeed, usually the topic isn’t mentioned. Meanwhile, suicide promotion is growing increasingly brazen–which substantially explains why each year “invisible Suicide Prevention Day” comes and goes, making nary a ripple.

The logic of assisted suicide pushes with the force of gravity to virtual death-on-demand. It starts with advocacy for allowing doctor-prescribed suicide for the imminently terminally ill for whom–supposedly–nothing else can be done to alleviate suffering. But that’s only a key that opens the door–and indeed, as we have seen in Oregon and Washington, the requirement of actual and measurable suffering that cannot be controlled never actually applies.

Once society widely accepts killing as an acceptable answer in some cases of suffering, the cultural tumor metastasizes to include people with chronic conditions, disabilities, mental illnesses, and even, the elderly who are tired of life–as we have seen in the Netherlands and Belgium. In Belgium, they have even given society a utilitarian stake in killing the expensive for whom to care by coupling lethal jabs with organ harvesting.

Now, in Switzerland, fear of future suffering becomes the a justifiable cause for assisted suicide, as a man with early Alzheimer’s was accepted for a one-way death trip to Switzerland. From the BMJ story:

An 83 year old man has become the first known Briton to have ended his life at the Dignitas assisted suicide centre in Switzerland because he was diagnosed with dementia. The professional man, who was in the early stages of the condition, travelled to Zurich with his wife in March, but his death has only now been made public. Michael Irwin, a retired general practitioner and campaigner for the legalisation of doctor assisted suicide in the United Kingdom, told the BMJ that he had asked a psychiatrist friend to assess the man to ensure that he was mentally competent to take the decision, a Dignitas requirement. He said: “He was an 83 year old man who knew very well all the implications of what dementia would mean for him and his family…”

See how the inside game works?  Euthanasia advocates approve the opinions of other euthanasia activists.

Also, what if doctors come up with a treatment for Alzheimer’s in the next five years? They’re working on it. If they do, this poor chap will not be around to benefit.

I saw that very phenomenon with AIDS in San Francisco in the 1990s. AIDS was a catastrophe at the time. You couldn’t walk down the street without seeing the tragedy playing out in real time. 

AIDS activists developed an assisted suicide culture by which the afflicted killed themselves in the presence–and with the support of–their friends. I argued and debated publicly against the practice, sometimes against the doctors who were facilitating the deaths. Then, the drug treatment suddenly came on line and people–literally on the brink of a very difficult death–came back to full vitality. But not everyone who would have lived took advantage of the breakthrough–because they were already dead by assisted suicide!

People were aghast at those suicides, right? And those who gave moral support were publicly repentant that they had supported people in their dying who might have gone on to live. I wish. All I noticed was collective shrug.

It is striking how few people care that people died who might have lived or that people died even though good times were still to be had. The real fault, I think, is that Western society is swimming in nihilism. If so, euthanasia is a symptom, not a cause. As the Canadian journalist wrote about the support Robert Latimer received after he murdered his disabled daughter:

A society that believes in nothing can offer no argument even against death. A culture that has lost its faith in life cannot comprehend why it should be endured.

I have noticed over the years that many bioethics death pro choicers (autonomy) actually envision the right as a one way street; a right to die but not a right to live. For example, almost all agree that we have a right to refuse medical treatment–even if it means we die. Okay, I’m cool with that. Most others say that seriously ill/disabled/mentally ill should be able to access assisted suicide or a lethal jab from doctors. I am definitely not cool with that. But then, when some patients want life-extending treatment with which the bioethicists disagree, well autonomy has its limits. Suddenly, doctors and bioethics committees should have the final say.

Now, the same paradigm may be forming around childbirth. Peter Singer–the usual suspect–a supporter of an absolute right to abort, claims that to save the planet, destitute women should not have a concomitant right to give birth. From the PRI story:

Then Singer compared women’s right to bear children to the traditional villager’s right to graze their cows on “common” grounds. As the villagers get more affluent and their cows die less from disease, he said, until the commons are overgrazed,  ”yields are falling… and that’s a road to disaster.” 

“Turns out that the right to graze as many cows as you like on the common was not an absolute right,” said Singer. “Obviously this is what I think we ought to be saying even about how many children we have… I hope we don’t get to a point where we do have to override it… but I don’t think we ought to shrink away from considering that as a possibility.”

In other words, the technocrats get to decide how many babies women can bear. We’ve seen the horrors that such a policy created in China.

Singer is far from alone. As I have written here many times, radical environmentalists and global warming hysterics have boosted China’s tyrannous one-child policy as a model for the rest of the world. But most advocates would have thought twice, I think, before impliedly comparing poor women giving birth to grazing cows on an overused pasture. If a conservative ever made such a statement, the response from the press would have been, “Racist!”

Wow. A child with cerebral palsy who suffered a cardiac arrest and became–they thought–permanently unconscious, appears to have been successfully treated with his own stored umbilical cord blood stem cells. From the ScienceDaily story:

Bochum’s medics have succeeded in treating cerebral palsy with autologous cord blood. Following a cardiac arrest with severe brain damage, a 2.5 year old boy had been in a persistent vegetative state — with minimal chances of survival. Just two months after treatment with the cord blood containing stem cells, the symptoms improved significantly; over the following months, the child learned to speak simple sentences and to move.

We should be careful not to assume this means a cure, but look at this progress!

After the cord blood therapy, the patient, however, recovered relatively quickly. Within two months, the spasticity decreased significantly. He was able to see, sit, smile, and to speak simple words again. Forty months after treatment, the child was able to eat independently, walk with assistance, and form four-word sentences. “Of course, on the basis of these results, we cannot clearly say what the cause of the recovery is,” Jensen says. “It is, however, very difficult to explain these remarkable effects by purely symptomatic treatment during active rehabilitation.”

This heartening story raises several issues, among which are: First, ethical stem cell research offers tremendous hope. Second, unconcious child patients are sometimes dehydrated to death based on the belief they can never recover. If that doesn’t give you pause…

The international surrogacy industry is rife with the potential for abuse and neglect of children. It never occurred to me that it could be used as a means of obtaining children by a pedophile. But if this story is accurate, that seems to be what happened in Israel. From Ynetnews.com:

A sex offender convicted of sex crimes against young children who were under his supervision took advantage of a legal loophole and became the father of a girl through an overseas surrogacy arrangement. An inquiry launched by the NGO showed the man had a criminal conviction for sexually abusing children who were given to his auspices, some repeatedly. He served a year and a half jail term and was categorized as a pedophile by the authorities.

The NCC notified the welfare authorities, the educational institution where the daughter, four, is enrolled, as well as police. “We learned that none of the bodies was aware the man was a pedophile who is raising a surrogate daughter on his own,” Kadman said. They also learned there was no legal possibility to take the girl from the father, as the surrogacy procedures were intact. However, the father’s relationship with his daughter is being carefully monitored by the welfare authorities, and he was made to attend special psychological guidance.

Yikes! Apologists for virtually unregulated surrogacy point to happy parents. But there is a dark underside that needs greater light cast upon it. And so many children out there begging to be adopted!

Michael J. New’s post over at The Corner about what could happen if Roe v. Wade was overturned reminded me of a chilling insight I experienced this past weekend while speaking at/attending a conference on the sanctity of life in health care at San Francisco University. A lawyer was discussing how Roe and subsequent cases actually permitted the death-by-a-thousand cuts strategy that pro lifers have deployed quite successfully for the last few decades. He also described Justice Ginsberg’s belief that the ruling was wrongly decided on privacy, when it should have been predicated on women’s rights. And it hit me: If President Obama replaces one or two of the five conservative/moderate justices, Roe could very well be overturned–from the other direction!

Given that many on the pro-choice side believe that abortion is a fundamental–nay, an absolute–right. And given that many pro choicers believe that abortion should be legal for any reason, at any time during a pregnancy. And given that some among the Planned Parenthood crowd go so far as to assert that a baby born alive after a botched abortion should only be saved at the discretion of the mother and doctor. And given that many in bioethics now claim that a human being only has a right to life if he or she has sufficient mental capacities to be considered a “person”–thereby justifying “post-birth abortion” infanticide: I can easily envision a ruling overturning Roe on the basis that it is insufficiently protective of the right to abortion, that is, a ruling barring any regulation limiting abortion by the states.

After all, the point of Roe was to end the abortion debate. From a certain perspective, the fault in the decision was that it didn’t go far enough to get that job done.  

Bioethics pushed personal autonomy to the forefront of medical decision making, helping forge the legal right to say no to unwanted life-extending care. Today, if a person doesn’t want to be in an ICU or to be otherwise kept alive with medical treatment, the patient or family can say no.  And that’s generally a very good thing. Indeed, without the right to say no, the hospice movement would never have materialized.

But what about patients who want to say yes to such care? Increasingly, patient autonomy is becoming a one-way street. If you want to die, fine. That decision is sacrosanct. If you want to live, well doctors and bioethicists get to make the final decision. This is sometimes called Futile Care Theory or medical futility.

Futile Care Theory is as much about money as it is about benefiting the patient. It is also about honoring the subjective views of doctors and care givers–even at the expense of rejecting a patient’s specific request for efficacious treatment, that is, treatment that would or could achieve the desired medical result of extending the patient’s life.

Now, in Canada (yet again), we see a case in which a patient stated he wanted to be kept alive but the doctors don’t want to comply. From the Toronto Star story:

Joaquim Silva Rodrigues wants to live. It’s what the 73-year-old Catholic man repeatedly told his family he wanted after he was diagnosed with a rare disease called progressive supranuclear palsy two years ago. It’s what his wife and son have demanded on his behalf from his physicians at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre where he lies today, motionless and speechless. On May 14, they placed a note in Rodrigues’s medical chart saying he has “no reasonable hope of recovery or improvement” and that they have decided to withhold mechanical ventilation in the event of a medical emergency requiring life-saving treatment.

That change in status was made unilaterally, without the consent of his family.

The physicians’ point is that Rodrigues has a life not worth living:

Last July, Rodrigues was admitted to Sunnybrook and moved into the ICU in August. Since then, he’s had to be placed on medical ventilation three times, Dr. Andre Amaral testified. There won’t be a fourth, he and his colleagues have decided. “He has no chances of recovery,” Amaral told the panel. “There’s no clear benefit in prolonging life when you cannot tell whether the life that’s being prolonged is actually worth living for. . . . We’re prolonging life for suffering and pain.”

Dr. Keith Rose, Sunnybrook’s chief medical executive, said the number of high-profile physician/patient conflicts at his hospital reflects the sheer volume of critical care cases it receives as one of Canada’s largest trauma centres. “Nobody goes out to try and make families angry, to create confrontation,” he said, adding that the hospital administration supports the decision of its doctors in the Rodrigues case. “The final decision-making, after all steps have been gone through and discussions with the family, then, if it’s in the best interest of the patient, it is the physician’s decision to make.”

But he said that this was a life he considered worth continuing.

I disagree with Rodrigues’ decision. If it were me, I’d reject the ICU. But who cares what I think? It isn’t my life that’s being decided about.

Nor should it be the doctors’ choice, since this kind of decision deals with subjective personal values. In other words, the treatment is to be withheld because it will or could work, not because it won’t.  Thus, the doctors are really saying that the patient’s life–as opposed to the treatment–is futile.

Hard cases make bad law. It will be a very worrying thing–particularly in an age of cost containment and potential conflicts of interest thereby created–if doctors and/or bioethicists are given the final legal say about whose life is worth living. I can’t think of a more certain way to destroy trust in the healthcare system.

I worked my heart out supporting the cause of saving Terri Schiavo’s life. Something very good (for me) came out of that tragedy; an abiding friendship with Terri’s parents and siblings, the Schindler family. In my more than 25 years as a public advocate, I have never met finer or more selfless people–or any more cruelly subjected to the most hateful, vicious, and unwarranted attacks by their detractors. 

Since Terri’s death, the family has worked positively to support people with disabilities at lethal risk of dehydration or other forms of medical discrimination through the Terri Schiavo Life and Hope Network. Most recently, I spoke for the foundation at a fund raising dinner, starring Sarah Palin, whose rousing and loving speech that brought the large crowd to their feet. Now Bobby Schindler, Terri’s brother, has started a blog over at Lifenews.com. For those interested, here’s the link. 

Talk about creating incentives to abort or commit infanticide: A Chinese city could soon fine women who give birth without being married. From The Guardian story:

The central Chinese city of Wuhan has published a draft ordinance that would fine women who have children out of wedlock more than £17,000. The move has raised fears of more of abortions and abandoned infants in a country with an entrenched gender gap. The new regulation is intended to support China’s long-held family planning policies, which allow most couples to have only one child, but local media condemned the proposed ordinance as a value judgment against single mothers.

Malthusianism leads to tyranny. Not coincidentally, China’s one-child policy is seen as a model by some global warming hysterics and other assorted radical environmentalists.

The NYT editorialized today in favor of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, chastising Republicans for blocking USA ratification. That got me to thinking that the Dutch authorities allow doctors to kill babies born with disabilities and I don’t recall a single NYT editorial in defense of those murdered children.

Also, I wondered whether the Dutch have ratified the Convention, which states in part:

States Parties undertake to ensure and promote the full realization of all human rights and fundamental freedoms for all persons with disabilities without discrimination of any kind on the basis of disability. To this end, States Parties undertake:…b. To take all appropriate measures, including legislation, to modify or abolish existing laws, regulations, customs and practices that constitute discrimination against persons with disabilities:

And then there is this simple statement:

Article 10 – Right to life States Parties reaffirm that every human being has the inherent right to life and shall take all necessary measures to ensure its effective enjoyment by persons with disabilities on an equal basis with others.

In answer to my question: Why yes, the Netherlands has ratified the Convention. Hypocrites!

The Netherlands, by permitting doctors to kill disabled babies, is in direct violation of this treaty that the government ratified. No doubt, defenders of Netherlander infanticide would claim that it complies with the part of the treaty requiring states to serve the “best interests” of children with disabilities. But killing is the epitome of prejudice and discrimination, because it denies the chance of the murdered children to have any kind of interests at all.

It is rare when the government has to push Netherlander doctors to be more aggressive with euthanasia. But that is what is happening around the killing of Alzheimer’s patients based on an advance directive. From the British Medical Journal story:

Senior figures in Dutch medicine and politics are set to decide whether advanced euthanasia directives can, in practice, replace verbal requests if patients with dementia are no longer able to express their wishes. Doctors in the Netherlands have expressed “difficulties” with this “grey area,” arguing that some communication is essential if they are to understand properly their patients’ suffering and wishes.

But eminent figures in medical ethics argue that doctors are placing themselves above the 2002 euthanasia law. This law states that doctors can act on an earlier advanced directive once a patient becomes incompetent. A public debate has raged on this subject since the Dutch Medical Association, in its response to the government’s latest research assessing euthanasia policy, proposed adapting the law. It suggested that the legally required second medical opinion must not only see but also communicate with the patient.

Former health minister Els Borst, who piloted the euthanasia law through parliament, has since argued: “A professional body cannot choose its own interpretation of the law.”

But it seems to me the doctors are the ones following the law. What if the patient no longer wants to die? What if the patient isn’t really suffering? The law says killing can be done only when that is required to end suffering. But the government leaders are essentially saying, “What does that matter? The advance directive is what counts!”

The bottom line here is that once a society broadly accepts the poison of euthanasia, the killable categories never stop expanding. Culture of death, Wesley? What culture of death?

Embryology text books will tell you that when fertilization is completed, an embryo is formed. That, is, a new individual organism exists–which remains the same organism until death. 

For scientific purposes, the developmental stages of the embryo are given different names. When it is one-celled, it is a zygote. When it is about 7-10 days along, it is a blastocyst. In human biology, the embryo is called a fetus after three months of gestation, and a new-born infant is called a neonate. But they all refer to the same organism, just at different stages of development.

The same holds true if the embryo comes into being asexually, as in SCNT cloning. But scientists and bioethicists who support the cloning agenda are obfuscating this scientific truth by pretending that cloned embryos aren’t embryos–just as they did about “leftover” IVF embryos that had not been implanted. In this edition, bioethicist Jonathan Moreno claims that a blastocyst isn’t an embryo. From his Huffington Post column:

Despite some confused media reports, the Oregon scientists did not clone a human embryo but a blastocyst that lacks some of the cells needed to implant in a uterus.

Confused, like in Nature? From it’s story on the successful cloning:

Therapeutic cloning, or somatic-cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), begins with the same process used to create Dolly, the famous cloned sheep, in 1996. A donor cell from a body tissue such as skin is fused with an unfertilized egg from which the nucleus has been removed. The egg “reprograms” the DNA in the donor cell to an embryonic state and divides until it has reached the early, blastocyst stage.

Also, let’s quote the Human Embryo Authority in the UK–which supports almost anything having to do with embryonic and cloning research–which accurately notes that a blastocyst is an embryo. From its Website:

A blastocyst is an embryo that has developed for five to six days after fertilisation.

Not only that, but James Thomson, the scientists who first derived human embryonic stem cell lines calls a cloned embryo what it is; an embryo. When an MSNBC reporter in a 2005 interview quoted scientists as suggesting–just as we see happening now–that SCNT cloning couldn’t really be used for “making a baby”, Thomson responded:

See, you are trying to redefine it away…If you create an embryo by nuclear transfer, if you gave it to somebody who didn’t know where it came from, there would be no test you could do on that embryo to say where it came from. It is what it is. By any reasonable definition, at least as some frequency, you are creating an embryo. If you try to redefine it away, you are being disingenuous.

Whether these particular cloned embryos could have been brought successfully to birth is unlikely because in monkeys, cloned embryos and fetuses have miscarried–although one gestated long enough to be seen with a heartbeat on ultrasound. But that is merely a matter of developing the proper technique–just as it was in the difficulties leading up to Dolly’s birth, and it was to creating human cloned embryos and maintaining them to the blastocyst stage.

The fact is, cloning creates an embryo asexually. Those scientists and bioethicists claiming it doesn’t mostly could care less if an embryo is destroyed for research. That is certainly true of Moreno.

Ah, but they think you do, so the terms are redefined to throw mud into the ethical debate. Redefining scientific terms for unscientific reasons–which we also saw ubiquitously in the embryonic stem cell debate–crassly politicizes science, which corrupts its purpose and makes what “the scientists” tell us less trustworthy.

I have advocated here and elsewhere for the forced stillbirth of the Independent Payment Advisory Board, due to go into action later this year. The IPAB is a Medicare cost-cutting board of “experts” legally possessed of the autocratic power to impose its “advice”–even over a presidential veto. It does not currently have health care rationing powers, but as I have noted, powerful voices have called for granting it such death panel status.

I have argued that the Republican Party should engage in “total noncooperation with IPAB.” For example, I urged that Speaker Boehner and Leader McConnell refuse to recommend names for the IPAB board because it doesn’t work to castigate the IPAB and then help find people to run it. 

Such soft power has worked, and now even its most vocal supporters, like the New England Journal of Medicine, have noticed that IPAB seems stuck on the lunching pad. From a NEJM editorial, ”Failure to Launch?”

3 years after the ACA’s enactment, the IPAB still has no members. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius described “active discussions” about IPAB nominees in February 2012 and said last month that the administration was “consulting Congress regarding “potential members.” But President Obama has not yet nominated anyone for the IPAB, and Republican congressional leaders have refused to provide any recommendations for appointees. Even if Democrats settle on nominees, the controversy surrounding the IPAB will make their Senate confirmations, which are subject to filibuster, extraordinarily difficult. Presidents historically have made appointments when the Senate is in recess, and President Obama conceivably could fill some IPAB slots in this manner. But recess appointments are temporary, lasting only until the end of the next congressional session.

The Obama Administration seems to understand the problem, hence its inaction on the IPAB front. After all, if the president nominates members for the IPAB board, the hearings will become a splendid public platform for educating the public about the wolf that this way comes wearing sheep’s clothes of improving access to health care. Obama never wants that. That was why he gave the health care rationer Donald Berwick a recess appointment, when the Democrats controlled the Senate overwhelmingly and had not even called a committee hearing where Berwick would have testified!

Conveniently, Medicare now says it won’t need IPAB’s services in 2014, allowing Obama to play for time by not appointing members now. But the NEJM editorialist laments that politics are ruining the launch of the technocracy: 

Yet the difficulties in launching the IPAB point to a more fundamental problem. The board’s appeal lies largely in its aspiration to remove politics from Medicare–to create a policymaking process that is informed by experts and insulated from electoral pressures, interest-group demands, financial considerations, and partisan divisions. But given Congress’s extreme partisan and ideological polarization, the ongoing fight over the ACA, the legacy of mythic “death panels,” and recriminations over Medicare reform, the IPAB’s rough start should not be surprising. This is not the sort of political environment in which an independent board charged with making controversial decisions about one of America’s most popular social programs is likely to thrive. These dynamics are unlikely to recede soon, which means that the IPAB is stuck in purgatory, neither operational nor canceled–an institution designed to be above politics that cannot escape the political binds holding it back.

Purgatory will have to do until the thing can, like the Wicked Witch of the East, be made not merely dead, but really most sincerely dead.  

The ACLU can be counted on to advocate on behalf of culture of death issues. Now, it is suing to overturn Arizona’s ban on sex and race-based abortion. From the AP story:

Civil rights groups on Wednesday sued Arizona to block a 2011 law banning abortions based on the race or sex of the child that makes it a felony to knowingly provide a sex- or race-based abortion. Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona said the law unconstitutionally singles out Asian and black women based on stereotypes and the sponsors’ beliefs that Asian and black women may choose an abortion because of race or the baby’s sex.

What? The law bans abortion based on sex and race. It doesn’t ban abortions by black or Asian women. Just because there was legislative history that some communities might be more likely to terminate a pregnancy based on sex, doesn’t mean the law is invidiously aimed at those communities. 

And here I thought the ACLU opposed racism and sexism. 

Human subject research is rife with potential ethical peril. That is why, beginning with the Nuremberg Code–which led to the USA’s Common Rule and international legal agreements, such as the Helsinki Accords–great efforts are made to ensure that human experimentation protocols protect participants’ safety, most particularly that of the most vulnerable, such as children.

With so much going on, self-monitoring is often the rule. And with protocols complicated and often arcane, it can be very difficult for to keep an eye on what is going on. That is why I so admire the the Alliance for Human Research Protection-an organization that endeavors to cast the public’s eye on dubious or unethical research practices.

The AHRP is currently campaigning to protect healthy children from being used as research subjects in an anthrax vaccine study–which could expose them to potential health risks. Despite the fact that the experiments are non-therapeutic as to the children who would participate, as I reported here at HE in March, President Obama’s bioethics council okayed the experiments moving forward, at least in theory. 

Now, the AHRP has issued a public letter to Obama urging him to shut the process down. From the letter:

Inasmuch as there is no evidence that American children are at risk of a bioterrorist attack, such medical experiments are explicitly prohibited by Federal statutes. Accordingly, children may not be exposed to more than a “minor increase over minimal risk” in research unless: “The intervention or procedure is likely to yield generalizable knowledge about the subjects’ disorder or condition which is of vital importance for the understanding or amelioration of the subjects’ disorder or condition.” [45 CFR46.406]

Well, a bioterrorist attack with anthrax is certainly a possibility, given the times in which we live. But, it seems to me that a vaccine’s experiment on children that could harm them is not of “vital importance” for understanding or ameliorating a risk that is mostly theoretical, and if it occurs, very likely to be a localized threat. 

Moreover, according to the AHRP, adult studies have apparently not demonstrated efficacy:

The planned anthrax vaccine experiment was initiated on the basis of a simulated exercise–called “Dark Zephyr”–not on the basis of real evidence of risk. After decades of testing, the effectiveness of the anthrax vaccine (BioThrax) following an attack has never been proven, and its safety problems are of considerable concern. Indeed, the FDA-approved label states: “The safety and efficacy of BioThrax in a post-exposure setting have not been established.”

Children exposed to this controversial vaccine will be put at significant risk of harm–not to mention severe pain–with no benefit for them. Furthermore, given the vaccine’s failure, after decades of testing in adults, to demonstrate its effectiveness, a pediatric trial is unlikely to succeed. Therefore, the trial will have no clinical or scientific value, much less be “of vital importance.”

I can’t imagine any parent allowing their child to be exposed to potential illness in an anthrax study, which even Obama’s commission admitted carries more than “minimal risk.”

It is so hard to follow these things. Thanks to the AHRP for keeping a sharp eye. 

Cost cutting! Cost cutting! Cost cutting! That’s the new mantra under Obamacare. As a consequence, perhaps, we are beginning to see new medical advice seeking to dissuade us from some cancer screening tests due to “false positives.” And now, we see a study telling us that involved and engaged patients cost the system more. From the Health Day story:

Although doctors and patients have long been urged to share decision-making, new research finds that patients who are involved in their care spend more time in the hospital and increase the cost of their hospital stay. Researchers at the University of Chicago Medical Center found that patients who share in decision-making raise the cost of their admission by an average of $865.“The result that everyone would have liked — that patients who are more engaged in their care do better and cost less — is not what we found in this setting,” the study’s author, Dr. David Meltzer, associate professor of medicine, economics and public policy at the University of Chicago, said in a university news release. “Patients who want to be more involved do not have lower costs. Patients, as consumers, may value elements of care that the health care system might not.”

The researchers said there are roughly 35 million hospitalizations each year in the United States. They calculated that if 30 percent of those patients shared in decision-making on their care instead of allowing their doctor to call the shots, it would result in $8.7 billion in additional costs every year.

After so much emphasis over decades on patient decision-making–often focusing on the right to say no–I worry that studies such as this will be used by Obamacare cost/benefit bureaucrats as an excuse to prevent patients from deciding to say yes. Or to put it another way, don’t let the bean counters ever tell you to mind your own business when it comes to your own medical decisions.  

Your doctor’s job when she or he is treating you, is you–not other patients. Otherwise, the doctor will become hopelessly entwined in serious conflicts of interest.