British Section of the World Federation of Doctors Who Respect Human Life

From Wesley J. Smith, 18 June 2008.

I have been warning and warning that a virulent anti-humanism is becoming rampant on the left side of the scale, and even within the MSM. A site on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (roughly akin to the BBC) Website--Planet Slayer--specifically, "Professor Schpinkee's Greenhouse Calculator" tells you to enter and "find out when you should die!" I kid you not.

Hit the start button and find out when you should become six feet under (I assume cremation is worse than burial for global warming). I answered the questions roughly, and found I should have died at age 7.4. The pig (me) blew up in a bloody mess.

Realize that this is being sold to children and it is shameful and profoundly nihilistic. And it illustrates again how profoundly anti-human and pro death certain aspects of our culture are becoming.

As Andrew Bolt, a blogger for the Herald Sun noted:

What a lovely insight into the green philosophy. Children should die to save the planet. Scott [Bolt's son], I calculated, should have died at age 4.2.

A little joke, you will say. A mere attention grabber in a good cause. Trouble is, though, that there really is an insanely anti-human bent to deep green preaching on global warming, and there really are believers who feel only too keenly the planet is doomed by our sin, and humans must vanish.

Take the influential Gaia preacher Professor James Lovelock, whose latest book, The Revenge Of Gaia, calls for nine-tenths of humanity to vanish to "save" the planet from warming. Or hear the ABC's Ockham's Razor air a lecture by a former academic arguing we must "put something in the water, a virus that would be specific to the human reproductive system and would make a substantial proportion of the population infertile."

And see the lengths to which some true believers now go. There's Toni Vernelli, from animal liberation group PETA, who aborted her baby because "it would have been immoral to give birth to a child that I felt strongly would only be a burden to the world." There's Sarah Irving, from Ethical Consumer magazine, who sterilised herself because it "was the most environmentally friendly thing I could do" in a warming world.

In "The Silence of the Asparagus" I warned:

What is clear, however, is that Switzerland's enshrining of "plant dignity" is a symptom of a cultural disease that has infected Western civilization, causing us to lose the ability to think critically and distinguish serious from frivolous ethical concerns. It also reflects the triumph of a radical anthropomorphism that views elements of the natural world as morally equivalent to people.

Why is this happening? Our accelerating rejection of the Judeo-Christian world view, which upholds the unique dignity and moral worth of human beings, is driving us crazy. Once we knocked our species off its pedestal, it was only logical that we would come to see fauna and flora as entitled to rights.

And once we see "the planet" as personal, it is easier to see humans as the vermin good only for eradication.

From Wesley J. Smith, 17 June 2008.

Apparently many doctors don't tell cancer patients when they enter the terminal stage of the disease. From the story:

Only one-third of terminally ill cancer patients in a new, federally funded study said their doctors had discussed end-of-life care. Surprisingly, patients who had these talks were no more likely to become depressed than those who did not, the study found. They were less likely to spend their final days in hospitals, tethered to machines. They avoided costly, futile care. And their loved ones were more at peace after they died.

The story proceeds to inaccurately describe AB 2747 as being about making sure people are told when they are dying when its real purpose is to open the door to backdoor assisted suicide via dehydration and terminal sedation, and thereby corrupt palliative care properly understood. Also, the bill defines terminal illness as one year to live--a time so far out that a doctor could be wildly inaccurate. But I have discussed that bill, its ultimate purpose, and media ignorance and biases before--and will again. So, for now, let's focus on the primary thrust of the story.

This is a sensitive issue, but patients deserve the truth without taking away hope in the understanding that there are few sure things in life--even with cancer. My dad's doctor told me and I told him--which for us was a very good way to go because we were so tight. His cancer was terminal but there was a small chance for life extenstion with chemo. Dad took the option and had a very good year as a result--which the doctor had not expected--during which he traveled and enjoyed life. We put him into hospice as he entered his final few months of decline.

An even better example: A friend of mine had a seizure. It was caused by lung cancer that had metastasized to the brain. The cancer was inoperable other than to remove the lung. He was told he had 3 months to live--eight years ago. He lived because he took every aggressive measure he could--and he believes, because of a whole lot of prayer.

On the other hand, as the story notes, not being candid impedes the patient from receiving proper hospice care opportunities. Indeed, I have another friend who did not get into hospice until two weeks before he died because the doctor refused to tell him it was in a terminal stage--and he only got into hospice after his wife forced a proper referral after I threw a fit about the unalleviated pain he was in.

Part of the problem, I think, is our hospice system. For those of us in the USA, hospice is often perceived as a kind of "abandon hope all ye who enter here" matter because in order to receive the services, patients must eschew all curative and most life sustaining treatment. When I interviewed Dame Cicely Saunders, the founder of modern hospice, she told me that was a profound weakness of the American system. In the UK, such a choice does not have to be made and people more readily enter hospice care knowing that if they want that last shot of chemo, they can have it (leaving aside for the moment, the problems with the NHS).

If we want more people in hospice, if we want to give them hope while still being able to care for them best when they are dying, a good way would be to change our hospice approach. Then perhaps doctors would be less reticent to tell patients that it looks like their time has come.

Sunday Times review by Dominic Lawson

May 18, 2008

The population-control freaks are back in town. Two factors have given the neo-Malthusians hope that their bleak world view and dismal remedies might once again become intellectually fashionable.

The first is the notion that the most efficient way for mankind to cut its carbon emissions is not to breathe at all - or at least to do so in much smaller numbers. The second is the recent rapid increase in food prices worldwide - which the neo-Malthusians, as ever, do not believe is capable of being addressed by either the market or agricultural technology. These days, even apparently liberal commentators in the mainstream press write effusively in admiration of China's coercive one-child policy.

Against this background, the publication of Matthew Connelly's book is not just perfectly timed: it is essential. The assistant professor of history at Columbia University has delivered a devastating account of the population-control movement; he demonstrates, detail by shocking detail, how a movement that believed it was acting from the highest humanitarian ideals became responsible for callous abuses of human rights on a global scale, ruining millions of lives in a grotesque eugenic experiment.

Sunday Times, May 18

Jack Straw, the justice secretary, has ordered an inquest into 10 suspicious deaths at an old people’s convalescent unit in Hampshire.

The patients were among a group of 92 who died unexpectedly after being given abnormally large doses of morphine and other drugs at the Gosport War Memorial hospital. Their relatives believe their deaths were a form of euthanasia.

Straw has demanded the coroner’s investigation even though at least seven of the bodies were cremated. An inquest cannot take place in the absence of a corpse unless there are exceptional circumstances.

The justice ministry believes there is sufficient anxiety about the circumstances of the cases to require such a procedure, which, in the absence of remains, will be based only on a review of medical records and witness statements.

The allegation of “murder by euthanasia” is similar to that levelled against Harold Shipman, the GP from Greater Manchester who was Britain’s biggest mass killer. He was convicted of 15 murders but is believed to have killed about 250 of his patients. Shipman committed suicide in prison in 2004.

At Gosport, relatives complained repeatedly that the victims were not sick enough to require morphine. Questions about the hospital’s heavy use of the drug were also raised by the Commission for Health Improvement, the hospital watchdog.

Despite these concerns, police have been unable to gather sufficient evidence to pursue a prosecution. The two police investigations of the affair were themselves criticised for shortcomings.

The inquest into the 10 selected Gosport deaths was opened last Wednesday at Portsmouth and South East Hampshire coroner’s court.

A full hearing is scheduled for this autumn. A different coroner, Andrew Bradley, from Basingstoke, will conduct the process, which is expected to be the largest inquest of its kind.

The patients whose deaths are being investigated are Leslie Pittock, Elsie Lavender, Ruby Lake, Robert Wilson, Enid Spurgeon, Elsie Devine, Helena Service, Arthur Cunningham, Sheila Gregory and Geoffrey Packman. All 10 died between 1996 and 1999.

Ann Reeves, a beauty therapist, whose mother, Elsie Devine, 88, died in the hospital in 1999, has been one of the most vocal campaigners for the bereaved relatives. She is writing a book about the events and claims that questions had been raised as long ago as 1991 about the use of syringe drivers – automatic pumps that produce a continuous flow of morphine into a patient’s body.

“My mother was getting better until she went into that place. We are in no doubt there has been a massive cover-up. We are determined not to rest until we get justice for all of these patients,” she said.

Many of the other families are dismayed that their cases have not been selected for the inquest. Mike Wilson from Gosport says his 91-year-old mother, Edna Purnell, was out of bed and using a walking frame after a hip replacement operation, before she was transferred from Portsmouth’s Haslar hospital for a brief period of rehabilitation at Gosport.

“We have all her notes – we can prove what happened,” he said. “She was put to bed when she arrived there and given oral morphine, then transferred to a morphine pump. They threatened me with arrest when they caught me feeding her. They told me she was demented, which was not the case before they started giving her morphine. We are in no doubt that is what killed her.”

Richard Baker, a professor of clinical governance at Leicester University, carried out the statistical analysis that proved the abnormal scale of the death rate among Shipman’s patients. He is believed to have raised similar concerns about the death rate in Gosport.

The methods of at least two doctors and seven nurses working at Gosport have been subject to scrutiny. One of them, Jane Barton, a local GP who worked part-time at the War Memorial hospital, has been reported to the General Medical Council for unprofessional conduct.

A spokeswoman for Hampshire Primary Care Trust, which runs the hospital, said recommendations for improvements in the hospital’s practice had already been implemented. She pointed out the police investigations had come to nothing, and said the further scrutiny was “hugely distressing” for staff.

“We are confident [the hospital] provides safe, high-quality care,” she said.

Sir, We are convinced that stem-cell research is a highly promising area of science offering potential for new methods of treating many serious diseases. We welcome legal acceptance, public and private funding, and international co-operation for a range of stem-cell research.

But we also wish to caution against false optimism and unrealistic claims for as yet unproven avenues of research. It is irresponsible, unjustified and, especially, unfair to patients for researchers to claim without evidence that a refusal to fund, to license or to approve a particular research approach will “delay treatments for incurable illnesses”.

In particular, given the current state of more conventional embryonic stem-cell research, of adult stem-cell research, and of induced pluripotent stem-cell research, there is no demonstrable scientific or medical case for insisting on creating, without any clear scientific precedent, a wide spectrum of human-non-human hybrid entities or “human admixed embryos”.

We therefore question the scientific validity of proposals to create such embryonic combinations currently before the UK Parliament. We note with concern that, though not widely reported, the Bill does not just propose licensing so-called cybrids (99.9 per cent human, 0.1 per cent other species). It also proposes that embryos “created by using human gametes and animal gametes” (50 per cent human, 50 per cent other species) or human embryos “altered by the introduction of one or more animal cells” (ie, any percentage of human material) could be created under licence (UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill 2007-08, Section 4A(5) and Schedule 2. 3(3)).

All such proposals are highly speculative in comparison to established sources of human stem cells, and we remain unaware of any cogent evidence suggesting any might yield significant therapeutic dividend.

As scientists and clinicians actively involved in stem-cell research and regenerative medicine, we do not hold a single common view about the relative merits, ethics and potential of adult v (conventional) embryonic stem cells. But we all believe that extravagant claims regarding the purported merits of human-non-human interspecies embryos are mistaken and misleading, and that such research would damage public confidence and support, to the detriment both of the cause of stem-cell science and, ultimately, of patients.

Prof Neil Scolding, Bristol

Prof Michael Chopp, Detroit

Prof Dr Wolfgang M. Franz, Munich

Professor Alan Mackay-Sim, Queensland

Professor T. John Martin, Melbourne

Dr Rodney L. Rietze, Queensland

Prof Dennis McGonagle, Leeds

Prof Dr Bodo-Eckehard Strauer, Düsseldorf

Professor Gianni Angelini, Bristol

Dr Roger Barker, Cambridge

Dr Maureen L. Condic, Utah

Prof Dr Ursula Just, Kiel

Prof Dimitris Karussis, Jerusalem

Dr Letizia Mazzini, Piedmont

Dr Jean Peduzzi-Nelson, Detroit

Dr Carlos Lima, Lisbon

by David Thomas, The Daily Telegraph (LONDON) , May 12, 2008 Monday

THE Archbishop of Canterbury yesterday drew moral parallels between the creation of embryos for human use and rape and torture.

On the eve of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill's second reading in the House of Commons, Dr Rowan Williams said: "A human person, an individual body with feelings and thoughts, needs to be treated, as we sometimes say, as an end in itself, not a tool for someone else's agenda.

"So we condemn rape, torture and blackmail. We don't allow experiments on people's bodies or minds without their consent. And we don't breed human individuals to create a pool of organs that could be transplanted to save the lives of others.''

The chairman of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, yesterday accused the Roman Catholic Church of using "fatal'' dogma to oppose research on embryos and IVF treatment. Lisa Jardine said: "The Catholic church is opposed to hybrid embryos, but then it is opposed to all embryonic research. The public hasn't taken this on board. For the most part, people don't realise how fundamental this [stance] is.''

Miss Jardine said that once the public understands why scientists wish to create hybrid embryos they approve of the research.

Dawn Primarolo, the health minister, said that claims by anti-abortion campaigners that foetuses could survive from 22 and 23 weeks could mislead parents. She said this could "raise hope when the science doesn't indicate that it should be there''.

Read the original here.

The news that Gordon Brown has thrown his weight behind a move to register everyone automatically as an organ donor unless they opt out has all the hallmarks of a major spin operation.

The Sunday newspapers ran prominent stories about the proposal, which is piggy-backing on tomorrow's government review aimed at boosting the number of organs donated for transplant.

Mr Brown himself penned an article arguing that voluntary organ donation should be replaced by an opt-out system.

Similarly, the BBC had clearly been primed with information to promote the story to pride of place. If this is supposed to assist Mr Brown's new year campaign to restore his waning political fortunes, it's a pretty rum way of going about it.

To begin with, the idea is not even new. England's Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, first proposed such an opt-out system last summer.

Maybe Mr Brown thinks he can humanise his image by capitalising on the distress of people suffering or dying for want of a transplantable organ.

Undoubtedly, the impulse to give people the gift of life after one's own death is a noble one.

But if Mr Brown really imagines that he will win popular acclaim by saying that the state will whip out people's hearts or kidneys without their consent, his advisers undoubtedly need a brain transplant. For the implications are truly terrifying.

There is no more fundamental human right than control over our own bodies and what is done to them, both in life and death. The inescapable implication of a donor opt-out is that we no longer possess such control.

The presumption instead is that the state controls our bodies and can do what it likes with them after it declares us to be dead.

If the medical profession alone were to suggest this - as its leadership most lamentably is doing - it would be alarmingly coercive.

For the Government to be backing it, however, deepens coercion into something even more threatening. Volunteering to donate your organs is one thing.

Making it compulsory unless you opt out transforms an act of altruism into state oppression.

Sir Liam attempts to defuse public hostility by saying soothingly that opting out would be an 'inalienable right'.

On the contrary - being forced to opt out of automatic donation destroys our inalienable right to control what happens to us.

It is a weaselly, back-door means of trapping people into having something done to them when they are declared to be dead which may be unacceptable to them in life. Opting out requires an effort.

Many will simply forget to do so. That is the cynical calculation behind the scheme. In addition, what will happen - as inevitably as night follows day - is that people will be put under great pressure not to opt out.

Patients who have done so may well be discriminated against.

Chillingly, hospitals are to be rated according to the number of dead patients they "convert" into donors.

It is hard to imagine a more sinister incentive for the wholesale abuse of vulnerable patients.

There is, however, a yet more fundamental objection to the opt-out proposal. This is the serious doubt whether people whose organs are harvested are indeed dead.

All the evidence suggests that organs are harvested not from the dead but from the dying. In other words, at the time the organs are removed the patients are still alive.

This is because, in these cases, the criterion doctors use to decide that someone has died is the death of the brain stem. This is said to be "brain death", and thus death itself.

However, it does not follow at all that the rest of the brain has also ceased to function. Yet no tests are carried out on other parts of the brain to establish whether all activity there has actually ceased or not.

As a result, people are declared dead while their heart is still beating unassisted and blood is still circulating round the body. Most of us would think such patients are not dead but very much alive.

Indeed former transplant doctors, who became so horrified by the implications of what they were doing that they abandoned the practice, say that organs for transplant are only viable if the donor is still alive - since when the body is really dead the organs become useless to anyone else, as they die too.

Brain stem death is in fact merely a convenient definition that allows surgeons to remove organs from a living body while they are still being nourished by its blood supply.

Such observations provoke outrage in transplant doctors who claim there is no basis for such "scaremongering", which will cause more people to die because potential organ donors will be unreasonably frightened off. But among such doctors, their own behaviour gives the game away.

Some give "brain stem dead" patients a general anaesthetic before removing their organs. But whoever heard of anaesthetising a corpse?

The reason they do it is because of a sharp rise in blood pressure during the organ removal.

Some doctors claim they administer the anaesthetic simply because it stops the excessive bleeding caused by this blood pressure rise.

But a rise in blood pressure during any surgical procedure is an indication that the body is experiencing physical distress.

Dr David Hill, a retired anaesthetist who has long expressed deep concern about organ donation, has written that if patients react in similar fashion when their organs are being removed, the most logical conclusion is that they are not in fact dead.

In recent years, "brain stem death" has been increasingly questioned as we realise how little we know about the brain.

Doctors are discovering that, among patients in a persistent vegetative state whose brains are presumed to have stopped functioning, there is in fact a large amount of brain activity.

The implications for what patients presumed to be "brain dead" might be experiencing are simply unknowable.

More and more experts have been expressing increasing concern about brain stem death and organ donation.

Three doctors wrote in a medical journal last year that declaring patients dead for the purposes of harvesting their organs was in effect a fiction, and that prospective organ donors were not being told the truth.

And a professor of philosophy and expert in medical ethics, Michael Potts, has drawn the horrifying conclusion: "Since the patient is not truly dead until his or her organs are removed, it is the process of organ donation itself that causes the donor's death."

In Britain, however, the medical establishment backs organ donation and the proposed opt-out scheme.

This is because the British Medical Association and the medical royal colleges long ago lost their own ethical plot.

Renouncing the core medical precept, "First do no harm", they have come to believe instead in the amoral doctrine that the end justifies the means.

As a result, from abortion, embryo research and cloning to starving and dehydrating "dispensable" patients to death, respect for human life has been replaced by the belief that individual lives are merely instrumental to the creation of the happiness of the greatest number.

This way lies the most alarming infringement of human rights and a descent into tyranny.

A system the public believes embodies the highest form of altruism rests instead on deception and unlawful killing. Far from being forced into an automatic/opt- out donation system, people should finally be told the truth.

January 31, 2008

Volume 11, Number 7

By Samantha Singson

(NEW YORK — C-FAM) At the European Union in Brussels this week, C-FAM Senior Fellow Douglas A. Sylva testified before the European parliamentary committee on women’s rights and gender equality, urging them to resist efforts by pro-abortion advocates to manipulate international law. He warned that giving in to those who would abuse international law to advance abortion risks undermining the consent of nations which undergirds the legal system.

At the public hearing chaired by Anna Zaborska, Member of the European Parliament from Slovakia, speakers on both sides of the abortion debate addressed the topic of sexual and reproductive health and rights, a confusing term that has been used to advance abortion. Abortion advocates from International Planned Parenthood and the ASTRA Network called for the EU institutions to make reproductive rights a priority and called for the removal of barriers to sexuality education, access to contraception and abortion.

Wanda Nowicka of the ASTRA Network based her argument for abortion on the UN's Beijing Platform for Action and a handful of EU reports, using these as evidence of what she called “international consensus” on "reproductive rights." Nowicka also claimed that religious fundamentalism was an obstacle to the spread of contraception and the acceptance of abortion and asked Member States to base their policies on "scientific evidence, not on religious ideology."

Sylva refuted all of her claims by reminding the committee that there are no binding international legal instruments which establish a right to abortion, and pointed out that reproductive health advocates acknowledge as much. According to Sylva, abortion advocates also admit that getting such a binding law would be impossible given widespread opposition and so they have turned to an alternate approach that claims to make “settled international law in the face of unsettled international debate.”

This “soft law” strategy devised in the mid-1990s by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the UN Division for the Advancement of Women consists chiefly of using interpretive recommendations made by treaty monitoring bodies which are charged with overseeing state compliance to UN conventions and treaties. Rather than sticking to the terms of treaties that were negotiated by sovereign states, the treaty monitoring bodies were taught how to “find” rights, such as a right to abortion, embedded within already existing human rights. Sylva charges that this strategy has been increasingly applied over the last ten years with at least sixty nations being pressured by the six treaty bodies to legalize or increase access to abortion.

The problem with this approach, Sylva warned the committee, is that erodes nations’ trust in the system. Sylva explains, “If member states believe that specific commitments they have ratified can expand, and expand in a manner without national oversight, they may grow distrustful of the entire regime of international law. It is therefore in the best interests of the UN system that international law should only reflect explicit consensus between and among national actors.”

Surrogate mothers could be given up to £15,000 of Health Service money to have children for gay couples, it emerged yesterday.

An NHS trust is considering funding the service for infertile couples - whether they are heterosexual or of the same-sex. If the proposals are approved, the Health Service will pay for IVF cycles and the expenses surrogate mothers are allowed...Surrogates would also be able to claim damages if things went wrong.

I have been warning anyone who will listen about the coming huge policy fight over medical futility--what I call Futile Care Theory--that allows a doctor to refuse wanted life sustaining treatment when the doctor doesn't believe that the quality of the patient's life is worth sustaining (or spending money on). This isn't about asking for treatment that won't work, but withholding treatment that will or may work. Usually futile care protocols--where they have been promulgated--allow an ethics committee to make this decision after a quasi-judicial hearing. Texas has been a big center of futilitarian advances.

There is a futile care case right now in the courts of Winnipeg. In this regard, it is worth noting--and being very alarmed about--the futile care protocol adopted by The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Manitoba, which permits the doctor to make the call, after consultation with a second physician, without even having to pass it by an ethics committee. And this is in cases in which the minimal goal of the patient is likely to be met! From the protocol:

WHERE THE PHYSICIAN CONCLUDES THAT THE MINIMUM GOAL IS REALISTICALLY ACHIEVABLE BUT THAT TREATMENT SHOULD BE WITHHELD OR WITHDRAWN, that physician must consult with another physician...
2. Where the consultation supports the conclusion that treatment should be withheld or withdrawn:

a. The physician who sought the consultation must advise the
patient/proxy/representative that the consultation supports the initial assessment that treatment should be withheld or withdrawn .

b. If there is still a demand or request for treatment, the physician must attempt to address the reasons directly and with a view to reaching consensus...

c. If consensus cannot be reached, the physician must give the patient/proxy/representative a reasonable opportunity to identify another physician who is willing to assume care of the patient and must facilitate the transfer of care and...

d. Where, despite all reasonable efforts, consensus cannot be reached the physician may withhold or withdraw life-sustaining treatment, but: i) in the case of a patient/proxy who is still not in agreement with the decision to withhold or withdraw treatment, the physician must provide at least 96 hours advance notice to the patient or proxy as described below.

There you have it: Doctors think that their values should rule over those of their patients.

This is the beginning of the institution of a duty to die that we ignore at our peril. It also threatens the trust of people in medicine. My prediction: A lot of fireworks ahead!

January 3 2008 (The times)

Find the orginal here.

Peggy Norris was a passionate and formidable anti-abortion campaigner who was one of the initial committee members of SPUC, the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child, an association which was founded in 1967 in opposition to David Steel’s Abortion Bill. Later, Norris fought attempts to legalise euthanasia and founded the anti-euthanasia pressure group, Alert.

Peggy O’Meara was born in Kilcormac, King’s County (now Co Offaly), Ireland, in 1921. In 1943 she graduated from the National University of Ireland and worked in UK and Irish hospitals.

After the war she went to Germany with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, treating Polish concentration camp survivors, many of whom suffered from tuberculosis. In 1948 she married Dr Jim Norris, and until 1979 worked as a GP on Merseyside.

In 1967 Norris and her husband were among the first supporters of SPUC, a non-denominational association set up to fight David Steel’s Abortion Bill. Norris regretted the Roman Catholic bishops’ decision not to make a powerful attack on the Bill, as they had followed advice that to do so would be counterproductive.

Fellow members of SPUC’s executive committee included the gynaecologist Aleck Bourne, who in 1938 had carried out an abortion on a raped woman, a case which made therapeutic termination legal in case law.

Norris’s anti-abortion stance was deeply influenced by the time she had spent in postwar Germany and observing the consequences of the Nazi philosophy as applied to medicine. Other anti-abortionists at the time founded a separate anti-abortion group, the charity LIFE, which provides counselling and care for women considering abortion.

After abortion became legal, Norris was at the forefront of the series of large SPUC demonstrations organised in London, Liverpool and elsewhere calling for an amendment of the law. There, she and other SPUC supporters faced pro-abortion students who chanted “not the Church, not the State, women must decide their fate.” In Liverpool Norris was with Malcolm Muggeridge when an angry crowd shouting “Half of you were unwanted” showered them from a bridge with condoms. Muggeridge responded: “I have heard it all before . . . trying to silence us . . . in Germany in 1936.”

In 1974, however, Norris resigned from the executive committee of SPUC, along with a majority of the original committee and secretariat, a move resulting from an internal wrangle. Four years later she founded the Medical Education Trust, which promotes ethical standards in medicine and disseminates little publicised scientific reports from governments and scientists on public health concerns.

In 1972 she was also a founder member of the Dutch-inspired World Federation of Doctors Who Respect Human Life (WFDWRHL). It argued that doctors should adhere to the 1948 Declaration of Geneva, which states that human life should be respected from conception until natural death. In 1991 Norris started Alert as an anti-euthanasia pressure group.

A tall, attractive woman with an apparently tough exterior, Norris combined unfailing kindness with generosity, while concealing her own vulnerability behind a brisk aura of certainty. She was also known internationally as an articulate speaker and writer on anti-abortion and anti-euthanasia issues, who liked, in an argument, to pin down her adversaries on the precise use and meaning of their terms. In 1991 Cardinal Basil Hume appointed Norris a Dame of St Gregory.

Norris’s husband predeceased her, and she is survived by three sons and two daughters. Another son died in a motorcycle accident.

In a stunning development, doctors responding to a questionnaire have urged that promiscuous people be denied certain treatments based on their unhealthy lifestyles. From the story:

I agree, it is absolutely outrageous. But to get your attention, I lied about the proposed targets. It isn't the promiscuous who doctors in the survey want to punish--whose behaviour is at least as dangerous as that of smokers, at least in the short term--but others with unhealthy lifestyles or too many years under their belts. Here is how the story actually reads:

Smokers, heavy drinkers, the obese and the elderly should be barred from receiving some operations, according to doctors, with most saying the health service cannot afford to provide ding free care to everyone.

If we are to punish lifestyles in health care, we should not just pick on those without political power such as smokers and the obese, or people who are deemed "style crimes," a wonderfully evocative term that I stole from Secondhand Smokette. But my real message is: Doctors should not be mutated into some kind of lifestyle police force. Their jobs are to treat patients as they find them, not judge why they are sick nor withhold proper care if they don't approve.

January 24, 2008

Volume 11, Number 6

By Maciej Golubiewski

(NEW YORK — C-FAM) A report just released by the European bishops calls on the European Union (EU) to focus on what they consider to be the real needs of families in Europe and further calls on the EU to respect national marriage laws of the member states. The report by the Commission of the European Bishops’ Conference (COMECE) entitled “Proposal for a Strategy of the European Union for the Support of Couples and Marriage” focuses on two fundamental problems that present “high emotional, social and financial costs to European society:” the continuing increase in divorce rates and the difficulty faced by young Europeans who decide to raise children.

The report says that in the field of matrimonial matters, “[national] diversity has to be respected and family law is and must remain the sole competence of member states.” The bishops found that some legislative proposals of the European Commission for increased cross-border legal cooperation come close to encroaching on the exclusive right of member states to make their own family policy. Moreover, EU policy in the areas of employment, social protection and poverty reduction ignore the importance of marriage altogether, they said.

In the area of employment and social protection, the bishops make the case that “loving and stable couples are a social capital for all Europeans” and are “founts of mutual trust in society” as well as “the preferable instance for bringing up children” and charge the EU with ignoring this. They call for EU assistance in sharing European best practices regarding divorce prevention programs such as communication training for high-risk couples, especially those dealing with pressures of dual employment and separation due to increased geographic mobility.

The bishops also took issue with the EU’s assumption that a dual-income family is “a new social norm” among European citizens, arguing that some dual earning households exist primarily for financial constraints. For that reason, they said, EU should support and not discriminate single-earner families. Staying at home to care for one’s children is “an important and welcome contribution to the well-being of all citizens of the European Union,” according to the report, which cites studies showing family break up as an important cause of poverty.

As for cross-border legal cooperation in family matters, the bishops warn that the EU’s legislative proposals exceed EU mandates by recognizing de facto unions and registered partnerships. This could prematurely “entail common recognition of such unions in a situation where member states do not provide recognition for the legal aspects of such unions” and dangerously undermine the importance of marriage as endowing parents with social and legal responsibilities which otherwise do not exist, they said.

David Fieldsend, from the Brussels-based CARE Europe, said, “The Bishops’ paper is a timely and well-researched contribution to the debate that is at last being aired at the EU on family matters. For too long talk of the family has been taboo while all sorts of fringe agendas were embraced with enthusiasm. Now the demographic crisis has forced the EU’s leaders to sit up and take notice.”

Although the Doctors' Federation is based on Hippocratic ethics, not religious faith, we totally support the stand taken by the Lawyers' Christian Fellowship against the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill.

Below is their latest information.  Please come to their rally in Old Palace Yard at 2pm on 15th January 2008 if you can.

TIME TO STAND - HFE Bill Rally

Date: 8/Jan/2008

Date: 15th January 2008
Time: 2-3.30pm
Place: Old Palace Yard (opposite the House of Lords)

The House of Lords is meeting on 15th January for the first day of the Report stage of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill to vote on the proposed amendments to the Bill. This Bill strikes at the very heart of our civilisation and questions what it means to be human.

The issues the Lords will be voting on include:

- The creation of animal-human hybrid embryos
- Tissue typing to create ‘saviour siblings’
- The ‘need for a father’ consideration in IVF treatment

While the Lords are meeting on 15th January, we will be holding a rally outside the House of Lords in Old Palace Yard, SW1P 3JY at 2.00pm - 3.30pm, to take a stand to protect the family, the unborn child/the embryo and human dignity.

This rally will be the first in a series of rallies called ‘Time To Stand’. We hope to hold rallies on each of the days that important votes are taken on issues that strike at the heart of God’s purposes for our society, in the Lords or the Commons. It is important that as many people as possible attend Parliament for the rallies on the days when votes are being taken on these issues. We need to send the message that these issues cannot be swept under the carpet, and that the dignity of the human embryo, and the family are things that the public care deeply about and will have a massive future impact on the well being of the Nation.

Please put this date in your diary. It would be helpful for us to have an idea of numbers that are coming and we would be grateful if you would email Simone Lamont or call 020 7407 6157 if you would like to attend.

Speaking on 21 November in the debate on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL], Lord Ahmed made the following comments:

"My Lords, on the basis of my scientific qualifications, I am the least qualified Member of your Lordships’ House to speak in this debate. However, I speak with my religious, ethical and moral convictions.

"I begin by thanking all those who have written to me by either e-mail or letter. It would be impossible for me to reply to each member of the community, as on Monday it took six hours for my research assistant to open all the letters and e-mails and I am still receiving correspondence on this issue.

"I realise that the UK’s position as a world leader in reproductive technologies and research requires regulations. Therefore, I welcome the commitment to ensuring that all human embryos outside the body, whatever the process used in their creation, are subject to regulation. Reference has been made to designer babies, and I also welcome the ban on the selection of the sex of offspring for non-medical reasons. However, I remain deeply concerned with other aspects of the Bill and therefore will support amendments, such as those to the clause that will remove the reference to the need for a father.

"I remain deeply concerned at the notion of abortion as a form of contraception, although I accept the need for abortion to save a mother’s life where there is a medical complication. As we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, on Monday, abortion has, sadly, been used for many other reasons.

40th Anniversary of the passing of the Abortion Act

London: Vigil 27 October 2 p.m. in Old Palace Yard, followed by March to Westminster Cathedral. Ecumenical service at 4 pm.

Manchester: 27 October 2007 at 10 am. Ecumenical service in Salford Cathedral.

Burnley: 28 October at 6 pm. Ecumenical service in St. Andrew’s Church (C of E)

Annual General Meeting: The AGM of the British Section of the World Federation of Doctors who Respect Human Life will be held at 12.30 pm on Saturday 27 October 2007, at No. 27 Walpole Street, London SW3 4QS.

Read the original here.

The Washington Post

By Andrew J. Imparato and Anne C. Sommers
Sunday, May 20, 2007; B07

In its preamble, the recently unveiled U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities recognizes "the inherent dignity and worth and equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family as the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world."

We wonder what Oliver Wendell Holmes would have said about that.

This month marked the 80th anniversary of the disgraceful Supreme Court decision in Buck v. Bell, which upheld Virginia's involuntary sterilization laws. In his majority opinion, Holmes declared: "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind . . . Three generations of imbeciles is enough."