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LifeNews.com Note: Dr. David Prentice is Senior Fellow for Life Sciences at Family Research Council. Up to July 2004 he had spent almost 20 years as Professor of Life Sciences, Indiana State University, and Adjunct Professor of Medical and Molecular Genetics, Indiana University School of Medicine.The President's Council on Bioethics is no more. With a one-day notice, the members were told in a letter from the President that their services were no longer required. Pack up, get out. Forget the fact that they had a couple of interesting reports coming out soon, one more meeting, and that the Council's tenure...

Obama Scraps President's Bioethics Council After Forcing Embryonic Funding The President's Council on Bioethics is no more. With a one-day notice, the members were told in a letter from the President that their services were no longer required. Pack up, get out. Forget the fact that they had a couple of interesting reports coming out soon, one more meeting, and that the Council's tenure would expire come this September. See http://www.LifeNews.com/bio2874.html

In the Oscar winning movie “Million Dollar Baby,” the female boxer Maggie Fitzgerald ends up paralyzed from the neck down and asks her coach to end her life. “I got what I needed. I got it all. Don’t let ‘em [the doctors] keep taking it away from me,” she begs. When those words were uttered in 2004 the debate over assisted suicide was underway, but today the debate strongly rages on in the national spotlight. Jerry Dincin, Lake County resident and president of the Final Exit Network, thinks this is an issue that people need to start thinking about. “This...

The mother of the UK's first sextuplets for more than a quarter of a century has told how she ignored medical advice to abort several of the foetuses. Nuala Conway, 26, from Dunamore in Co Tyrone, said she was warned about the high risks of carrying on with the multiple pregnancy, but decided to put her faith in God. She was given the option of terminating some of the unborn babies at 14 weeks and was advised that this was the best option. However, Mrs Conway, who is a Roman Catholic, said that the suggestion of a termination made her...

The solicitor representing an IVF couple whose last embryo was implanted in another woman by mistake has said it was "an accident waiting to happen". The couple had been trying for a second child with their only remaining embryo when the IVF Wales clinic in Cardiff, discovered the error. The woman wrongly implanted chose to have a termination after finding out what had happened. Their solicitor, Guy Forster, from national law firm Irwin Mitchell, revealed there had been two previous near misses at the clinic the year before. The Cardiff and Vale NHS Trust has apologised for the blunder and...

A 66-year-old woman with terminal cancer has become the first person to die under Washington state's new assisted suicide law, an advocacy group said Friday. Linda Fleming, of Sequim, died Thursday night after taking drugs prescribed under the ''Death with Dignity'' law that took effect in March, said Compassion & Choices of Washington. The organization said Fleming was diagnosed last month with advanced pancreatic cancer. She would have had to have been diagnosed by two doctors as terminal in order to qualify for assisted suicide. The group said Fleming died at home with her family, her dog and her physician...

Dr. Leon R. Kass, a widely published author, award-winning humanities teacher, and one of America’s leading moral philosophers and experts on medical ethics, will deliver the 2009 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced today. The annual NEH-sponsored Jefferson Lecture is the most prestigious honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities. “Leon Kass is an outstanding scholar, a gifted teacher, and one of our nation’s leading humanists,” said NEH Acting Chairman Carole M. Watson. “He has brought the wisdom of the humanities to bear on many topics, from bioethics...

Editor's Note: This article was originally published on the Disability Matters blog site. It is reprinted here with permission. There's been very little attention paid to an interview President Obama did with the New York Times the day of his major speech at Georgetown University on April 14. I was especially interested in the section of the interview dealing with health care, and to learn of the President's perceptions of end-of-life issues. It's not pretty. Read on. For starters, President Obama opined: I have always said, though, that we should not overstate the degree to which consumers rather than doctors...

Stem Cells from Blood Render Embryonic Sources Obsolete by Brian Thomas, M.S.* On the heels of President Barack Obama’s March 9 order to use public monies to support embryonic stem cell research,[1] another source of stem cells has become available—blood. Blood would be an ideal supplier for stem cells because it is a renewable tissue and harvesting blood components does not end life. These reengineered cells would also be patient-specific and avoid immune system difficulties, unlike embryonic sources which are derived from another person entirely. A recent study discovered a way in which blood could generate stem cells.[2] The researchers...

PHILIP Nitschke is considering moving to the US to continue his campaign for voluntary euthanasia after a hostile reception from British immigration authorities on the weekend.The Australian campaigner known as "Doctor Death" said last night that until he was detained at Heathrow airport for nine hours on Saturday he had been considering moving to Britain to escape Australia's increasingly tight restrictions on the dissemination of information on how to kill yourself. "That looks unlikely now, because after that reception I guess the British will be less likely to let me stay," Dr Nitschke told The Australian. "I'm not sure, but...

A United States-based fertility doctor claimed to have cloned 14 human embryos and transferred 11 of them into the wombs of four women. In an interview published on Wednesday, Panayiotis Zavos told Britain’s Independent newspaper that although none of the women had had a viable pregnancy as a result, the first cloned baby could now be born within a couple of years. “There is absolutely no doubt about it... the cloned child is coming. There is absolutely no way that it will not happen,” he said, quoted by the paper. “If we intensify our efforts, we can have a cloned...

Health Service paramedics have been told not to resuscitate terminally-ill patients who register on a controversial new database to say they want to die. It has been set up by the ambulance service in London for hundreds of people who have only a few months to live so that they may register their 'death wishes' in advance. It is believed to be the first in the country, but other trusts around the country are expected to follow suit to comply with Government guidelines which state that patients' wishes should be taken into account, even at the point of death. Patients'...

LifeNews.com Note: Joseph Infranco is senior counsel with the Alliance Defense Fund, a legal alliance employing a unique combination of strategy, training, funding, and litigation to protect and preserve religious liberty, the sanctity of life, marriage, and the family.   On March 9, with a stroke of his pen, President Obama signed an executive order that provides federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. The president’s terse but chilling justification was that “science should trump ideology.” The statement is a masterpiece of legerdemain, disguising its false premise and frightening implications while miscommunicating the nature and meaning of science. The first...

In a couple of weeks Guelph will host the 2009 annual Ontario provincial Pro-Life Conference. Pro-life leaders of national and international fame will present their expert opinions on issues from embryonic stem cell research to abortion, eugenics, reproductive technologies, physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia. Our conference spans the time frame from 1969 to 2009 and is titled "The Pro-Life Journey: A Voice for all Seasons." I believe it is more difficult today than ever to present our world-view in Canada. Induced abortion is as available as toothpaste and considered just as inconsequential, even though it has been the cause of over...

Austin, TX (LifeNews.com) -- Texas lawmakers have introduced competing bills that would either scrap or defend the controversial futile care law that has come under national condemnation. The law allows medical facilities to give families just 10 days to find places to care for their loved ones when a medical center refuses treatment.The statute allows hospitals and other medical facilities that believe a patient is too far gone to help to give their families just 10 days to find another facility that will offer the treatment or lifesaving medical care.With names such as Emilio Gonzales and Andrea Clark making the...

Rep. Michael Lawlor / Sen. Andrew McDonald Hartford, Conn., Mar 16, 2009 / 04:31 pm (CNA).- The Connecticut legislators who sponsored a quickly withdrawn bill targeting the Catholic Church for financial and organizational restructuring have now introduced and hastily withdrawn a “disastrous” bill which would legalize assisted suicide in the state.Senator Andrew McDonald (D-Stamford) and Representative Michael Lawlor (D-East Haven), co-chairs of the State Judiciary Committee, first made headlines with their sponsorship of S.B. 1098. The bill was quickly removed after it provoked Catholic outcry for its provisions which would have removed the ability of bishops to govern their...

On March 9th President Obama's executive order reversed the Bush administration's long-standing restrictions on using federal funds for embryonic stem cells research and authorized the destruction of live human embryos in medical experimentation. The administration ignored the promising results from adult stem cell therapies. It reopened a Pandora's Box of bioethical concerns and raised vocal opposition from many Christian leaders, including 191 Catholic bishops. Science is on the side of embryonic stem cell research, the president argued. Linking fetal stem cells experiments with "scientific integrity" in the order titled "Signing of Stem Cell Executive Order and Scientific Integrity", Obama proclaimed:...

SHORTLY AFTER the president announced his new policy on funding embryonic stem-cell research, CNN's Larry King devoted a special program to the subject. His first guest was Mary Tyler Moore, the international chairwoman of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation who has long been involved in raising funds and awareness for the treatment of Type 1 diabetes, a disease for which there is still no cure. "I am so pleased with the thought and care that he put into making this decision. I think it's a good one," Moore told King. "What's wonderful too is that this means that the United...

<p>Last week, the White House invited me to a signing ceremony overturning the Bush (43) executive order on stem cell research. I assume this was because I have long argued in these columns and during my five years on the President's Council on Bioethics that, contrary to the Bush policy, federal funding should be extended to research on embryonic stem cell lines derived from discarded embryos in fertility clinics.</p>

On Wednesday, only two days after he lifted President Bush’s executive order banning federal funding of stem cell research that requires the destruction of human embryos, President Barack Obama signed a law that explicilty bans federal funding of any "research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death." The provision was buried in the 465-page omnibus appropriations bill that Obama signed Wednesday. Known as the Dickey-Wicker amendment, it has been included in the annual appropriations bill for the Department of Health and Human Services every fiscal year since 1996....