Recently in Pro-Life Category

Thanks to Bp. Robert McManus of Worcester, Massachusetts! His Excellency has publicly warned a college in his diocese against renting facilities to a conference on teen pregnancy with speakers from Planned Parenthood and NARAL.

This is not the first rebuke from a Worcester bishop to the Jesuit-run school: in 2003, the previous ordinary, Bp. Daniel Reilly, boycotted the college's graduation ceremonies because of honors given to pro-abortion journalist Chris Matthews.

Not hesitating to name the problem, Bp. McManus explicitly cites "the perception that the administration of the College of the Holy Cross supports positions contrary to the fundamental moral teaching of the Church" and warns that the College's right to call itself Catholic is at stake.

Ad multos annos, your Excellency! Let's hope and pray that the management of the college will take the opportunity to do the right thing and show stronger support for the right to life.

Here is Bp. McManus' statement:

A controversy has arisen at the College of the Holy Cross that has resulted from the College’s renting space for a conference sponsored by the Massachusetts Alliance on Teen Pregnancy. The conference involves workshops presented by members of Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice Massachusetts. Both organizations promote positions on artificial contraception and abortion that are contrary to the moral teachings of the Catholic Church.

I have received numerous complaints from people who are shocked and outraged that a Catholic institution like Holy Cross would have anything to do with such groups. They have appealed to me to ask Father Michael McFarland, president of the College of the Holy Cross, to revoke the College’s agreement to rent space to the Massachusetts Teen Alliance. I have done so.

As Bishop of Worcester, it is my pastoral and canonical responsibility to determine what institutions can properly call themselves “Catholic.� This is a duty that I do not take lightly since to be a Catholic institution means that such an institution conducts its mission and ministry in accord with Catholic Church teaching, especially in cases of faith and morals.

The moral teaching of the Catholic Church on respect for life at all stages of its development is manifestly clear. Life is a fundamental good that must be protected and respected from the moment of fertilization to natural death. This teaching is so basic and important that it provides the foundation upon which much of the Church’s moral and social doctrine rests. It is beyond modification and compromise.

Both Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice are notorious for their policies and practices that directly reject the Church’s teaching on artificial contraception and abortion. The College of the Holy Cross should recognize that any association with these groups can create the situation of offering scandal understood in its proper theological sense, i.e., an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil. Certainly it is understandable how people of good will could interpret the college’s allowing presentations to be made by such groups as truly scandalous.

I strongly contend that the confusion and upset to the Catholic faithful and others that flow from the perception that the administration of the College of the Holy Cross supports positions contrary to the fundamental moral teaching of the Church must be avoided. To deny Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice a forum in which to present their morally unacceptable positions is not an infringement of the exercise of academic freedom but a defensible attempt to make unambiguously clear the Catholic identity and mission of the College of the Holy Cross.

It is my fervent wish that the administration of the College of the Holy Cross will unequivocally disassociate itself from the upcoming conference sponsored by the Massachusetts Alliance on Teen Pregnancy so that the college can continue to be recognized as a Catholic institution committed to promoting the moral teaching of the Roman Catholic church.

(HT to Amy and Jeff.)

The Mass. Alliance on Teen Pregnancy is scheduled to hold a conference on the campus of Jesuit-run Holy Cross College in Worcester.

Not everything in the conference is bad: there's apparently going to be a "critical look" at Depo-Provera, for example. But is this enough to justify bringing this event on campus, with several Planned Parenthood representatives and other pro-contraception, pro-abortion speakers -- in the middle of the week, when students are likeliest to be on-campus? Does the pro-abortion Governor of this immoral Commonwealth deserve to be getting an award on Holy Cross' campus? [The conference brochure has more details, if you're not outraged enough yet.]

The Holy Cross Cardinal Newman Society has the college's double-talk public statement on the issue: the PR spokesman denies the college's responsibility for hosting the event, but does acknowledge that Holy Cross “evaluates all requests by individuals and organizations to the College to rent facilities."

In a turnaround being called an "incredible victory", pro-life voters in Vermont persuaded the legislature to reject an "assisted-suicide" bill patterned after Oregon's. Calls to legislators ran 10-to-1 against the bill, and a state House member warned colleagues that such a bill would "tell our old citizens, our dying citizens, that we regard them as a burden."

Singapore's "organ donor policy ... assumes that all citizens are willing donors, unless they have registered with the government that they wish to opt out."

But when the criterion is "brain death", and the medics want those organs, they sometimes tend to hurry the family along:

Sim's family had no objection to his organs being used for transplants but wanted doctors to wait one more day before turning off the life support machine.

But as Sim's 68-year-old mother and about 20 other relatives knelt weeping before the doctors, begging them to wait, nine police officers entered the ward and restrained the distraught family while Sim's body was quickly whisked away.

"The hospital staff were running as they wheeled him out of the back door of the room. They were behaving like robbers," said Sim Chew Hiah, one of Sim's elder sisters. [...]

His parents were offered five years of subsidized hospital fees -- and his family received a thank-you letter from the ministry for their "generous organ donation."

I wish I could be assured that current practice is proper, because I'm not convinced yet that (a) "brain death" is a sound definition of bodily death, or (b) the medical profession can be trusted to make sound ethical decisions. Sad to say, I have opted out in Massachusetts.

A particular type of dementia in men has been linked to vasectomies.

Flip Benham with Operation Save America appears as enthusiastic as [Judie] Brown about the legislation. "[W]ithout a doubt, [this is] the very best bill that any state has brought before its legislative body yet," he says in a press release. "It is truly an all-out declaration that human life begins at conception and therefore is due protection under [...] law."

A biotech start-up went out of business this fall, and it's good news:

The company was launched by billionaire and University of Phoenix founder John Sperling, who had hoped to have his hunting dog, Missy, cloned — a feat that was never accomplished.

I don't mean to be unsympathetic to a fellow missing his dear old dog, but trying to manufacture life really sounds too much like the mission of a comic-book villain. There's already a stereotype that self-made billionaires are arrogant (cf. Turner, Soros; Gates sometimes); don't these people have any self-awareness?

It's not villainy in itself to clone cats and dogs, but the animal welfare people know that the effort is a cruel process:

"we're very pleased that Genetics Savings & Clone's attempt to run a cloning pet store was a spectacular flop," said Wayne Pacelle, head of the Humane Society of the United States. "It's not just a bad business venture, but also an operation grounded on the misuse of animals."

Pacelle and other groups argue that cloning is still primitive and fails more often than it succeeds.

"For every successful clone, dozens fail and die prematurely, have physical abnormalities, and face chronic pain and suffering," Pacelle said. "Cloning is at odds with basic animal welfare considerations."

Treacherously, commercial success at cloning mammals would have given a boost to the fringe types who fantasize of cloning babies. Thank Heavens the message is getting across: even if it ended up working, the cruelty of the experiments to get there would be unimaginable.

Invest in us! Our stock price has been sagging, but we've got a new way to get into federally funded re$earch! We'll be willing to use our new technique in the future and avoid killing any embryonic people. At least on federally funded projects.

Oh, sorry: was there some confusion? We haven't really stopped killing embryonic human beings yet; not while we were trying out our new method, but we could! If there's money in it! And we think it'll be far less deadly than what we do now!

Oh, and: sorry if anyone lost money over that false impression people got from our publicity article. Oops!

The press has been buzzing for a few days over hyper-billionaire Warren Buffett's arrangement to merge most of his money with Bill Gates' foundation. To the extent that they do something good that benefits people, this is laudable.

On the other hand, I can't get all sanguine about it, since Buffett, like Gates, has been a population-control zealot for years and, as Mary Meehan wrote in 2001, a big donor to abortionists in the US and overseas. He even bankrolled the liars of (well, really they're ex-)Catholics for a Free Choice.

One commentator in the business press has the nerve to point out that this supposed Mr. Philanthropy earned his money the old-fashioned way: with ruthless amorality.

But that's not a surprise, considering he wants to "help" the poor by seeing that fewer of them make it to birth.

When Planned Parenthood resorts to scare tactics against pro-life pregnancy aid services and tries to get their advertising banned by law, you know the good guys are having an effect!

By the way, notice the rhetoric in the piece: for PP, terms like "pregnancy help" don't appear, but "crisis pregnancy" is the lede. When you hate birth, every pregnancy is a crisis.