The Obama administration moved formally on Friday to rescind a Bush administration rule to protect health workers who refuse to provide services and information on moral grounds, which had inflamed abortion-rights advocates.
In the New Administration, it is not enough to fund federal programs to promote and provide abortion and contraception within our borders and around the world. It is not enough to fund the manipulation and destruction of human embryos in the name of scientific progress. It isn't enough -surely this is coming soon- to enforce availability of late term, partial-birth abortions, even in states which have legislated against them.
What now shall be required is the denial of legal protection for those medical professionals who refuse to provide such services because of their own personal moral objections. The federal government shall now attempt to compel medical providers to carry out procedures or dispense products they believe to be immoral, harmful, or unethical.
Pharmacists, physicians, nurses, medical technicians, and others: Your deepest convictions regarding what is ethical, Your very sense of right and wrong as it pertains to Your profession, are at stake. By executive order Your conscience has been stripped of its legal standing.
Yes, the Administration acknowledges Your right to have such convictions. But it now asserts You have no legal right to act on these convictions unless they are in accord with the policies of our central government.
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Here is an interesting comment from an Associated Press article from today: "Princeton University politics professor Robert George, a Catholic and another member of the Bush-era Council on Bioethics, said the moral argument over embryonic stem cell research is not rooted in religion but in ethics and equality. He said research shows that an embryo is a human being in its earliest form of development, so we have to ask ourselves whether all human life should be treated equally, with dignity and respect.
ReplyDelete"I don't think the question has anything to do with religion or pulling out our microscope and trying to find souls," George said. "We live in a pluralistic society where some people believe there are no such things as souls. Does that mean we should not have moral objections to killing 17-year-old adolescents?"
It's amazing how science has presented the facts, and we have a window to the world in utero through amazing 3-D ultrasound images, and yet we can still debate when human life begins. The reality is that everyone, in their hearts, must know that human life begins, at, well, the beginning! The developing embryo is not one day some meaningless clump of cells, and the next day, voila! Human! Having seen my baby that I miscarried at 12 weeks, I was stunned by the full and wondrous development of this obviously human little being....So, people believe what they want to believe, when they want to believe it. If they want the child, it's human. If they don't want the child, it's a clump of tissue, easily discarded. That's schizophrenic!
The reality of the true science behind all this stem-cell debate, is that stem cells drawn from human embryos are utterly unnecessary to stem cell research. Adult stem cells are the ones that have shown promising potential to effect cures....people must do the research and be fully informed about this issue.
One last word from a Creator who made every reader of this blog: "Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. Before you were born, I set you apart for my holy purpose." Psalm 139