Friday April 23, 1999
See today’s LifeSiteNews stories
GOV’T MAY PRESSURE CANADIANS TO DONATE THEIR ORGANS
OTTAWA, Apr 23 (LSN) – Yesterday in the House of Commons, the Standing Committee on Health tabled a report entitled Organ and Tissue Donation and Transplantation: A Canadian Approach. The report contained startling recommendations implying that pressure may be exerted on Canadians to donate their organs.
Eric Sorenson reported on CBC’s The National yesterday that the “parliamentary committee proposed a three million dollar federal secretariat to work with the provinces.” The aims of the proposals are:
i) To better educate the public on the need for donations. ii) To train medical teams to ask families of the dying for organs iii) To require hospitals to register all patients near death as potential donors in a nationwide computer data base.
There has been wider publicity recently of the fact that, for many organs such as the heart, organ donation requires that the donor be “alive” when the extraction occurs. This has caused increasing concern about aggressive organ harvesting policies. Critics of vital-organ donation suggest that declarations of “brain death” do not constitute real death and that the term was manufactured to legitimize the taking of organs from persons who would otherwise have not been declared dead. Using the heartfelt emotional appeals of young children who are in need of vital-organ transplants may cloud the issue and not allow for a clear investigation into the facts.
The parliamentary committee has seemed to dismiss these concerns despite testimony from doctors that brain-dead declared patients have sometimes regained consciousness. Last month, Dr. Ruth Oliver testified before the committee that she is “living testimony that people survive” such declarations. The Vancouver psychiatrist was declared clinically dead in 1977 at the Kingston General Hospital after suffering internal bleeding of the brain.
Health Minister Allan Rock, notorious for his anti-family and anti-life sentiment, urged politicians to support the organ harvesting initiative and promised to respond to the committee’s report “in the months ahead.”
For the CBC’s The National transcript see: (link only valid for today) https://www.tv.cbc.ca/national/trans/current.html
See the LifeSite story HEART TRANSPLANTS: IS BRAIN DEATH REAL DEATH? At:
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/1999/march/99030301.html
“GAY GENE” DISPROVEN AGAIN
New research from the University of Western Ontario (UWO) in London, published in today’s issue of Science magazine, has again disproved the existence of a genetic basis for homosexuality. In 1993, a team led by Dean Hamer of the US National Institute of Health (NIH) claimed to have found evidence for a “gay gene” by studying the X chromosomes of 40 pairs of homosexual brothers. In an attempt to replicate Hammer’s findings, Dr. George Rice and his team looked at 52 pairs of gay brothers and found no evidence for a “gay gene.”
“It is unclear why our results are so discrepant from the original study,” said the UWO research team strongly (for a scientific journal) implying mistakes in the original study. Hammer and other pro-gay-gene theorists immediately dismissed the Rice study despite the fact that it was based on a larger number of people.
They demanded more studies in an attempt to find the gene they are looking for, conveniently failing to mention that other studies exist that have also failed to find the desired genetic link to homosexual behaviour.
Although not mentioned by most of the media outlets, Rice’s research is the second known study to find no evidence for Hammer’s hypothesis. In June of last year, LifeSite reported on an attempt to replicate Hammer’s findings by Dr. Allan Sanders, also of NIH. Sanders’ study was presented on June 1, 1998 at the American Psychiatric Association’s annual conference in Toronto buried in a pile of hundreds of other presentations. It found no evidence for a “gay gene,” and was mentioned in a short article in the June 2, 1998 issue of the Globe and Mail.
See the Science journal’s news on the finding at:
https://www.academicpress.com/inscight/04221999/grapha.htm
PARTIAL BIRTH ABORTION VICTIM BORN ALIVE
CINCINNATI, Apr 23 (LSN) – A baby, having lived in its mother’s womb for 22-weeks was born alive after an abortion attempt but survived for only three hours afterwards, probably due to lack of medical attention. Nurses at the Women’s Med Center in Dayton, Ohio, where the baby was born on April 6, comforted the dying newborn and named her Baby Hope, but did not provide her with medical care.
Connie Boyles, a nurse who held the baby told the press, “Staff who cared for her on the night of her birth have experienced a myriad of emotions from sadness and grief, to peace – peace that she was comforted, held close and even sang to until she took her last breath,” “This emotional trauma inflicted on our department is deeper and will last longer than the physical frailties that we deal with on a daily basis,” she said.
Gene Rudd, MD, an obstetrician and associate director of the Christian Medical & Dental Society said the event could mark a grievous turning point in American society. “Babies at this same age – 22 weeks – can and have survived outside the womb,” said Rudd. “The difference that apparently led doctors to let ‘Baby Hope’ die is that she was the product of a failed partial-birth abortion.”
See the AP news report on Baby Hope at:
https://www2.nando.net/noframes/story/0,2107,40463-65279-4736…
For more on live births after abortions see:
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/1999/april/990409a.html https://www.rcav.bc.ca/bc_catholic/archives/04.htm
KNIGHTS OF COLUMBUS DEFEND VATICAN AGAINST CFFC
NEW HAVEN, Conn., Apr 23 (LSN) – The head of the 1.6 million member Catholic lay-men’s organization, the Knights of Columbus defended the Vatican against attacks from a group calling itself “Catholics for a Free Choice” (CFFC). While the UN has granted NGO status to CFFC, Supreme Knight Virgil C. Dechant said in a letter to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan that CFFC “is not Catholic in any recognizable sense of the word.”
An April 16 letter released Tuesday noted that the CFFC “represents no one and no real issues. The organization’s virtually nonexistent membership seeks support for a pro-abortion, anti- family agenda. The only activity that it undertakes is issuing antagonistic statements, from time to time, in hopes of embarrassing the Catholic Church while calling attention to itself.”
Dechant described the attempt of CFFC to procure withdrawal of United Nations permanent observer status from the Holy See a “meaningless and vindictive attack”, illustrating the CFFC’s “own irrelevance and ignorance.”
Concluding, the Supreme Knight recalled the “important and gentle service the Holy See, through its Permanent Observer Mission in New York, has rendered and continues to render, in a multitude of ways, to the international community” and asked the UN chief to recognize this contribution.
For the complete letter from the Knights go to:
https://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY;=…