A Time for New Martyrs?

Those of  us in the field of health care may come under additional pressure from this pro-abortion administration and congress.  According to the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration moved on Friday to undo a last-minute Bush administration rule granting broad protections to health workers who refuse to take part in abortions or provide other health care that goes against their consciences.

The Department of Health and Human Services served notice on Friday, through a message to the White House Office of Management and Budget, that it intends to rescind the regulation, which was originally announced on Dec. 19, 2008, and took effect on the day President Obama took office.

When the administration publishes official notice of its intent, probably next week, a 30-day period for public comment will begin, after which the regulation can be repealed or modified.

The rule prohibits recipients of federal money from discriminating against doctors, nurses and other health care workers who refuse to perform or assist in abortions or sterilization procedures because of their “religious beliefs or moral convictions.” Its supporters included the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Catholic Health Association, which represents Catholic hospitals.

In praising the Bush administration last fall, Sister Carol Keehan, president of the Catholic Health Association, said that in recent years “we have seen a variety of efforts to force Catholic and other health care providers to perform or refer for abortions and sterilizations.”

But opponents of the regulation, including the American Medical Association, the National Association of Chain Drug Stores and Planned Parenthood, said it could have voided state laws requiring insurance plans to cover contraceptives and requiring hospitals to offer emergency contraception to rape victims. It could also allow drugstore employees to refuse to fill prescriptions for contraceptives, critics of the regulation have said.

Fascism comes slowly sometimes.  One step at a time.  And it must be resisted by decent people of all faiths.  Some may have to suffer a "green martyrdom" rather than to submit to this type of intimidation.  Catholic hospitals may need to close. 

The pro-abortion crowd is pleased.

“Dismantling this dangerous rule is a historic step toward preserving profoundly significant health care rights for women, and vital constitutional rights for all,” Mr. Blumenthal said.

Reaction to the move on Friday made it clear that the issue remains an emotional one. “We are encouraged by the Obama administration’s recent effort towards ensuring that patients have the ability to access necessary, widely used and accepted medical services,” said Mary Jane Gallagher, president and chief executive of the National Planning and Reproductive Health Association.

Fellow Catholics who voted for Obama you have your change, but with little hope for a better America.

Technorati Tags: abortion,Obama,healthcare,conscience

Disability on Display

If nothing else, Sara Palin's nomination as Republican VP candidate has brought matters of disabled children to the forefront in this political season. Palin and her husband have welcomed a child with Down's Syndrome into their family.

Unfortunately not all are willing to accept children as they are rather than as they might be. Wesley Smith at SHS blog has a disturbing post about a mother who murdered her disabled child.

Joanne Hill, 32, planned the murder after her husband refused to allow their daughter, Naomi, to be adopted, it was alleged.

A jury heard how Mrs Hill struggled to cope caring for the youngster, who suffered with cerebral palsy. She wore callipers to help her walk and had poor hearing.

Opening the case for the prosecution Michael Chambers QC told Chester Crown Court that Mrs Hill was "ashamed and embarrassed" of her daughter's condition and murdered her in a "determined and planned act".

"Joanne Hill could not come to terms with the fact that her daughter Naomi was disabled," he said.

"Instead of seeking help from the social services, she quite deliberately and consciously acted to kill Naomi."

Mrs Hill allegedly planned the murder for the afternoon of November 26 last year knowing her husband Simon would not be home until 5.30pm.

After picking up Naomi from the childminder she drove them to the family home in Deeside, Flintshire, north Wales, poured herself a glass of wine then ran a bath.

Mr Chambers said: "When the bath was full she told Naomi she was having a bath, but Naomi didn't want one. The defendant carried her upstairs and undressed her.

"The defendant put her in the bath and drowned her by holding her head under the water for a long time until she was dead."

Smith writes:

Princeton University's Peter Singer and some other bioethicists argue that killing unwanted babies is perfectly fine since babies aren't persons. Babies born with disabilities and terminal illnesses are already being subjected to infanticide in the Netherlands--acts of murder under Dutch law that go unpunished, and which have been supported by prestigious medical and bioethics journals such as in an article published in the prestigious Hastings Center Report. Here in America, 90% of fetuses testing with genetic anomalies such as Down or dwarfism are not allowed to be born--a eugenics action sometimes encouraged by doctors and genetic counselors. In Canada, Robert Latimer murders his daughter Tracy because she had cerebral palsy and is embraced by many there as a loving and compassionate father. Meanwhile, some people savage the Palins because they are affronted by Trig's presence in the world and a Canadian medical official worries that it could mean more parents deciding not to abort their disabled babies.

We as physicians have wonderful opportunity to affirm life from conception until natural death. Our patients respect us and we can influence the debate. Our actions and words are noted. Set the example and frame the debate in a life affirming way.

Technorati Tags: Down's Syndrome,disability,ethanasia,suffering,Catholic,physician,cerebral palsy,infanticide

Catholic Bioethic Resources

The National Catholic Bioethics Center has prepared a collection of materials regarding a number of moral issues facing physicians and their patients. These materials are available for downloading here. Topics include subjects from abortion to vaccines.

Limits on Biology

Dr. Leon Kass is President Bush's former advisor on bioethics and the author of "The Beginning of Wisdom." He is a thoughtful man who understands that science is not limitless in its understanding of man because science cannot answer questions which involve the soul. He writes a recent piece on just this limitation of biology.

According to many a prophet in the temple of science, biology has no permanent limitations. Instead, it faces an endless frontier — eagerly, gladly, confidently. Firmly founded on the concepts and methods of objective science, supported by the century-old doctrine of evolution, and armed with new discoveries and techniques in biochemistry and molecular genetics, biology and medicine go forward into a golden age. They promise, among other things, a full understanding of those age-old “mysteries” of embryogenesis and differentiation; an unlocking of the “secrets” of perception, memory, imagination and desire; new biotechnologies and new cures for disease; the provision of psychic peace through a true psychophysics; and perhaps even the conquest of mortality through mastery of the genetically determined processes of aging.

Though it is commonplace to distinguish applied from pure science — and it makes some sense to do so — it is important to grasp the essentially practical, social and technical character of modern science as such, modem biology included. Ancient biology had sought knowledge of what living things are, to be contemplated as an end in itself, satisfying to the knower. In contrast, modern biology seeks knowledge of how they work, to be used as a means for the relief and comfort of all humanity, knowers and non-knowers alike. Though the benefits were at first slow in coming, this practical intention has been at the heart of all of modern science right from the start. In order to make thought useful for meeting human needs, Descartes (in his Discourse on Method) proposed a new kind of thinking. He permanently turned his — and science’s — back on the speculative or theoretical questions, questions about the being or nature or goodness of things, questions also about first or ultimate causes. Instead, in order to become practical, science will study nature-at-work, nature-as-craftsman; a new kind of physics, solving problems about force and action, will yield power and will ultimately lead to human mastery and ownership of nature.
The purposes of a science-based mastery are humanitarian, served by a boundless medicine capable of curing “an infinitude of maladies both of body and mind,” capable perhaps of conquering aging, and even mortality itself. Moreover, because the new medicine will know precisely the mind’s dependence on the disposition of the bodily organs, it will be able to provide psychic peace and new mental powers, including a new kind of practical wisdom. Physics, here meaning “natural science,” will issue in mastery of nature (phusis), via a new physick, an omnicompetent and comprehensive medicine of body and mind.

The new biology that brings us these dilemmas can, by its very value-neutral self-definition, provide us neither knowledge nor guidance for dealing with them. Worse, the scientific teachings themselves challenge and embarrass the existing prescientific or religious notions of better and worse, and of human life more generally, on the basis of which we have made — and still make — moral judgments; on the basis of which we have lived — and still live — our lives. The project for the mastery of nature, even as it provides limitless powers, leaves the “master” lost at sea. Lacking knowledge of ends and goals, lacking standards of good and bad, right and wrong, we know not who we are nor where we are going. Yet we travel fast and freely, progressively achieving our own estrangement — from our communities, from our nature, from our very selves.
Despite these obvious practical and moral threats to our humanity, scientists and others often refuse to recognize the danger, and even object to the term “dehumanization.” For how, they ask, can science or technology be dehumanizing when these activities are themselves the expression of our highest humanity — of our curiosity and courage, our cleverness and dexterity, our energy and industry, our rationality and perfectibility? But not everything of human origin is humanizing in effect. Man does not live by rationality alone. Indeed, the foundations of our humanity — our sentiments, loves, attitudes, mores and character, as well as the familial, social, religious and political institutions that nourish and are nourished by them — are not laid by scientific reason or rational technique, and may, in truth, be undermined by them, especially if our much-vaunted scientific rationality is — as I hope next to show — philosophically unsound and finally unreasonable.

This is a wonderful piece, a shade so to speak in the hot sunlight of a scientific world.