Thread by bruinbirdman.
Vulnerable elderly and disabled people will feel pressured to end their lives if the law on assisted dying is relaxed.
The Demos “commission” promises to examine all sides of the argument, but critics allege that its claims to be independent are undermined because it has received funding and support from campaigners to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill patients.
Richard Hawkes, chief executive of the disability charity Scope, said there was “a desperate need” for an open debate on the issue of assisted suicide.
But he continued: “We are deeply concerned that this pseudo ‘Commission’ will not reflect the concerns and fears of many disabled people.
“When it is funded by supporters of legalising assisted suicide and without a formal remit from Government, we would question how independent this Commission really can be.
“Many of the disabled people we talk to are extremely frightened by any weakening of the law on assisted suicide. We must be vigilant in ensuring that we never get to a position where disabled people feel abandoned and under pressure to end their lives.”
Dr Peter Saunders, campaign director of the Care Not Killing Alliance of 40 organisations opposed to assisted dying, said the commission appeared to be “a stitch up”.
The commission has received practical support from Dignity in Dying, and funding from the author, Terry Pratchett, a supporter of euthanasia, who has Alzheimer’s disease.
Demos insisted that the commission would remain “entirely independent” of Mr Pratchett and Dignity in Dying and would make recommendations
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Thread by markomalley.
November 29, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Every once in a while, one stumbles upon a terrifying level of honesty among abortion supporters. Normally, the truth is something that refreshes us when we come upon it - not so in this realm.
Such is the nomenclature of what appears to be a moderately successful group dedicated solely to providing low-income women with abortion money, called the Lilith Fund.
The Texas-based group explains its name on its website as follows: “Lilith was the first woman created by God, as Adam’s wife and equal. Because Lilith refused to be subservient or submissive, she was sent away from Eden.”
This is a somewhat accurate presentation of Lilith’s bio; however, it’s certainly not the whole story. Here’s how the Hebrew legend, as first described in the Alphabet of Ben Sira of the 8th-10th century, ends: after Lilith flew away (and was not sent) from Eden, God punished her by dictating that one hundred of her own demon children would be killed each day. She responds by asserting her perpetual desire to sicken and kill newborn infants.
The abortion industry’s poster girl if ever there was one.
In fact, the primordial population control expert bears a significance far beyond Hebrew culture. The recognition of Lilith, Lilit, or Lilitu as a demoness of night or wind traces an etymological path through the earliest civilizations, believed first to appear as early as 4000 BC in Sumer. “Lilith” may even be mentioned in the Bible, Isaiah 34:14: after God has reduced Edom to an uninhabitable waste, “the lilith … find[s] for herself a place to rest” there. In Assyrian, Babylonian, and Greek mythology, Lilith emerged as a strong symbol of perverse barrenness, a desert-dwelling monster with breasts devoid of milk, that terrified nearby mothers by strangling and devouring their children.
Unsurprisingly, as Adam’s supposed original wife, Lilith is touted in Wiccan and occult circles to this day as the “first Eve” or “first mother” over and above Eve herself and the New Eve, Mary, whose selfless openness to life represents Lilith’s pure inverse.
In her Greco-Roman incarnation, Lilith (Lamia in Latin) was an even more fascinating - and insightful - symbol of the total corruption of female fertility. There we learn the child-eating Lamia actually suffers unbearable grief from the sight of her own dead babies, a grief made eternal because Zeus had forced her eyes to remain open permanently. In a gesture of pity, Zeus allowed Lamia occasionally to find relief by pulling her eyeballs out of their sockets. (Well, that was nice.)
The bizarre myth, an uncanny portrait of post-abortive grief, echoes in testimonies from the women of Silent No More Awareness depicting decades of being torn with obsessive anguish over their lost little ones.
One might wonder what would possess the Lilith Fund to follow through with such a cheery mascot. On its Facebook page earlier this year, the group eerily invited fans to express their devotion to abortion by posting the phrase “I am meeting Lilith” as their status, “if you have had an abortion or know someone who’s had an abortion.”
The Fund notes that old Lil is today “the feminist icon of the free-spirited strong woman” - and in fact, the revoltingly barren, sex-crazed, child-killing monster has found favor in modern “feminist theology” as a symbol of rebellion against patriarchal repression. Other pro-abortion feminist organizations have snapped up the name as well. (One of several such blogs, The Lilith Plan, helps women self-abort and even provides gruesome instructions for an illegal do-it-yourself D&C abortion.)
It seems some abortioneers are at least honest enough to openly associate with the child-killing demon who is even more well-fed in our modern world than she was 6000 years ago. Even if relatively few, it’s a good reminder that some know exactly what it means to be “pro-choice.”