Thread by me.
WASHINGTON, D.C., June 8, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - More light has been shed on the pro-abortion leanings of Supreme Court hopeful Sonia Sotomayor after news erupted of a brief Sotomayor apparently endorsed that urged the Supreme Court to uphold the "right" to abortion.
The amicus curiae brief, reported late last month by U.S. News and World Report's Bonnie Erbe, addressed the Supreme Court concerning the 1989 case Webster v. Reproductive Health Services. The case involved a complaint by various Missouri abortion providers against a state law defining conception as the beginning of life and disallowing public facilities to be used for abortions. The Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (PRLDEF), on whose Board of Directors Sonia Sotomayor served at the time, was among the many pro-abortion interest groups that signed the brief.
In summarizing the interests of the petitioning parties, the brief states: "All Amici share an urgent concern that the Court clearly and unequivocally reaffirm Roe v. Wade.... They fear that any tampering with the right to abortion recognized in Roe will have a powerful, adverse impact on the liberty, equality and health of poor women and women of color."
The brief also argues that laws requiring abortions to be performed in hospitals would place undue burden on minority and low-income women seeking abortions. . .
Thread by me.
Last week in Washington state a 66-year-old woman with terminal cancer made history as the first person to undergo physician-assisted suicide since that state legalized the practice in November of 2008.
Proponents of legalized suicide celebrated Washington's approval of this policy as a victory for the "death with dignity" movement. These suicide advocates, in keeping with the rhetorical tactic of their ideological cousins in the pro-abortion movement, equate "dignity" with "choice." Unfortunately, as with the abortion debate, the "choice" rhetoric of the right-to-die movement eclipses critical moral and ethical questions which ought to be at the forefront of the debate.
Is suicide really a way to honor life and preserve dignity? What are the social and cultural implications of normalizing the "right to die?" Will voluntary physician-assisted suicide give way to involuntary physician-assisted suicide where doctors decide whether their patients would be better off dead? Will the "right" to suicide be transmogrified into a "duty" to commit suicide? Will the elderly who consume more than they produce be deemed "resource hogs" that have a duty to die and get out of the way?
In an age of scarce economic resources, will the critically ill or the handicapped or the demented be viewed as expendable by their younger, healthier counterparts? How will the medical profession be transformed if those who are trained to cure are given a license to kill? These and many other questions should be asked and answered before we decide it's okay to encourage terminally-ill persons to choose self-destruction in the name of dignity.
But we won't get answers if we allow this debate to be defined solely in terms of the euphemistic "right to choose." Indeed, these questions won't even be asked.
Dying with dignity does not require suicide. The question, "Do you want to suffer and die or die with dignity?" presents a false choice and assumes that there are only two alternatives at the end of life—pain or death. Properly employed, modern medicine has the tools to mitigate pain. Hospice care, for example, employs a multi-disciplinary approach to ensure that terminally-ill patients endure their final time on earth with dignity—free from pain and nourished physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.
Hospice care does not seek to stop the dying process. The goal of hospice care is to make a difficult time as comfortable and peaceful as possible for both the patient and their loved ones. The important distinction between palliative care and physician-assisted suicide is that the first respects the inviolability of human life in spite of the difficulties presented by illness while the second rejects the sanctity of life in favor of an expedient escape from pain and fear. . .
well there goes Rush Limbaugh’s tacit support for the bigot.