Free Republic

We must never forget Terri and the premature, unthinkable death she endured. Last March 31st was the seventh anniversary of my sister, Terri Schiavo’s death. Terri was starved and dehydrated to death by those who value killing the innocent ahead of preserving life, and who put God second to the powers of a corrupt legal and government system—or leave Him out of the equation, entirely. Terri never wanted to die, and in fact told us just the opposite—that she wanted to live. As we look back on all she endured, we realize that Terri did not die in vain. For...

When Kenneth Warden was diagnosed with terminal bladder cancer, his hospital consultant sent him home to die, ruling that at 78 he was too old to treat. Even the palliative surgery or chemotherapy that could have eased his distressing symptoms were declared off-limits because of his age. His distraught daughter Michele Halligan accepted the sad prognosis but was determined her father would spend his last months in comfort. So she paid for him to seen privately by a second doctor to discover what could be done to ease his symptoms. Thanks to her tenacity, Kenneth got the drugs and surgery...

WASHINGTON — Old checklist for doctors: order that test, write that prescription. New checklist for doctors: first ask yourself if the patient really needs it. Nine medical societies, including the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the American College of Cardiology, representing nearly 375,000 physicians are challenging the widely held perception that more health care is better, releasing lists Wednesday of tests and treatments their members should no longer automatically order. The 45 items listed include: * Don't repeat colonoscopies within 10 years of a first such test * Don't perform early imaging for most back pain * Don't do...

JANET BAIRD writes: President Obama and the Department of Health and Inhuman Services, as you know, recently decreed that free sterilizations be available to all college-age women under Obamacare. But the truth is even more sinister. Note the wording of the HHS regulation. As reported at CNS news, ‘[a]ll Food and Drug Administration [(FDA)] approved contraceptive methods, sterilization procedures, and patient education and counseling for all women with reproductive capacity,’ as prescribed by a provider,” said the HHS description of the regulation. [emphasis added] This clause caught my eye, “for all women with reproductive capacity.” Have you thought about the...

An engineer has come up with macabre rollercoaster concept where passengers are thrilled and then ‘killed’. The chilling Euthanasia Coaster is a theoretical machine engineered to ‘humanely, with elegance and euphoria, take the life of a human being’. It is designed to subject the rider to a series of unique experiences from euphoria to thrill and from tunnel vision to loss of consciousness. When travelling at 100m/s, the passenger would then pass away following a lack of oxygen reaching the brain. The surreal structure is the brainchild of Lithuanian engineer Julijonas Urbonas.

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) – How strongly does Barack Obama believe in unlimited abortions? Strongly enough that the only article he wrote for the Harvard Law Review while he was a law school student talked about how fervently believed in legalized abortion. Obama’s name wasn’t attached to any other legal scholarship during the time. In an article unearthed by the Politico web site, Obama, as the president of the Harvard Law Review, wrote an unsigned article touting abortion. The web site says the article comes in at six pages and is contained in the third volume of the 1990 Harvard Law...

A family court judge who ruled that a pregnant woman with schizophrenia should undergo an abortion and be sterilized sharply defended her decision yesterday, while denouncing Boston University for withdrawing what she said was a job offer amid the controversy. In a rare personal defense of the reasoning behind a court ruling, Christina Harms, who retired from the bench last month after 23 years, said she concluded that the woman, a 31-year-old who suffered from delusions, would choose to terminate her pregnancy if she were mentally competent, chiefly so that she could resume antipsychotic medication that would have harmed the...

With all that's going on with the Catholic Church and the President right now, this has become a huge hot button topic. But why is this so important to progressives? Rush keeps saying that "abortion is the sacrament of liberalism." What makes this so? Let's ask Margaret Sanger. In her book "Woman and the new race", Sanger explains the purpose of birth control:(Page 229) Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those...

If you aren't creeped out by the No Birth Control Left Behind rhetoric of the White House and Planned Parenthood, you aren't listening closely enough. The anesthetic of progressive benevolence always dulls the senses. Wake up. When a bunch of wealthy white women and elite Washington bureaucrats defend the trampling of religious liberties in the name of "increased access" to "reproductive services" for "poor" women, the ghost of Margaret Sanger is cackling. As she wrote in her autobiography, Sanger founded Planned Parenthood in 1916 "to stop the multiplication of the unfit." This, she boasted, would be "the most important and...

Alongside today’s respect for human life there is the increasingly popular idea that there is too much human life around, and that it is killing the planet. Since the beginning of time, one of the clearest markers of an enlightened society has been the moral status it attaches to human life. And outwardly, at least, twenty-first-century Western societies express an unprecedented degree of respect for human life. For example, cultural and political institutions continually talk about the need to uphold human rights. The human rights narrative now shapes policymaking, both domestically and internationally. Many even argue that protecting human rights...

January 9, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In a recently released report, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) claimed credit for helping to “shape” the Affordable Care Act signed by President Obama this past March. “In the latter half of 2009 – in what will surely be remembered as a pivotal achievement – Planned Parenthood worked with its supporters across the nation to help shape and pass the Affordable Care Act,” wrote PPFA President Cecile Richards and PPFA Chair Valerie McCarthy, in a letter published as part of the organization’s 2009-2010 annual report. The women credit their organization’s “tireless efforts” with...

“There is only one country in the world for which we project the median fertility to not fall below 2.1 children in the projection period between 2010 and 2100,” said the UN Population Division in the 2010 Population Estimates and Projections Revision. In their informative video series, Overpopulation Is a Myth, The Population Research Institute explains, ”by the end of this century, we’ll be losing 1 billion people every twenty years.”

The “slippery slope” is often derided as a logical fallacy. But when one of the leading advocacy groups for euthanasia in Belgium posts an article entitled “Euthanasie: tijd voor de volgende stap, Euthanasia, time for the next step”, it’s hard not to think that it may not be so illogical after all. The Humanistisch-Vrijzinnige Vereniging (Humanist-Liberal Association) complains that eligibility for euthanasia is far too restrictive. At the moment, only people with unbearable suffering can be euthanased. This leaves out people in irreversible comas, people with dementia, people with irreversible brain diseases and people who are under 18. This is...

A woman in Australia who was pregnant with twins decided to have one of her babies aborted after doctors discovered that he had a life-threatening congenital heart defect. The seriously disturbing part? The doctors aborted the wrong fetus, terminating a perfectly healthy child. After doctors realized the "blunder," the woman, who was 32 weeks pregnant, had to undergo an emergency cesarean to deliver the sick fetus, where it was later terminated. The Royal Women's Hospital confirmed the incident and referred to it as a "terrible tragedy." Um, yeah ... one could say that. I honestly really don't even know what...

No amount of reassuring chat can disguise his advice that we should keep deadly drugs in our sock drawerDr Philip Nitschke, aka “Dr Death”, has been in town. According to a report in the Independent on Tuesday the Australian euthanasia campaigner has been telling audiences in London, York and Scotland that “his aim [is] to save lives”. His argument runs that “once people have a means of killing themselves, many who might attempt a botched suicide would instead prolong their lives, knowing they had a way out without having to call on a loved one to help, exposing them to...

An artist's rendering of the unborn child at 32-weeks gestation. MELBOURNE, Australia, November 23, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A 32-week set of twins were both aborted after staff at an Australian hospital initially killed the healthy twin by accident, and then also aborted the sick sibling after realizing their mistake, reports the Herald Sun. The paper reports that the mother of the children was told that one of her twin children had a congenital heart defect that would require years of surgery, and that the child may not survive. After she decided to have the child aborted, doctors then gave...

The Obama administration Friday revoked the approval of the best-selling drug Avastin for treating advanced breast cancer in the United States, despite appeals from distraught women, some patients advocates and the company that makes the drug. FDA Administrator Margaret Hamburg issued a 69-page decision outlining her decision, which was based on the recommendation of a six-member FDA advisory committee that unanimously concluded in June that the drug was harming women more than it was helping them. [Snip] ... Genentech spokesman Charlotte Arnold. “We are disappointed with this outcome. We remain committed to the many women with this incurable disease and...

I think my Ukrainian heritage fuels my twin obsessions with Soviet history and economics. Sadly, this often puts me on opposing ideological ground from my good friends and fellow alumni of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, which recently helped bring Utopia in Four Movements to Iowa City's local tax-supported theater. Sam Green, the filmmaker who narrated the exploration of "the battered state of the utopian impulse," on one hand described socialism has having gone "monstrously wrong" and on the other expressed open sentimentality for the Russian and Maoist revolutions. He showed pictures of executed Cambodians and also said a copy of...

As the world population reaches seven billion people, the BBC's Mike Gallagher asks whether efforts to control population have been, as some critics claim, a form of authoritarian control over the world's poorest citizens.> In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson warned that the US might be overwhelmed by desperate masses, and he made US foreign aid dependent on countries adopting family planning programmes. Other wealthy countries such as Japan, Sweden and the UK also began to devote large amounts of money to reducing Third World birth rates. > Meanwhile, Paul Ehrlich has also amended his view of the issue. If he...

As global population reaches 7 billion, Jeffrey Sachs says we must adopt sustainable technologies, achieve stable population. Just 12 years after the arrival of the 6 billionth individual on the planet in 1999, humanity will greet the 7 billionth arrival this month. The world population continues its rapid ascent, with roughly 75 million more births than deaths each year. The consequences of a world crowded with 7 billion people are enormous. And unless the world population stabilizes during the 21st century, the consequences for humanity could be grim. A rising population puts enormous pressures on a planet already plunging into...