Title: The Con: The Attack on 1st Amendment Rights of Conscience Source:
Americans United for Life URL Source:http://www.aul.org/conscience/ Published:Mar 1, 2012 Author:aul.org Post Date:2012-03-01 20:26:27 by GreyLmist Keywords:1st Amendment, Right to Life, Mandated Abortion and Abortion, Americans United for Life Views:113 Comments:4
Americans United for Life has launched this educational campaign to help people understand the manipulative and deceptive policies in the pending healthcare law that are forcing both an abortion mandate and an abortion-inducing drug mandate on all Americans — regardless of their personal beliefs. In a public relations bait-and-switch tactic, the administration pretends that this is about contraception. But that’s a con—this issue is about mandating abortion-causing drugs. Be sure to click here to sign up for updates on this issue from AUL.
Democrats will crow about this outcome, pretending that they've somehow staved off a non-existent Republican effort to "ban" contraception. Blunt's measure would have done no such thing, of course, but facts are not important to Harry Reid's majority. They've squelched a provision that even their late colleague Ted Kennedy would have supported. [sic]
Meanwhile, Americans United for Life has released a video [note: see above] explaining why, despite Democrats' lies, this issue has nothing to do with a "war" on birth control. Nobody is trying to ban contraception. What we object to is the government forcing everyone to pay for other people's birth control, especially religious institutions. This is a massive government project, it will increase the cost of healthcare, it diminishes the value of individual responsibility, and it violates the Constitution
Doctors should have the right to kill newborn babies because they are disabled, too expensive or simply unwanted by their mothers, an academic with links to Oxford University has claimed.
Francesca Minerva, a philosopher and medical ethicist, argues a young baby is not a real person and so killing it in the first days after birth is little different to aborting it in the womb.
Even a healthy baby could have its life snuffed out if the mother decides she can’t afford to look after it, the article published by the British Medical Journal group states.
The journal’s editor has defended the piece, saying the publication’s role is to present well-reasoned arguments, rather than promote one particular moral view.
But the article has angered other ethicists, peers and campaigners. They have described the call for legalised infanticide as chilling and an ‘inhumane defence of child destruction’.
Stating that newborn babies ‘aren’t people’ and it is therefore acceptable to kill them, two ‘ethicists’ writing for the peer-reviewed Journal of Medical Ethics are now calling for after-birth abortions.
The writers, who worked with Australian universities in the construction of their paper, say that newborn babies simply do not have a “moral right to life.”
Furthermore, the paper goes on to state that the babies have no right to live as they do not offer “at least basic value” that would represent a loss.
Study authors Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, both from the University of Melbourne, state in their paper that “after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.” They go on to say that while it is infanticide, they prefer not to call it that. Instead, they prefer the term ‘after-birth abortion’ — a term that avoids the true labeling of the proposed technique.
Authors of the paper write that simply being a human isn’t something that grants ‘a right to life’. It appears the paper authors believe that they are the ones who are to determine whether or not a human can live or die. Under this train of thought, then these ‘after-birth’ abortions are not limited to infants.
In fact, if being a human does not grant a ‘right to life’, then so-called ‘ethicists’ could soon state that everyone with a disability no longer has the right to live. [sic] The authors of this paper are now recommending that certain human beings simply do not deserve to live, [sic]
The paper states:
Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life’. [...]
Merely being human is not in itself a reason for ascribing someone a right to life. Indeed, many humans are not considered subjects of a right to life…
Saturday, March 17, 2012 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer
(NaturalNews) The Obama Administration has given its blessing to PepsiCo to continue utilizing the services of a company that produces flavor chemicals for the beverage giant using aborted human fetal tissue. LifeSiteNews.com reports that the Obama Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) has decided that PepsiCo's arrangement with San Diego, Cal.-based Senomyx, which produces flavor enhancing chemicals for Pepsi using human embryonic kidney tissue, simply constitutes "ordinary business operations."
The issue began in 2011 when the non-profit group Children of God for Life (CGL) first broke the news about Pepsi's alliance with Senomyx, which led to massive outcry and a worldwide boycott of Pepsi products. At that time, it was revealed that Pepsi had many other options at its disposal to produce flavor chemicals, which is what its competitors do, but had instead chosen to continue using aborted fetal cells -- or as Senomyx deceptively puts it, "isolated human taste receptors" (http://www.naturalnews.com).
A few months later, Pepsi' shareholders filed a resolution petitioning the company to "adopt a corporate policy that recognizes human rights and employs ethical standards which do not involve using the remains of aborted human beings in both private and collaborative research and development agreements." But the Obama Administration shut down this 36-page proposal, deciding instead that Pepsi's used of aborted babies to flavor its beverage products is just business as usual, and not a significant concern.
"We're not talking about what kind of pencils PepsiCo wants to use -- we are talking about exploiting the remains of an aborted child for profit," said Debi Vinnedge, Executive Director of CGL, concerning the SEC decision. "Using human embryonic kidney (HEK-293) to produce flavor enhancers for their beverages is a far cry from routine operations!"
To be clear, the aborted fetal tissue used to make Pepsi's flavor chemicals does not end up in the final product sold to customers, according to reports -- it is used, instead, to evaluate how actual human taste receptors respond to these chemical flavorings. But the fact that Pepsi uses them at all when viable, non-human alternatives are available illustrates the company's blatant disregard for ethical and moral concerns in the matter.
Back in January, Oklahoma Senator Ralph Shortey proposed legislation to ban the production of aborted fetal cell-derived flavor chemicals in his home state. If passed, S.B. 1418 would also reportedly ban the sale of any products that contain flavor chemicals derived from human fetal tissue, which includes Pepsi products as well as products produced by Kraft and Nestle (http://www.naturalnews.com).