25^th Anniversary Coming Up!
 
         Consistent Life (CL) was founded in 1987 under the name of the Seamless Garment Network, at a conference of peace, justice and life groups. This means that 2012 will be our 25th anniversary. We will mark this occasion with a 25th Anniversary Conference in the Washington, DC area, tentatively set for March 9-11, 2012. We’re seeking to hire a coordinator and welcome ideas and participation.
  

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The Nature of Violent Institutions
 
               When people want to justify ongoing violence as “defense” or “choice,” they offer idealized images of what their facilities are like – abortion in clean clinics, death row with strict court safeguards, and weapons manufacturers with safe working conditions. In real life, these ideals crumble because it’s not in the nature of violence to stay clean.
               Kansas City, Missouri has a plant that for over six decades has produced most of the non-nuclear components of nuclear weapons. Even though non-nuclear, toxic chemicals are needed, and the workers have suffered tremendously. Fortunately, efforts to address this have recently received some excellent local news coverage.
 

 

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Quotation of the Week
Chang Kao, 1189
From “The Twelve Medical Talks,” a work on medical ethics
cited in T’ao Lee, “Medical Ethics in Ancient China” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 13 (1943): 268-277
 
Note: the dream in this different time and culture is similar to dream motifs for various kinds of killing. 
 
        “A woman called Pai Mu-tan lived by selling drugs for artificial abortion. . . .Her crying at night could be heard by all the neighbors. One day she asked her son to burn all the prescriptions for abortion and warned him not to engage in such a vocation as hers. Her son asked her why she would not hand down the prescriptions to him. She answered ‘I dreamed of hundreds of infants striking at my head every night. My illness is entirely due to my selling drugs for abortion.’”