We Need Your Ideas

       As this P&LC is sent out, we are beginning our pre-Conference public witness. At out 25th Anniversary Conference, we will be collecting ideas from participants for the future of Consistent Life, as well as offers to help. These ideas will help the Consistent Life Board, which meets after the Conference March 11-12. But we realize that those who are not able to attend the Conference may also have good ideas, and may be able to help our efforts. So we are opening up to everyone the opportunity to submit ideas. You may use this form to submit your ideas and/or tell us what you can do to help the cause.
 

 
         For example, what topics would you like to see more (or less) in our newsletters and other publications? What types of constituencies should we be worker harder to promote the Consistent Life Ethic among? How? For example of ways to help, we need volunteers who can do translation (from English into a variety of languages), web design, newsletter editing, and other special skills. We need volunteers who can staff literature tables or otherwise do a presence at conferences. We also gratefully appreciate those who are in a position to promote the Consistent Life Ethic in their church, school, activist group, social group, and so on.
 

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Conscientious Objection Scotched Again

        The term “conscientious objection” started with those not wanting to be drafted to fight in war, but impelling people to participate in any kind of institutional violence is a practice that connects all of the consistent-life issues. Now a Scottish judge has ruled that mid-wives, in their roles as labor-ward coordinators, can’t object to supervising late-term abortions on the bizarre grounds that “The nature of their duties does not in fact require them to provide treatment to terminate pregnancies directly.”
 
 

Midwives Mary Doogan, left, and Concepta Wood

 

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Connections - Yes!

        The National Catholic Reporter reports "The U.S. bishops’ top pro-life and social justice directors Jan. 29 urged Catholic colleges and universities to help their students see those church priorities as complementary and mutually supportive, never competing with each other. They said . . . that most grass-roots Catholics active in either pro-life or social justice activities, or in both areas, get the connection, despite secular political trends that try to create divides between social justice and pro-life advocates." (March 2 - 15, 2012, p. 12a)
 

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Quotation of the Week
Tucker Carlson, “Eugenics, American Style” Slate, February 21, 2012
(reprinted from 1996 due to recent news)
 
        “Jeffrey Greenspoon, M.D. is the director of the high-risk obstetric unit at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. In the summer of 1995, during the beginning of the debate over partial-birth abortion, Greenspoon sent a letter to Rep. Henry Hyde passionately defending the procedure, especially in cases where a child might be born with ‘problems ... incompatible with a normal life,’ such as Down Syndrome. . . . Reached at his office, Greenspoon admits that he approves of eugenics—weeding out ‘babies who don't have much of a viable life.’ What makes him uncomfortable, he says, is the word ‘eugenics,’ which somehow has assumed ‘bad connotations over time. I think the better terms would be 'genetic counseling' and 'prenatal diagnosis' and 'having a country in which the option to exercise choice in whether to continue or terminate a pregnancy is a right of the people.' After all, he says, ‘Sometimes you need to abandon words that have common meanings that connote the wrong ethics or morals.’
 
        But only the words have changed.”