In the known universe, only human beings yearn for meaning.  Only we search for TRUTH.  Only we think noetically and have mystical experiences. Only we develop philosophies. Only we act on rationally constructed moral values. Only we experience faith. And only we deploy the scientific method to learn about the way things really are.

Now, some are suggesting that science should deeply study religion.  From the ABC story:

They aren’t trying to convert anyone.  They just think it’s high time for scientists to stop ignoring something that plays a critical role in the lives of billions of people around the world. “Religion is not something that scientists study very deeply,” anthropologist Scott Atran, lead author of a study published in this week’s issue of the journal Science, said in a telephone interview.  “There is sort of an agreement between science and religion to remain separate, and I think that has not been a good thing.”…

“Science can help us understand religion just as much as it can help us understand the genome or the structure of the universe,” Atran said.  So why aren’t they more willing to dig into religion? Probably, said Atran, because most scientists are “non-religious, including myself.  If you look at the National Academy of Sciences well over 90 percent are non religious.” That may explain why some of the bestselling books by scientists aren’t about science as much as they are about religion, or the reasons why it’s no longer necessary to believe. Atran was particularly critical of a cadre of scientists called the “new atheists” who have aggressively sought to discredit all religions, contending in general that science has now answered the questions that only religions could answer in the days before evolution.

To paraphrase a former president, it all depends on what the meaning of “study” is.  If it means to hubristically deconstruct or rationalize away religion as a primitive–but now, no longer needed, evolutionary survival technique–as the scientist quoted said, there’s already plenty of that ideological advocacy going around.  If it means going in assuming that those who have religion are wrong or irrational, don’t waste the grant money.  If it assumes that religion cannot have an existential reality, it won’t be truly scientific.

But if it means to objectively look at the phenomenon of religious belief, to non judgmentally investigate faith experiences that are as real as rain to the persons who have them–even though by their very nature, they can’t be repeated or falsified–if it means respecting people of faith as engaged in normal and often beneficial human behavior, have at it.  The desire to learn is also part of human exceptionalism, and faith–which includes but is not synonymous with theism–is a core and very interesting part of what it means to be human.

I don’t believe in surrogacy. But if it is to be allowed, commercial should be made against public policy just as we now do non vital, living organ donation. Alas, there is an ill-advised bill in the New Jersey Legislature to legalize commercial surrogacy.  From the summary of Senate 1599:

The agreement would be required to include express terms providing that the gestational carrier agrees to undergo pre-embryo transfer, attempt to carry and give birth to the child, and surrender custody of the child to the intended parent immediately upon the birth of the child.  Additionally, the agreement would expressly state that the gestational carrier has the right to have medical care for the pregnancy, labor, delivery, and postpartum care provided by a physician, advanced practice nurse, or certified nurse midwife of her choice after notifying the intended parents of her choice.  The agreement would also be required to include a provision that the gestational carrier’s spouse or partner in a civil union or domestic partnership, if any, agrees to the obligations imposed on the gestational carrier and surrender custody of the child immediately upon the birth of the child.  With regard to the intended parent, the agreement would be required to include express terms that the intended parent agrees to become the legal parent of the child immediately upon the birth of the child and assume sole responsibility for the support of the child.  An agreement including these terms would be presumed enforceable.

This entitlement mentality is really getting out of hand in the West and turning living human bodies and their constituent parts into mere natural resources to be used and exploited by the well off.

Rich women will never rent their wombs. Rich women will never risk their lives, health, and fecundity to help pay the rent.  Rich women will never go through the potential trauma of gestating for nine months and the process of being impregnated by strangers’ embryos only to have the child taken away at birth. No, that is work only fit for women who need money.  Only poor women will risk the emotional problems that can be associated with surrogacy. Only poor women will risk the potential emotional trauma and moral consequence of undergoing a “selective reduction” abortion, often associated with IVF.  Only poor women will risk the relational problems that can arise, with spouse/partner and children.  Imagine, for example, a surrogate mother with three young children who see mommy getting big with child.  Will they understand the “giving away” of the baby?  And how will it affect their own sense of security and love?

In the Dune science fiction novel series, a certain race of women are lobotimized and used as biological gestational machines known as “axlotl tanks.”  I don’t see the term “gestational carrier,” as much different from that.  It is a disgustingly dehumanizing and objectifying label intended to take all the mothering out of being a birth mother. Why not just say human brood mare and be done with it? And while they are at it, why not add a codicil for the gestational carrier to be paid for wet nursing services?  It would be better for the baby to nurse anyway, and if that caused emotional problems for the “milk producing unit,” so what? That’s what she’s paid for.

All this twisting ourselves into legal and moral pretzels when there are so many children waiting to be adopted!

President Obama wants unelected bureaucrats to control health care costs, and indeed, envisions using that goal as an excuse for constructing a bureaucratic state.

But why not try capitalism first?  The SF Chronicle has an interesting story about a couple of on-line start ups that help compare the prices hospitals charge for their services.  From the story:

Surgery to remove your appendix in one California hospital could cost  $180,000. Have the operation at a different facility in the same state and the  bill might be as little as $1,500. That kind of disparity, typical across the country, combined with escalating  medical spending and the increasing amount of data available online, has  prompted several startups to get into the business of helping companies and  their employees save health care dollars.

Great idea for a business. But why not really unleash the power of competition to reduce costs?  Let’s dump the Obamacare approach of forcing broad free, across the board coverage, which will raise the price of insurance companies and eventually lead to centralized invidious rationing.

Instead, if we had high deductibles, tax credits for maintaining health savings accounts, and required coverage only for medical treatments and screening, with limited or no coverage for non therapeutic services, competitive forces would be unleashed, pushing hospitals, doctors, pharmacies, drug companies, etc. to reduce prices.

Cost isn’t everything, of course, particularly in medicine.  But it isn’t chopped liver, either. Knowing that patients are individually impacted by the price of treatments, and that other providers are competing for the business, would create a downward pressure on the cost of health care overall.  That would sure beat the Independent Payment Advisory Board authoritarianism!

Obama metaphorically tried to burn the right of public religious practice at the stake with his authoritarian Free Birth Control Rule.  Now, the Catholic Church and scores of Catholic Institutions, including Notre Dame University, sueth. From the CNS story:

The Archdiocese of New York, headed by Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., headed by Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the University of Notre Dame, and 40 other Catholic dioceses and organizations around the country announced on Monday that they are suing the Obama administration for violating their freedom of religion, which is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution. The dioceses and organizations, in different combinations, are filing 12 different lawsuits filed in federal courts around the country.

The grounds?

“This lawsuit is about an unprecedented attack by the federal government on one of America’s most cherished freedoms: the freedom to practice one’s religion without government interference,” the archdiocese says on the website. “It is not about whether people have access to certain services; it is about whether the government may force religious institutions and individuals to facilitate and fund services which violate their religious beliefs.”

First Amendment, baby!

Obama started his own secular Inquisition of forced regulatory conversions. Let’s hope the Catholic plaintiffs finish it.

“Victim celebrities,” Ralph Nader calls them, by which he means, people who have been victimized by an abusive act or policy.  They often make the best political activists against it because they bring the principle down to the personal level.

But there are also “celebrity victims,” movie stars and other assorted famous faces in the popular culture. These “stars” are often put in harness by industries and advocacy groups to use their fame to push a particular political agenda, because, fame matters in this culture, they are usually on the political “side” that the media likes, and politicians bow and scrape at their very presence.

The late Christopher Reeve was the classic example in the embryonic stem cell debate.  The poor man was so used–to push the false meme that embryonic stem cells were  his only hope of walking again–even as adult stem cells were restoring sensation to paralyzed people in early human trials.

Ditto, Michael J. Fox who pushed embryonic stem cells and human cloning research in political ads and biological baloney advocacy as the primary answer to Parkinson’s disease, when other modalities were offering great hope.  That was then.  Today, he hasn’t turned against ESCR, but he has seen the light to bring a more balanced advocacy to his work.  From the ABC story:

Michael J. Fox, whose turn from Parkinson’s disease patient to scientific crusader made him one of the country’s most visible advocates for stem cell research, now believes the controversial therapy may not ultimately yield a cure for his disease, he told ABC’s Diane Sawyer in an exclusive interview. There have been “problems along the way,” Fox said of stem cell studies, for which he has long advocated.   Instead, he said, new drug therapies are showing real promise and are “closer today” to providing a cure for Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative illness that over time causes the body to become rigid and the brain to shut down.

“Stem cells are an avenue of research that we’ve pursued and continue to pursue but it’s part of a broad portfolio of things that we look at. There have been some issues with stem cells, some problems along the way,” said Fox, who suffers from the diseases’ telltale tics and tremors. “It’s not so much that [stem cell research has] diminished in its prospects for breakthroughs as much as it’s the other avenues of research have grown and multiplied and become as much or more promising. So, an answer may come from stem cell research but it’s more than likely to come from another area,” he said.

The “broad portfolio” isn’t new.  It existed at the time of his earlier stridency.  Even now, there are no human ESC trials for Parkinson’s.  And human cloning hasn’t yet been reliably accomplished.  But this is a significant back off by Fox.

One is tempted to be cynical. Fox’s earlier misleading TV ads were used by Democrats to demagogue their political opponents as somehow wanting to thwart CURES! CURES! CURES!, with Fox as the more than willing accomplice.  Stem cells have ceased to be a potent political weapon for the Democrats, and so suddenly Fox has a more balanced understanding.  How convenient.

Why do some life scientists insist on trying to reduce what we are as human beings to the lowest common biological denominator? Here I was minding my own business, reading the New York Times Book Review to raise my blood pressure, and there it is again: Humans are just pond slime. From the book review of Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms:

Beside the steaming geysers of Yellowstone, Fortey gets down on his hands and knees, undeterred by staring tourists, to observe the steamy environment of heat-loving bacteria. Gazing at the green microbial mats the bacteria form, he has a sobering thought: “Yellowstone National Park may be the best place there is to reflect on the fact that we are all pond slime. Every cell in our body acknowledges a deep history, a time when organelles floated free in a world we would have found ­insupportable.”

Yes, sobering.  So sobering.

Wait! I thought we were just ”star stuff.” That’s what the late astronomer Carl Sagan told us. But this kind of reductionism that defines us as our molecular makeup or genetic lineage, so often seen in writing about evolutionary history–are we supposed to be shocked?–is not only ridiculous, it is unscientific. If we evolved from bacteria, we certainly are not bacteria now.

But we are the bad guys:

At the end of his joyful travels, full of heartfelt appreciation for so many humble, enduring creatures, Fortey strikes a somber note, giving precious little hope for the next four billion years. He fears that his fellow human beings, lacking humility, will cause the third great extinction. And then what will survive?  Bacteria: “They will be there to rot down the last bodies of the last humans, and then the wheel of life will have turned full circle.”

Wait. I thought the cockroaches were going to be the new lords of the earth after we destroy it.  These anti humanists have to get their stories straight.

An Indian surrogate mother has died as a consequence of renting her uterus to a Western woman. From the Daily News and Analysis story:

Renting out her womb to a US couple cost Amraiwadi resident Premila Vaghela, 36, her life. Trying to give a child to the couple, she died on Monday leaving her two sons motherless… Premila’s mother, more than 80 years old, had anger in her voice. “I have lost my daughter. Now, we don’t want anything from anybody,” she said.

But  at least there was good news for somebody:

Three days later, it was an emotional scene at Arpan New Born care Centre in Navrangpura as Helen- the biological mother of the boy Vaghela delivered prematurely-saw her son for the first time on Thursday. Onlookers said Helen looked tired and gloomy after her flight, but when she saw the baby in the incubator tears welled up in her eyes.

But she wanted a baby! Sometimes entitlement comes at a terrible cost.

In a victory (of sorts) for human rights, and a good piece of diplomacy by the Obama Administration, the persecuted Chinese human rights activist, Chen Gugangchen, has been freed from the national gulag that is the People’s Republic of China. He’s coming to “study” in the USA with his family. (Pity his relatives and supporters left behind.)

What, did he protest?  The continual breaking of Chinese law.  Okay, but what law?  Those against forced abortion/sterilization and infanticide that are integral in the practice of China’s infamous one child policy.  From “Is Pro Life Cause Celebre Chen Guangchen Really Pro Life?”, in Religion Dispatches:

Forced abortions and sterilizations are illegal in China under a 2002 law that gives individuals the right to an “informed choice” in these matters. However, the central government publishes national population targets and holds local officials accountable for meeting them. Some officials resort to illegal and coercive tactics to meet their quotas. These abuses happen primarily in rural areas where families want more children to work the land. In the cities, most couples voluntarily limit the size of their families.

The central government disavows responsibility for the actions of these officials, but it has never made an example of any official who has been caught coercing women, according to Steven Mosher of the Population Research Institute. Chen is being persecuted by local authorities, but Beijing has been unwilling or unable to help him. In 2006, he was sentenced to over four years in prison for “destroying property” and “assembling a crowd for the purpose of disrupting traffic”—despite being under house arrest at the time. According to Amnesty International, Chen is a prisoner of conscience who has been jailed solely for peacefully defending human rights.

I wouldn’t claim that those in the cities who obey an unjust law “voluntarily” limit their family size. Were African-Americans who only used “their” drinking fountains under Jim Crow “voluntarily” not using those reserved for whites? Please. It is the single child policy that is unjust–indeed, a violation of basic human rights–which too many of a certain political/cultural persuasion so often neglect to mention.

The intriguing question is whether Chen will become a pro life activist in the USA. The pro life community has embraced him as one of their own, and even chastized pro choicers for not working hard enough on Chen’s behalf.  From a column by the National Right to Life Commitee’s Dave Andrusko:

So, why have abortion advocates been struck deaf and dumb? The explanation, of course, is not just that these atrocities are taking place thousands of miles away. And clearly they do not favor coerced abortion, although I’ve been struck by how many times I see reader responses to newspaper stories which take the line that what China does is its business.

But having the word “abortion” and “human rights” in the same sentence strikes too close to home. Better silence in the face of unbelievable brutality and cruelty than to even entertain the thought that there is another party whose human rights are abridged every time an abortion occurs, whether it takes place in a rural village in China or an urban abortion clinic here at home.

I don’t know about that, but the piece I first quoted, written by lefty journalist Lindsay Beyerstein, is clearly intended to defend against the meme that Chen is pro life in the American sense of the term, and that the pro choice community was muted in his support.

Only time will tell if Chen will engage the broader “life” issues, and what the government’s attitude toward his continued residence in the USA will be if he does.  I suspect he’ll stay focused on his homeland.  Whatever. For now, let’s all of us–pro life and pro choice–celebrate the liberation of a very courageous and impressive man.

Never in my life have I seen such widespread formal resistance by the states to a federal law than we have witnessed with Obamacare. Even during the Civil Rights struggles, there were far fewer states in revolt than we see now.  And polls continue to show majorities of the people wanting the ugly thing repealed.  Count me among them.

The South was wrong to resist racial equality, but the legal assaults coming from the state houses against the centralization of the health care system into the hands of federal bureaucrats are spot on right.  Latest example: The Missouri Legislature has passed a law that, if signed by the governor, basically voids the Free Birth Control Rule in the state. From the Kansas City Star story:

With several hours to spare before a mandatory 6 p.m. adjournment, lawmakers gave final approval to a bill stating that employers can refuse to provide health insurance for birth control – a measure meant as a slap against an Obama administration policy requiring insurers to cover contraception at no additional cost to women working at certain religious-affiliated institutions.

The contraception legislation now goes to Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon. A separate measure also passed Friday will ask Missouri voters later this year whether to restrict the creation of a health insurance exchange. It targets a provision in Obama’s federal health care law requiring states to set up online insurance markets by 2014 or have one run by the federal government.

Will the Governor veto?  I have no idea.  I’ll bet Senator Claire McCaskill hopes he doesn’t. She’s in the race of her political life with her vote for Obamacare a major argument being made against her.

In any event, whatever happens, look for the rebellion in the states to continue until this debacle of a mess of a law of a federal intrusion of a corner stone for the threatened bureaucratic state, is repealed.

The It’s-Okay-to-Kill-the Sick-Crowd intentionally blur distinctions and destroy definitions in their quest for legalizing/normalizing doctor-prescribed death and even, Final Exit Network ghoul helium terminations. It really disgusts me.

One of their favorite moves in this regard is to intentionally and wrongfully conflate palliative sedation–that is sedating a dying patient at the end of life who is experiencing intractable pain or symptoms–with both euthanasia–fast killing the patient–and terminal sedation–slow killing the patient by inducing coma and withdrawing food and water.  As I said, it really disgusts me.

A good piece in the Journal of Pain & Palliative Care Pharmacotherapy 201 2;26:30-39 shatters that lie.  First, it notes that in palliative sedation, the point is to use the least amount of sedative to accomplish the needed palliation. From “Review of Palliative Sedation and Its Distinction From Euthanasia and Lethal Injection” (abstract link only):

Ideally, the level of palliative sedation is provided in a fashion that is titrated to a minimal level that permits the patient to tolerate unbearable symptoms, yet the patient can continue to periodically communicate…The three most common levels of providing PS include mild, intermediate, and deep. When mild sedation is used, the patient is awake and the level of consciousness is lowered to a somnolent state, withverbal or nonverbal communication still possible. With intermediate sedation, the patient is asleep or stuporous and can still be awakened to communicate briefly. The third level is deep sedation, which refers to the patient being near or in complete unconsciousness and does not communicate verbally or nonverbally. Besides regulating the degree of sedation, palliative sedation may also be provided intermittently or continuously…

Well, let’s stop so we don’t get too technical.

The points to take away from the above are 1) PS is individualized to the patient’s needs, 2) the point isn’t to end the life of the patient, and 3) levels of sedation may vary in the same patient from time to time. In contrast, euthanasia kills the patient with a lethal injection.  And “terminal sedation” is merely the imposition of coma and withdrawing artificial nutrition and hydration, sometimes without actual medical need and/or to make it easier for care givers–as in the much abused Liverpool Care Pathway in the UK. 

According to the article, the average PS time before death, in cases in which total coma is clinically required is 1.5-3.1 days, not enough time to die by dehydration, which generally takes about two weeks.  Also, the AMA urges practitioners to use PS only as a “last resort,” which certainly isn’t the case with E and TS, which are done for non medical reasons.. 

The authors also point out that the intentions between PS and E/TS are mirror opposites:

Palliative sedation is not a euphemism that is morally equivalent to euthanasia, nor is it “slow euthanasia,” or physician-assisted suicide (PAS). There is a sharp distinction between euthanasia and PS or PAS and PS, the distinction between the three can be ascertained by recognizing the primary intention and outcome of each measure. Although PAS and euthanasia are intended to relieve suffering, it is accomplished by causing death, whereas PS is provided in a proportionate manner without an intention of causing death. The primary intention of euthanasia and PAS is the death of the person-with relief of suffering occurring as a secondary (incidental) result, whereas with PS the primary intention is relief of suffering-with death being a secondary (incidental) result. Slow euthanasia and PAS specifically involve the intent to end life deliberately with lethal (nontherapeutic) doses of drugs, or with rapid administration of drugs, that exceed the amount needed to alleviate the symptoms. When death unintentionally occurs following a proportionate administration of drugs in PS, the patient dies from the underlying illness and the death certificate does not list the cause of death as “drug overdose.”

DeGraeff and Dean and Morita et al, both summarized how there are three reasons why palliative sedation is distinct from euthanasia: It has the intent to provide symptom relief, it is provided in a proportionate manner, and death of the patient is not a criterion for success of the treatment.

Bingo!  But don’t expect accuracy in advocacy or proper nuance from the euthanasia crowd. They want what they want and they are more than willing to sow unnecessary confusion in order to to get it.