UPDATE, 5:30pm: The House passed this measure on voice vote, with a recorded vote to be taken tomorrow.
Today, the Kansas House is scheduled to take up the Healthcare Rights of Conscience, a measure strengthening protections for medical professionals and healthcare facilities that oppose abortion, sterilization and abortifacient (abortion-causing) drugs and devices.
- Over 8,300 abortions were performed in Kansas in 2010.
- Sterilization of females by “tubal ligations” number approximately 500 per year in Kansas hospitals, with an additional unknown number in single-day surgery centers.
- Millions of pills, patches, injections and devices not only act to prevent pregnancy, they silently eliminate tiny human beings (embryos) trying to implant in their mother’s wombs. By definition, that is post-fertilization abortifacient action.
Current state statutes allow physicians and hospitals to stay out of direct abortions and sterilizations, but those statutes were written before chemicals that cause abortion –intentionally or indirectly– were invented.
Today’s pharmacists who are ethically opposed to filling prescriptions for abortifacient drugs are in a terrible bind. The Healthcare Rights of Conscience would protect such Kansas pharmacists from job loss or their employer from a retaliatory civil lawsuit.
Ethical healthcare conflicts are escalating under a pro-death administration that has mandated free birth control and abortifacients in all health plans. This weekend, a reported 54,000 citizens attended “Stand Up for Religious Freedom” rallies in 143 cities, to protest the mandate.
Infanticide has now been shockingly advocated in a mainstream periodical– the February 2012 issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics. The article, “After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?” was written by two authors holding academic positions at major universities. They wrote, “Merely being human is not in itself a reason for ascribing someone a right to life… Killing a newborn “should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.”
This is a horrible cultural atmosphere! Well-known commentator Wesley Smith writes ,”The ongoing transformation in the methods and ethics of medicine raises
profound moral questions for doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and others who believe in the traditional virtues of Hippocratic medicine that proscribe abortion and assisted suicide and compel physicians to ‘do no harm.’ “
“For over the past fifty years, the purposes and practices of medicine have changed radically,” continued Smith. “Where medical ethics was once life-affirming, today’s treatments and medical procedures increasingly involve the legal taking of human life. The trend toward accepting the termination of some human lives as a normal part of medicine is accelerating. Courts, policymakers, media leaders—even the elites of organized medicine increasingly assert that patient rights and respect for patients’ choices should trump the consciences of medical professionals.”
Action alert: Contact your state representative today (here) to urge passage of the Healthcare Rights of Conscience, written into two bill numbers: HB 2523 and House sub SB 62.
“Millions of pills, patches, injections and devices not only act to prevent pregnancy, they silently eliminate tiny human beings (zygotes) trying to implant in their mother’s wombs. By definition, that is post-fertilization abortifacient action.”
This is correct (due to artificial hormonal disruption of the endometrial lining of the uterus) however, the word “zygotes” should be replaced with “embryos”. A zygote is the single cell that is formed by the union of sperm and ovum. At the time of normal physiologic implantation, which takes place approximately one week after fertilization, the growth and development of the tiny human being has progressed much beyond the unicellular zygote stage. It is at that time called a blastocyst, one of the stages of embryonic development.
Although one can encounter attempted redefinitions of “embryo” (even in medical sources) here is a correct one from Dorland’s Medical Dictionary (2007):
2. in humans, the developing organism from fertilization to the end of the eighth week.
Good catch, made the change, thanks!