Pendergraft, who has subjected women to botched legal abortions, was ordered to pay $10,000 fine and take a course on record keeping.
The medical board suspended his license after it found Pendergraft had allowed an unlicensed employee to order and administer drugs even though she was unqualified and had a known history of drug abuse. Pendergraft also was disciplined for prescribing steroids to her for unknown reasons.
On June 30, 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Harris v. McRae and upheld the constitutionality of the Hyde Amendment, which had prohibited federal funding for Medicaid abortions since 1976. Three decades later, Harris v. McRae remains the pro-life movement's most important legal victory since Roe v. Wade created a "right to abortion" in 1973.....
Their achievement, however, is not secure. The Hyde Amendment, although deemed constitutional, still had to be re-enacted in every Congress, every year following Harris v. McRae—a fact of legislative history that raises the most serious questions about the Obama administration's claim that the Hyde Amendment is such "settled law" that it need not be replicated in the various legislative iterations of Obamacare. The administration's "deal" with certain Democratic congressmen to include a Hyde Amendment-type ban on abortion funding through a presidential executive order is the thinnest of barriers—some would say, a non-existent barrier—against claims that abortion is a "necessary" form of health care that requires taxpayer funding. That some Catholic members of Congress and some Catholic health-care advocates have fallen for this sleight-of-hand reflects either grave misunderstanding of the law or bad faith.
Like Climategate, the public policy debate over hESCR has shown that scientists are not always disinterested parties. Rather, scientists can be every bit as political and partisan as the politicians, selectively using scientific "evidence" to justify their ideological viewpoint.
The patterns of behavior promoting public funding of hESCR have been strikingly similar to Climategate: selective use of data, manipulation of the peer review process, demonizing colleagues who question the prevailing orthodoxies, and appeals to a bogus scientific "consensus," among others. Those who question this supposed "consensus" have been dismissed as scientifically ignorant and accused of playing politics with science......
The most ironic -- and most troubling -- aspect to the stem cell debate is that all the talk about "playing politics" with science obscured the fact that in an open society, there is and must be a role for politics in determining the parameters within which science will be conducted. By itself, science is not competent to set these parameters. Science is a method to obtain knowledge; it can determine that one way may be more effective or more efficient than another. But efficient does not always mean morally acceptable.
TCA Cellular Therapy, LLC has enrolled its first patient to participate in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) first adult stem cell clinical trial to treat spinal cord injuries. Enrollee and Marine Veteran, Matt Cole was paralyzed from the chest down in a 2005 insurgent attack in Iraq....
Utilizing TCA Cellular’s proprietary therapy, a couple of thousand adult stem cells have been extracted from the patient’s own bone marrow, Mesenchymal Stem Cells have been separated, purified, multiplied to millions and will be infused into Cole’s spinal cord later this month.
“In theory we expect the cells to repair damaged neurons,” explained TCA Cellular president, Dr. Lasala. “At minimum, our team expects this therapy will provide some improvement to the patient’s motory and sensory functions with no side effects."
Media reports regarding the proposed constitution in Kenya, which goes before the country for a vote on Wednesday, continue to misrepresent the proposed document’s impact on the country’s abortion policy.
“Many in the media are falsely reporting that the new constitution would not allow abortion except ‘where the life of the mother is in danger,’” explained Jeanne E. Head, R.N., National Right to Life Vice President for International Affairs and United Nations Representative. “The truth is actually the opposite.”
The language in the proposed constitution does not contain any meaningful restrictions on abortion, despite recognition of the right to life from conception. Section 26 contains language which allows abortion when in the “opinion of a trained health professional, there is need for emergency treatment, or the life or health of the mother is in danger, or if permitted by any other written law.”
Doctors regenerated tissue from the patients' nose and bone marrow stem cells to create tracheas biologically identical to the patients' original organs. Both patients underwent the transplant in early July and were released from the hospital just weeks after the surgery, according to the Associated Press.
One of the patients was able to speak again only a few days after the surgery, said Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, professor of surgery at the University of Barcelona in Spain and the head surgeon in the cases.
"They are back to the home, able to speak, able to socialize with everybody," Giovannini told the Associated Press.
The organization has identified anti-abortion candidates in virtually every primary contest, from county commissioner and probate court to state Senate and U.S. House of Representatives.
You may think it doesn't matter very much what your county commissioner thinks about abortion, but RTL knows better. It knows its voters play an outsized role in deciding the local races many primary voters ignore, and that anti-abortion candidates who prevail in such races often use their positions as a springboard to higher offices, including the state Legislature and appellate courts, where the stakes for Right to Life are larger.
You can see which candidates Right to Life is grooming for bigger things by checking out rtl.org.
And even if you're among the deluded majority who believe nothing politically important happens in August, you can be sure that RTL's savvy, committed army of anti-abortion voters will be out in force Tuesday.
For all the emotional debate that began about a decade ago on allowing the use of embryonic stem cells, it's adult stem cells that are in human testing today. An extensive review of stem cell projects and interviews with two dozen experts reveal a wide range of potential treatments.
Adult stem cells are being studied in people who suffer from multiple sclerosis, heart attacks and diabetes. Some early results suggest stem cells can help some patients avoid leg amputation. Recently, researchers reported that they restored vision to patients whose eyes were damaged by chemicals.
Apart from these efforts, transplants of adult stem cells have become a standard lifesaving therapy for perhaps hundreds of thousands of people with leukemia, lymphoma and other blood diseases.
Today's titanium replacement joints work very well for 10 to 15 years, but replacing them after they've worn out is a challenge for both patient and surgeon. A team of researchers from Columbia University proposes a way around that problem: by implanting a scaffold that encourages the patient's own stem cells to regrow the joint....
Thanks to the added growth factor protein, the rabbit's own stem cells naturally migrated into the scaffold and regenerated both the cartilage and the bone beneath it.
The success is somewhat surprising. "I wouldn't have thought in a normal weight-bearing joint that you could [replace the newly forming] cartilage while the joint is being loaded," says Howard Seeherman, chief scientific officer for tissue repair at Pfizer. Seeherman says he would have expected the cartilage to just wear off when weight was put on the joint.
"Without blinking, the Obama Administration had approved high-risk pool plans submitted by at least three states that would have funded virtually all abortions – until NRLC raised the alarms starting on July 13," said NRLC Legislative Director Douglas Johnson. "In the regulation issued today, the Administration tells states that elective abortions may not be covered in the high-risk pool program – but simultaneously, the head of the White House Office of Health Reform, Nancy-Ann DeParle, issued a statement on the White House blog explaining that this decision 'is not a precedent for other programs or policies given the unique, temporary nature of the program . . .'"
"This entire episode demonstrates what National Right to Life said in March – there is no language in the new health care law, and no language in Obama's politically contrived March 24 executive order, that effectively prevents federal subsidies for abortion on demand," Johnson said. "This means that unless Congress repeals the health care law or performs major corrective surgery on it, there will be years of battles, as each new program is implemented, over how elective abortion will be covered – and the White House is suggesting that today's policy will not necessarily be applied when implementing the other programs, some of which will cover far larger populations."
Thirteen senators wrote a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius Wednesday urging her to "act immediately" to bar states operating the high-risk pools from covering elective abortions.
"Absent such contractual requirements, it will be necessary for Congress to modify the current law," they wrote, asking for a response by Friday.
The senators referenced a Congressional Research Service report dated July 23 that found the health care law, the subsequent executive order on abortion restrictions and the contracts themselves do not explicitly prohibit the high-risk pools from covering abortions with federal money.
The high-risk program, called the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan, was meant to help those denied coverage over pre-existing conditions until the broader provisions of the law go into effect in 2014. The law set aside $5 billion in federal subsidies for the program, which is supposed to be either administered by the state or the Health and Human Services Department.
When the woman, purportedly 10-weeks pregnant, asks the clinician, named "Sarah," when her baby's heart begins to beat, Sarah replies, "It's around I think the 8th or the 9th week that you can hear the heartbeat." The heart actually begins beating 3 weeks and 1 day after conception, according to Moore and Persaud's well-known textbook The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology. The Planned Parenthood clinician also insists, "It's not a baby, it's a fetus," which, she claims, is "not like a person."
In the video, Sarah assures the woman that "having an abortion is safer than carrying to term." The woman asks, "The abortion won't hurt me from having more kids in the future, will it?" and the counselor replies, "Nope." But a 2009 study from the Obstetrical and Gynecological Survey recently found that a previous abortion increased a woman's risk of pre-term birth by 20%, and a 2003 report from the Shanghai Institute of Planned Parenthood Research notes a 55% increased risk of future miscarriages for women who have abortions.
The high-risk pool program is one of the new programs created by the sweeping health care legislation (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) that President Obama signed into law on March 23. The law authorizes $5 billion in federal funds for the program, which will cover as many as 400,000 people when it is implemented nationwide.
"The Obama Administration will give Pennsylvania $160 million in federal tax funds, which we've discovered will pay for insurance plans that cover any legal abortion," said Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), the federation of right-to-life organizations in all 50 states. "This is just the first proof of the phoniness of President Obama's assurances that federal funds would not subsidize abortion -- but it will not be the last."
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The section on abortion (see page 14) asserts that "elective abortions are not covered." However, that statement proves to be a red herring, because the operative language does not define "elective." Rather, the proposal specifies that the coverage "includes only abortions and contraceptives that satisfy the requirements of" several specific statutes, the most pertinent of which is 18 Pa. C.S. § 3204, which says that an abortion is legal in Pennsylvania (consistent with Roe v. Wade) if a single physician believes that it is "necessary" based on "all factors (physical, emotional, psychological, familial and the woman's age) relevant to the well-being of the woman." Indeed, the cited statute provides only a single circumstance in which an abortion prior to 24 weeks is NOT permitted under the Pennsylvania statute: "No abortion which is sought solely because of the sex of the unborn child shall be deemed a necessary abortion."
“The Obama recess appointment of rationing advocate Donald Berwick to head the key government agency that will apply the new health care law is disastrous news for the vulnerable, especially the elderly and the sickest of American patients,” said Burke Balch, J.D., director of National Right to Life's Powell Center for Medical Ethics.
Confirmation of Berwick would have faced strong opposition from pro-life Republican senators appalled by his open advocacy of government-imposed rationing of medical treatment. In a June 2009 interview with the journal Biotechnology Healthcare, Berwick said, “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care – the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”
In an article in the May/June 2008 issue of Health Affairs, he called for “rational collective action overriding some individual self-interest” so as to “reduce per capita costs.” Lamenting that “[t]oday’s individual health care processes are designed to respond to the acute needs of individual patients,” Berwick wrote that instead government should “approach new technologies and capital investments with skepticism and require that a strong burden of proof of value lie with the proponent.”
A few years ago, this kind of work would not have been possible in Michigan. But two years ago, state voters approved a ballot measure allowing stem cell research.Both of these sentences are factually incorrect. First, there was no law in Michigan a few years ago which prevented research using fetal stem cells. None. Research using fetal stem cells has never been banned in Michigan. Second, the ballot measure didn't allow stem cell research. All types of stem cell research were already occurring in Michigan before Proposal 2. Proposal 2 just allowed researchers to kill human embryos for research in Michigan instead of importing embryonic stem cells from other states.