Why Embryonic Stem Cell Research?

Perhaps Prof. Alan Trounson knows why, and so he pursues that. But Prof. Colin McGuckin is as puzzled as I am, and so he has given up on U.K. universities where money is poured into ESCR -- and no one is paying attention to adult stem cell research, despite thousands of successful human treatments. I guess actually treating patients is not the goal for these folks?

The Age Polls: Should Catholic hospitals be forced to comply with the new abortion laws?

I'm not sure what new abortion laws they speak of here, since the Abortion Law Reform bill has not yet been legislated. It has passed the Lower House, but must still go through the Upper House in a few weeks.

In any case, the poll as it stands now is a big "Yes", obviously from non-Catholics who find nothing wrong with the State dictating over the doctrines of the Church while at other times (when it suits them) crying "separation of Church and State". Please visit the poll and make your views count. Polls are a dime a dozen, but in this day and age, many people actually let polls shape their principles. Tragic, I know..

Update: this abortion law is about forcing hospitals to refer women seeking abortion to abortion providers. Our Archbishop has spoken out against this. We refer to this as cooperating with evil, which in itself is a grave and objective evil, given the nature of what is at stake (murder). The government would use the term "collusion" or "aiding and abetting" in other situations, but obviously not when it is an abortion.

Obsession about fetal stem cell research

Medical researchers have urged Sydney University to reconsider making a deal with Australia's oldest Catholic college that will prevent foetal stem cell research at a new medical facility.

I don't know if they're referring to embryonic stem cells, which require harvesting of the cell linings of embryos by the 14th day, or if they truly mean fetal (as in fetus) stem cell research. Either way, it's still wrong, and the fact that embryonic stem cell research has so far netted zero successful treatments while adult stem cells have been used for 72 successful human treatments just makes the matter that much more unbelievable. God bless St. John's residential college on this deal, and God bless Sydney U.

Trapped in the wrong body, or the wrong mindset?

Hats off to Uncle Di, who exposes the forces of political agendas against (gasp) Natural Law.

This is vile even by progressivist standards. German quacks started pumping a 12-year-old boy, now 14, full of female hormones so as to make him "the world's youngest transsexual." For legal reasons, castration and other surgical mutilation must be delayed until "Kim," born Tim, turns 18.

According to the Telegraph article:

Tim was diagnosed as a transsexual two years ago, when doctors and psychiatrists concluded that his claims to be "in the wrong body" were so deeply felt that he required treatment. The therapy involves artificially arresting male puberty, with a series of potent hormone injections before the administration of female hormones to initiate the development of features such as breasts.

Says Uncle Di:

Progressivist intellectuals such as deans and editors and high court judges see the indefensible puerility of a phrase like "trapped in the wrong body" as clearly as we do. But they tolerate it -- and, at need, defend the mutilation it purports to justify -- as the price of deflecting the force of Natural Law reasoning, which, if permitted to direct their deliberation and choice, would mean they'd have to forfeit altogether the project of protean sexuality (self-created, free-form, non-judgmental sexual liberty) which is the keystone of their public philosophy. Such a forfeiture is unthinkable. Sooner than put that project at risk, they're willing to put up with incoherence and cruelty.

The political alliance between abortion rights and gay rights absolutists bears this out. Gays claim that unitary human nature is a fiction and that the individual has absolute dominion over his own trajectory. Why? Because it allows them total liberty of sexual indulgence. Abortion partisans claim that a woman has absolute dominion over her own body. Why? Because it allows them total liberty of sexual indulgence as well as the liberty to disencumber themselves of the undesired consequences of that indulgence. Robert Bork points out that an absolute right over one's body was not recognized by law (the law didn't permit a surgeon, he says, to amputate a man's healthy arm even if he asks him to -- say, to settle a bet), but there's no question today that judges will pretend it's absolute wherever the project of moral self-determination -- what Scalia calls "the sweet mystery of life" jurisprudence -- is imperilled.

The excision of a healthy baby, like that of a healthy limb, is of a piece with the decision to addle a 12-year-old boy with estrogen on the basis of the politically expedient imbecillity that he's "trapped" in the wrong body. It has nothing to do with physiology and everything to do with Elton John's habits of oral hygiene -- which habits the Western élites have made the touchstone of public thought about civil order. If a few innocent Tims get Kim'd in the process -- well folks, we've already put orphans out to ranch in gay households and ash-canned tens of millions of unborn babies as surgical waste. It's the price of progress.