In today’s News:
Ethics board meets
The Trump administration established the National Institutes of Health Human Fetal Tissue Research Ethics Advisory Board earlier this year amid calls to end the practice of using aborted baby body parts in taxpayer-funded research. The Scientist reports President Donald Trump appointed the 15 board members, and at least 10 of them are pro-life. The board met for the first time July 31. The new ethics board is made up of 15 non-government employees, including doctors, scientists, ethicists, attorneys and theologians. Its task is to research the use of aborted baby body parts in taxpayer-funded scientific research and make ethical recommendations about it. The board will create a final report with recommendations for U.S. Department Of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.
World Day against Human Trafficking
July 30 was the World Day Against Trafficking in Persons, a day of awareness for sex trafficking around the world. To emphasize the subject, the Women’s Rights Without Frontiers organization noted that Communist China is ranked among the world’s worst offenders in sex trafficking by the U.S. State Department. China has “an insatiable market for sexual slavery, but china also is a major purveyor of sexual slavery around the world,” said Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, in a press release.
ACLU sues Catholic hospitals
Catholic hospitals around the country are on a collision course with the ACLU, the Democratic Party and assorted social-justice secularists who insist that these religious institutions violate their own faith precepts in the provision of medical services. In Washington state, a proposed merger between a secular and Catholic hospital systems has brought down the ire of the ACLU and others, such as End of Life Washington and NARAL. Specifically, the ACLU wants to force the merged system to practice medicine in a secular fashion, meaning the Catholic hospital would be required to perform abortions, transgender surgeries, and assisted suicides — all legal in Washington, but all also prohibited in Catholic teaching. There have already been several lawsuits filed against religious hospitals around the country for obeying the principles of catholic health care, with the primary focus seemingly on hospitals denying transgender hysterectomies, abortions, and sterilizations.
Assisted suicides in Hawaii reported
The Hawaii assisted suicide law went into effect on Jan. 1, 2019. The 2019 Hawaii Assisted Suicide Report, issued on July 1, indicates that in the first year of legalized assisted suicide: 30 people were prescribed lethal drugs, 15 people died by assisted suicide, eight people received a lethal prescription died but did not die by assisted suicide and seven people remained alive at the end of 2019. The report also includes preliminary data for 2020 from Jan. 1 to June 26, 2020, 24 people were prescribed lethal drugs and 13 people died by assisted suicide.
