AFRICAN AMERICAN BUSINESSMAN SPENDS 1M TO URGE BLACKS TO VOTE PRO-LIFE. With the balance of power in Congress hanging in the air, a leading African American businessman says black voters in the United States should put their historical pro-life values above political party. That means voting for pro-life candidates rather than supporting Democratic candidates across the board. Herman Cain is best known as the former chairman and CEO of Godfather’s Pizza. He is a political commentator and was a candidate for the U.S. Senate.

Statement by Cain: “More and more African Americans are pro-life...Our message to African Americans is simple -- it's time you vote for candidates who support our values." Cain will underscore that message with a $1 million advertising campaign in key states and congressional districts targeting black radio programs and urban radio stations young African Americans enjoy. Some of the ads focus on abortion. The campaign is a second go-round based on a highly successful Ohio campaign in 2004 that helped President Bush garner 17% of the African American vote in the Buckeye State – double his vote total from the 2000 presidential race.  [LifeNews.com, 14Sept06]

ABORTION ADVOCATES TO CREATE NATIONAL TALK RADIO NETWORK FOR WOMEN. Whether the programming will represent the majority of American women, who oppose abortion, remains to be seen. Abortion activist Gloria Steinem and pro-abortion actress Jane Fonda are two of the founders of Greenstone Media, a radio company that plans to sponsor the new network. Steinem said the radio network is planned as an alternative to the current talk show radio landscape, where hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Michael Reagan, G. Gordon Liddy, James Dobson and others are decidedly pro-life.  Whether the network will represent women is questionable. Polls of women's attitudes on abortion find a majority are pro-life. A June 2003 poll conducted by the pro-abortion Center for the Advancement of Women found 51% of women took a pro-life position opposing most or all abortions while only 30 percent said it should be generally available. [LifeNews.com, 14Sept06, NY]

SURGERY HOPE FOR PARALYSED. A new treatment to repair damaged nerves could help thousands of patients regain movement in their arms and legs. Using a finely woven plastic tube, surgeons will regrow and reconnect severed nerves in road and work accident victims.

The neural prosthesis is attached to the ends of the damaged nerve and acts as a scaffold to aid repair. Victorian doctors say the advanced surgical technique is more effective than nerve grafts and will restore sensation in the limbs of victims.

St Vincent's Hospital neurosurgeon Assoc Prof Michael Murphy said the device was a vast improvement. "You can't stretch severed nerves," he said. "You can do a graft, taking nerves from elsewhere in the body, but the end result is poor. If the tubular scaffold works, it will speed up repair and improve the outcome."

Chemicals in the polymer tube accelerate regrowth of nerve cells, allowing the nerve to grow up to 4mm a day. And there is no need for surgery to remove the biodegradable tube because it breaks down within nine months.

The cutting-edge treatment has been developed by Bionic Technologies Australia -- a $6 million state government-funded project. Involved in the research is the Bionic Ear Institute, St Vincent's Hospital, CSIRO, University of Wollongong and Melbourne-based biomaterials company PolyNovo.

Prof Murphy said that a similar repair device was used on patients in the US, including those with severe cuts and trauma injuries. He said 5 per cent of all hospital patients suffered peripheral nerve damage -- 60 per cent of those patients were car and motorbike accident victims and 15 per cent were injured in falls and industrial mishaps. Most of these injuries occur to the arms, legs, hands and feet. In the next 2 years Prof Murphy and his team will trial the plastic scaffold on animals before progressing to clinical trials. Scientists at Bionic Technologies Australia are also researching treatments including a device to detect and control epileptic seizures. [21Sept06, Kate Jones, medical reporter, http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0%2C21985%2C20448680-662%2C00.htm]

WOMB TRANSPLANTS MAY BE POSSIBLE WITHIN TWO YEARS, GIVING HOPE TO WOMEN UNABLE TO HAVE CHILDREN. London-based researchers, working with medical teams in New York and Budapest, have developed a technique for providing a transplanted womb with a reliable blood supply. Women born without a uterus or who have undergone an emergency hysterectomy would be among those to benefit from the procedure.

The transplant would be temporary, doctors being reluctant to continue giving a patient drugs to help the body to fight rejection of the womb. That could leave the woman two to three years to conceive and carry a baby or babies before the womb was removed.

Maintaining a reliable blood supply has been seen as crucial before the technique — which has worked in animals — can be successfully performed on humans. The first uterus transplant, carried out on a Saudi woman in 2000, failed when a blood vessel supplying the organ developed a clot. Richard Smith, a consultant gynaecologist at Hammersmith Hospital in West London, said: “By getting to a place where we seem to have a reliable method of giving the uterus a blood supply, that takes us a whole heap closer to being able to provide this for humans.” Mr Smith and his team, who have been working on the project for eight years, hope that before long they will be able to transplant a womb from a deceased donor into a woman who is unable to conceive. He said: “I think that two years probably is realistic.”

Researchers in Sweden as well as Saudi Arabia are also working on womb transplants. Mr Smith said that about 30 women had expressed an interest in the procedure. There are thought be more than 15,000 women in Britain without a uterus. At present, one option for a childless woman is surrogacy, but that brings physical and emotional complications.

Now Mr Smith and his team intend to apply for permission from his hospital’s ethics committee and the UK transplant programme to proceed with a human womb transplant. In 2002 doctors in Saudi Arabia, where surrogacy is illegal, disclosed that they had carried out the world’s first uterus transplant two years earlier. The patient was a 26-year-old Saudi woman who had lost her uterus because of excessive bleeding after childbirth. The transplanted womb, from a 46-year-old post-menopausal woman who had to have a hysterectomy, produced two menstrual periods before it failed and had to be removed.

Dr Wafa Fageeh, a professor at Abdulaziz University who carried out the procedure with her team at King Fahd Hospital and Research Centre in Jedda, said at the time it was a “good start”. The operation failed because a blood vessel supplying the uterus developed a clot, which cut off the blood supply, the International Journal of Gynaecology and Obstetrics reported.

Many scientists had considered womb transplants impossible, given the complex blood vessels that must be connected and because of fears that anti-rejection immunosuppressant drugs could harm a foetus. But Mr Smith said: “There is plenty of experience of transplanting kidneys and those women getting pregnant, and there appear to be minimal problems (with reactions to immunosuppressant drugs).”

Swedish scientists have produced healthy offspring from mice with transplanted wombs.

The project leader, Dr Mats Brannstrom, of Sahlgrenska University in Gothenburg, has estimated that, in 3 per cent of infertile women, problems may be traced to the uterus. [Ian Evans, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0%2C%2C2-2342896%2C00.html, The Times, 5Sept06]

VOLUNTARY C-SECTIONS & MORTALITY. A recent study of nearly six million births has found that the risk of death to newborns delivered by voluntary Caesarean section is much higher than previously believed. Researchers have found that the neonatal mortality rate for Caesarean delivery among low-risk women is 1.77 deaths per 1,000 live births, while the rate for vaginal delivery is 0.62 deaths per 1,000.

Their findings were published in this month's issue of Birth: Issues in Perinatal Care.

The percentage of Caesarean births in the United States increased to 29.1 percent in 2004 from 20.7 percent in 1996, according to background information in the report. Mortality in Caesarean deliveries has consistently been about 1½ times that of vaginal delivery, but it had been assumed that the difference was due to the higher risk profile of mothers who undergo the operation.

This study, according to the authors, is the first to examine the risk of Caesarean delivery among low-risk mothers who have no known medical reason for the operation. Congenital malformations were the leading cause of neonatal death regardless of the type of delivery. But the risk in first Caesarean deliveries persisted even when deaths from congenital malformation were excluded from the calculation.

Intrauterine hypoxia - lack of oxygen - can be both a reason for performing a Caesarean section and a cause of death, but even eliminating those deaths left a neonatal mortality rate for Caesarean deliveries in the cases studied at more than twice that for vaginal births. "Neonatal deaths are rare for low-risk women - on the order of about one death per 1,000 live births - but even after we adjusted for socioeconomic and medical risk factors, the difference persisted," said Marian F. MacDorman, a statistician with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the lead author of the study.

"This is nothing to get people really alarmed, but it is of concern given that we're seeing a rapid increase in Caesarean births to women with no risks," Dr. MacDorman said. Part of the reason for the increased mortality may be that labor, unpleasant as it sometimes is for the mother, is beneficial to the baby in releasing hormones that promote healthy lung function.

The physical compression of the baby during labor is also useful in removing fluid from the lungs and helping the baby prepare to breathe air. The researchers suggest that other risks of Caesarean delivery, like possible cuts to the baby during the operation or delayed establishment of breast-feeding, may also contribute to the increased death rate.

The study included 5,762,037 live births and 11,897 infant deaths in the United States from 1998 through 2001, a sample large enough to draw statistically significant conclusions even though neonatal death is a rare event. There were 311,927 Caesarean deliveries among low-risk women in the analysis. The authors acknowledge that the study has certain limitations, including concerns about the accuracy of medical information reported on birth certificates. That data is highly reliable for information like method of delivery and birth weight, but may underreport individual medical risk factors.

It is possible, though unlikely, that the Caesarean birth group was inherently at higher risk, the authors said. Dr. Michael H. Malloy, a co-author of the article and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, said that doctors might want to consider these findings in advising their patients. "Despite attempts to control for a number of factors that might have accounted for a greater risk in mortality associated with C-sections, we continued to observe enough risk to prompt concern," he said. "When obstetricians review this information, perhaps it will promote greater discussion within the obstetrical community about the pros and cons of offering C-sections for convenience and promote more research into understanding why this increased risk persists." [BAKALAR, 5Sept06, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/05/health/05birt.html]

TEENS LESS LIKELY TO CONSIDER OTHER'S FEELINGS WHEN DECIDING. If the teens in your life sometimes seem oblivious to the feelings of those around them, especially when making decisions,…well, maybe they are, according to a new study on the teen brain. Researchers from a British university report that the medial frontal cortex, the part of the brain used to determine others’ motivations, as well as anticipate their reactions to words or incidents, are undeveloped and under-used in teens.

They depend, instead, on the superior temporal sulcus, a brain area which uses the past to predict the future. According to researcher Dr. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, "It seems that adults might be better at putting themselves in other people's mental shoes and thinking about the emotional impact of actions…The relative difficulty that teenagers have could be down to them using a different strategy when trying to understand someone else's perspective, perhaps because the relevant part of the brain is still developing. The other factor to consider is that adults have had much more social experience...Whatever the reasons, it is clear that teenagers are dealing with, not only massive hormonal shifts, but also substantial neural changes. These changes do not happen gradually and steadily between the ages of 0-18. They come on in great spurts and puberty is one of the most dramatic developmental stages." [“Feelings Matter Less To Teenagers, New Research Suggests,” Medical News Today, 09-09-06, http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=51154; Abst Clrnghse, 13Sept06]

SURVEY FINDS MEN SEEK TO LEAVE HOMOSEXUAL LIFESTYLE TO HEAL EMOTIONAL PAIN. Why would anyone with homosexual attractions try to "go straight"? According to conventional wisdom, the answer is inevitably "internalized homophobia" or societal pressure. But a new survey of almost 200 same-sex-attracted men who are pursuing change paints a very different picture: Out of 18 possible motivations listed in the survey, outside pressure was the least frequently cited motivating factor reported by the 189 survey respondents. The most frequently cited motivation was a desire to heal emotional hurts that respondents believe contributed to their same-sex attractions (SSA) to begin with. The desire to heal emotional pain was cited as a major motivator by 77% of respondents, compared to 22% who identified "outside pressure" as a major motivator. In fact, just 3% identified outside pressure as one of the three main reasons they were seeking change. The survey was conducted by People Can Change, a non-profit, non-religious self-help organization of men who have overcome unwanted homosexual attractions and who now support others who seek similar change. On average, each respondent identified 14 of the 18 factors as contributing to their desire to change. Other factors identified as major motivators include:
- personal spirituality - 68%
- desire for wife and children - 66%
- religious teachings - 63%
- desire for nonsexual male friendships - 63%
- conscience - 63%
- expectation of unhappiness in gay life - 63%.
Richard Wyler, a professional life coach who is the founder and executive director of People Can Change, summarized, "This survey indicates that same-sex- attracted men who seek change may be less influenced by outside pressure or shame than is generally assumed. Rather, they are more often motivated by their personal spirituality, deeply held values and beliefs, a desire to have a family, and a desire to heal emotional pain."
The current survey didn't explore perceived "root causes," but a 2004 survey by People Can Change found that men seeking to overcome SSA most frequently perceived the root causes of their own attractions to be:
- a history of father-son relationship problems,
- a history of problems relating with male peers,
- unhealthy mother-son relationships,
- a history of sexual abuse, and
- individual personality traits.
Complete summaries of both surveys are available at http://www.peoplecanchange.com [VIRGINIA, 13July06 LifeSiteNews.com]

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=51154; Abst Clrnghse, 13Sept06]

MINNESOTA CRISIS PREGNANCY CENTERS GET ALMOST $5 MILLION IN GOVT FUNDS. Crisis pregnancy centers in Minnesota are getting $4.75 million from the state thanks to legislation lawmakers approved and Gov. Tim Pawlenty signed. The Positive Alternatives Act makes sure the 36 centers across the state, like the North Side Life Care Center, can better help pregnant women find abortion alternatives and pregnancy needs. The state started to disperse the grants to the center this weekend. North Side will get $129,180 to expand prenatal care and offer services such as free ultrasounds, infant formula and car seats. Those grants will help women in sometimes dire situations who may think abortion is their only option. "We know that abortion kills babies, but it also hurts women," said Cindy Lorsung, the center's executive director. "I know that women suffer and I don't think they need to suffer." The grants can't go to groups that do abortions or refer women to abortion businesses. The money helps combat the $3.7 million a year in family planning funds that abortion facilities like Planned Parenthood receive. [St. Paul, 3July06, LifeNews.com]

AFTER 11 YEARS OF DELAYS, ILLINOIS ADDRESSES ABORTION. The Illinois Supreme Court has announced it has finally agreed to develop rules for parental notification of abortions on girls under age 18, and pro-life leader Joe Scheidler [national dir, Pro-Life Action League] says that may "rescue Illinois from its notorious position as the abortion dumping ground of the Midwest."

Scheidler said until now, Illinois was the only state in the region without a parental notification requirement: "Illinois has become a target state for minors from surrounding states who are seeking to avoid their own states' parental notice and parental consent laws." In the Chicago area, teens arrive at abortion sites from Indiana, Minnesota, Michigan and Iowa, while southern Illinois sites see teens from Missouri, Kentucky and Kansas, he said. The high court's announcement this week means the judges will answer a request from DuPage County State's Attorney Joe Birkett and write the rules that allow for judicial bypass of the notification. That, officials say, will allow a federal injunction preventing implementation of the parental notice portion of the law to be lifted, and the requirement will take effect. A coalition including Illinois Citizens for Life, Illinois Federation for Right to Life, the Illinois Right to Life Committee, the Illinois Family Institute, Concerned Women for America, Eagle Forum of Illinois, et al, just a week earlier also had petitioned the court with the same request. The law was approved by the state legislature in 1995 and signed then by Gov. Jim Edgar, providing that a parent or guardian must be notified 48 hours before a child under 18 has an abortion.

Until this week, however, "the Illinois Supreme Court had refused to write rules that the law requires for an appeals process," according to the Chicago-based Thomas More Society, which delivered the petitions to each of the seven judges in the court.  Society lawyer Tom Brejcha said abortions are "invasive medical" procedures and only in rare cases, such as domestic abuse, should parents be denied the opportunity to give advice and support. "This will give Illinois parents the involvement they should have in the healthcare choices their minor daughters make," Scheidler said. "We look forward to the day soon when the law can go into effect, and we are a step closer in finally recognizing the importance of parents in their children's lives, and especially at time when they are vulnerable to exploitation," said Karen Hayes, CWA of Illinois state director. Pro-life advocates noted that the change came about under the leadership of Bob Thomas, the court's new chief justice. [22Sept06 WorldNetDaily.com; N Valko RN]

Abortion Site Sued for Posing as a Pro-Life Crisis Pregnancy Center
WHITE PLAINS, NY, September 21, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) -  Expectant Mother Care-EMC FrontLine Pregnancy Centers filed suit against "Dr. Emily's" abortion business with sites in the Bronx and downtown Brooklyn citing evidence of deceptive advertising practices.

"SAME SEX MARRIAGE HARMS CHILDREN'S RIGHTS" MARRIAGE SYMPOSIUM HEARS. Louis DeSerres, co-founder of Preserve Marriage - Protect Children's Rights, addressed the issue of harm to children's rights resulting from same-sex marriage [symposium, Brigham Young University Law School, 15-16Sept06].  The 'What's The Harm? How Legalizing Same-Sex Marriage Will Harm Society, Families, Adults, Children and Marriage' symposium was jointly sponsored by The Marriage and Family Law Project at Brigham University Law School and The Marriage Law Project at the Catholic University of America's Columbus School of Law.

DeSerres asked if there is a more natural and self evident birth right for a child than to have a mother and a father. More specifically, while nature creates every child with two biological parents, same-sex marriage leads to the creation of fatherless and motherless children, taking away one of the child's natural parents.  "Adult same-sex couples seeking the right to marry have relied on constitutional equality arguments in their court challenges," he said. "It is noteworthy that not a single child has been represented in any of these court challenges to defend his right to a father and a mother, a right recognized in the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child."

He pointed out furthermore, that when children are discussed, the issue is relegated to family law, as if children do not enjoy the constitutional protection that adults enjoy. In time, the advantages gained by adults have started to seep into family law and children's rights and best interests are being further marginalized. Man-woman marriage provides the child with many benefits, said DeSerres enumerating fourteen such benefits which are all lost with same-sex marriage. Some of the harms caused by same sex 'marriage' are irreversible, suggested DeSerres. 

"Unfortunately, the harm is permanent as no legal authority can bring back the missing biological parent of a child born from an anonymous sperm donor or a surrogate mother. Only prevention can protect children's rights to a father and a mother." Commenting on the "inevitability" of same-sex marriage, he cited the decision by France to reject same-sex marriage because it violates children's rights.

DeSerres concluded, "There are thus two models to address same-sex marriage. Either favour adults at the expense of children, like Canada, Massachusetts and a few other countries have done, or rightfully place the rights and best interests of children ahead of those of adults as France has chosen. A 137 page English edited translation of the French gov't document version can be downloaded at http://www.preservemarriage.ca/docs/France_Report_on_the_Family_Edited.pdf;  21Sept06 (LifeSiteNews.com]

JOURNEY OF WORLD FAMOUS SCIENTIST WHO CRACKED THE HUMAN GENOME. In a world where the rate of scientific discovery outpaces anything ever dreamed of in any other era of human history, the idea that “science disproves God” is perhaps one of the commonest arguments now invoked against the existence of an omnipotent Deity.

FETAL CARE CENTER in Cincinnati treats babies in utero diagnosed with life-threatening illnesses/congenital defects. Doctors from Cincinnati Children’s, Univ Hosp, & Good Samaritan Hosp formed the center which opened in 2/05, the first in the world to have a care unit for prenatal surgery for heart, lungs, neural tube defects, cancer, etc. In 2005, 37 fetal surgeries were performed. [Cincinnati Rt to Life, 4/06]