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Attacks on the sanctity of life–some of them perpetrated by our own state government–were coming fast and furious in Connecticut this week. FIC received this e-mail alert from the CT Catholic Conference yesterday:

Legislation Being Proposed in Public Health Committee Threatens Religious Freedom of Catholic Hospitals In Connecticut

Yesterday, the Connecticut General Assembly’s Public Health Committee approving having a bill drafted that would require all Connecticut hospitals, including Catholic hospitals, to provide emergency contraception (commonly known as Plan “B” or the “morning after pill”) to rape victims. Catholic hospitals do adhere to special rape protocols, but will only administer emergency contraceptive medication following tests to insure the woman is not previously pregnant, or that the chance of destroying a fertilized human egg does not exist.

Catholic moral teachings and the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, require that Catholic health care providers care for victims of sexual assault in a caring and compassionate manner. In considering issues involving the administration of contraceptive medications to women who are the victims of sexual assualt, Catholic moral teachings allow the woman to protect herself from the possible effects of the assault, so long as the medications administered to do so do not act as an abortifacient, which is contrary to the natural law and Catholic moral teaching.

Nationwide efforts have been launched by pro-abortion groups to change the policies of Catholic hospitals concerning the administration of emergency contraception. If this policy can be legislatively altered, then the next effort will be to force Catholic hospitals to perform abortions.

Click here for more information and to contact the members of the Public Health Committee.

And the AP is reporting that State Comptroller Nancy Wyman is asking Wal-Mart to stock those same pills in its Connecticut pharmacies. In the late ’90’s the Catholic Transcript exposed Wyman’s practice of stuffing the pay envelopes of state employees with paraphernalia from Planned Parenthood. So it is no surprise to see her leading the charge in what appears to be another orchestrated pro-abortion campaign.

According to a story in yesterday’s Courant, it is still full-speed-ahead for publicly-funded clone-and-kill research in Connecticut:

The University of Connecticut Health Center has hired an expert on human embryonic stem cells and also has reached a tentative agreement to lease a Farmington building as headquarters of its new stem cell institute, university officials said Wednesday.

As soon as April, UConn scientists will be ready to work with human stem cell lines, including those ineligible to receive federal funding.

The Courant reported other state stem-cell news the same day but, curiously, chose to run it as a separate story on the bottom of page A22:

Five nationally known scientists, including cloning expert Xiangzhong “Jerry” Yang of the University of Connecticut, today urged top scientific journals not to hold cloning and human embryonic stem cell research to higher standards than other medical research.

Some scientists have urged that the data of researchers who submit articles on creation of human embryonic stem cells be subject to independent analysis.

The call for stricter publication guidelines is a response to fraudulent claims by South Korean researcher Hwang Woo-suk that he had created 11 lines of human embryonic stem cells by cloning.

Perhaps a more prominent placing of that story would have made the taxpayers aware of just how much of a boondoggle it is that their elected representatives are giving $100 million of their money to. Regardless, the story underscores the observation made by Wesley Smith in his Weekly Standard article, which we linked to on Dec. 30:

So where are we in the cloning debate? At this point, we don’t know whether human cloning has been successfully accomplished or not. We don’t know whether embryonic stem cells have been derived from cloned embryos. We don’t know to what depths the dishonesty of the seemingly most successful researcher in the field actually descended.

We do know that cloning proponents in this country are avid in their desire for billions in federal and state money to pay for morally problematic and highly speculative research that the private sector generally shuns. And we do know that some advocates of this public policy agenda are more than willing to play fast and loose with the facts in order to get their way. In short, the human cloning agenda is falling into public disrepute-and for that, proponents of the agenda have no one to blame but themselves.

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