How do contraception, abortion, transgenderism and euthanasia fit in? Paul Tuns Editor’s Note: Part I appeared in the March edition of The Interim. Technology, as the writer Sean Haylock points out in a 2017 essay in Crisis “is mechanistic (reductively focused on efficient causation), utilitarian (reasoning by a calculus and willing to treat persons as means to an end), and voluntaristic (taking [...]
Interim Staff: Michelle Zacchigna is suing her medical team for not considering her mental health issues when they affirmed her self-diagnosis of gender dysphoria and permitting her to transition to become a male. Source: Zacchinga’s Twitter Michelle Zacchigna, 34, of Orillia, Ont., is suing eight health professionals who facilitated a change in her gender from female to male in 2010, [...]
Paul Tuns: Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland tabled the federal budget on April 7 and most media coverage focused on the size of the deficit, measures to address the housing affordability crisis, new defense spending and a new dental program, and tax increases for large businesses and the wealthy. But there are a number of anti-life and anti-family initiatives in the budget that [...]
Paul Tuns: Kerry Lavender, an assistant professor of biochemistry, microbiology, and immunology at the University of Saskatchewan’s College of Medicine, wrote two articles based on government-funded research she has conducted on “humanized mice” experiments that used fetal tissue procured from aborted preborn babies. The mice are known in the scientific literature as “TKO-BLT mice.” The controversial experiments entail implanting human fetal tissue [...]
Oswald Clark and Paul Tuns: The Center for Medical Progress and Judicial Watch announced on August 3 that they had received “252 pages of new documents” exposing the University of Pittsburgh’s lucrative “quest” to become a “tissue hub” for fetal organs taken from preborn children 6-42 weeks gestation. The documents, acquired as part of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against [...]
By Interim Staff Health Canada has approved four vaccines against COVID-19: Moderna, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson. Moderna and Pfizer COVID injections utilized abortion-derived cell lines in their testing process but not their development or production, whereas the AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines utilized abortion-derived cell lines in their development, production, and testing. Last May, the Canadian Conference of Catholic [...]
Now that COVID-19 vaccinations are being made available across the country, Canadians find themselves facing important personal decisions about whether or not they should receive them—decisions which will require reflection, research, and prudence about a medical procedure which bears on personal physical health, social responsibility, and the inviolable dictates of conscience. From reading the headlines in the press, however, one wouldn’t think [...]
By Interim Staff An embryo created by in-vitro fertilization in 1992 and subsequently frozen, was successfully implanted into her (surrogate) birth mother’s womb in early 2020 and born on Oct. 26. Molly Gibson was technically 27 years old when she was born, making her almost the same age as her mother, Tina Gibson, who is 29. Ben and Tina Gibson adopted their [...]
Laying Down the Lawton Andrew Lawton If you want to practice medicine, leave your beliefs at the door. That’s the key takeaway from a May decision by the Court of Appeal for Ontario ruling that conscience rights for healthcare practitioners effectively don’t exist. At least not when doctors are anywhere but in their own homes with the doors locked and [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman Despite the intense controversy over the birth last November of the world’s first gene-altered designer babies in China, numerous leading biologists around the world are proceeding with similar, potentially catastrophic experiments. The crisis has been brought on by the invention of CRISPR Cas9, a revolutionary new technology for editing genes that was hailed four years ago by [...]
The Canadian Cancer Society remains committed to funding human embryonic stem cell research despite great advances in adult stem cell therapy and the controversial nature of research that relies on the harvesting of human embryos. CCS spokesperson Rosie Hales confirmed the organization has not changed its policy. The registered charity reported that donations made up 84 percent of its 2016 revenue of [...]
Television personality Bill Nye chooses politics over science. A generation grew up on the Emmy-winning TV show Bill Nye the Science Guy. The series spanned 100 episodes and covered everything from dinosaurs to computers. Kids came home from school to watch Bill Nye on PBS in their living rooms. They cheered when their teacher would pop a Bill Nye video [...]
In a position statement released on May 11 concerning sections six and seven of the 2004 Assisted Human Reproduction Act, the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society called on the federal government to legalize the payment of surrogates and egg and sperm donors, though board member Sherry Levitan suggests placing a cap on how much money surrogates or donors can receive. The position [...]
Jean Echlin (third from right) with Campaign Life Coalition summer students at the deVeber Institute seminar. Just less than a month after the legalization of euthanasia in Canada, the deVeber Institute for Bioethics and Social Research hosted “Medical Ethics in an Age of Medically Assisted Dying and Reproductive Decisions,” their second annual summer symposium. On July 15, over 100 guests [...]
As the Centers for Disease Control said April 13 that the Zika virus can cause microcephaly and other birth defects, pro-life leaders expressed concern that the assessment will be used to promote abortion. A report published in the New England Journal of Medicine concluded, “a causal relationship exists between prenatal Zika virus infection and microcephaly and other serious brain anomalies.” The study [...]