Life Issues

Chart 2

As this committee considers House Bill 228, the Ohio abortion ban, we must focus on the primary question to be asked in this debate: “When Does Life Begin?” This question can be answered conclusively in scientific terms.

There is a diverse array of religious, philosophical, and social opinions on this subject, but it is my object to set before you the unambiguous scientific facts proving when life begins. The only religious presupposition I bring to the table is one with which everybody in this room, I am sure, find themselves in complete agreement, the validity of the divine commandment that forbids intentionally killing innocent people (sixth commandment, Protestant Bible, and fifth commandment for Catholics).

Chart 3

Unfortunately, you will rarely find the question of when life begins debated in scientific terms. It is important to be circumspect to identify and avoid the “smoke and mirrors” in this debate.

This debate is not primarily about:

1. Personal autonomy – “I have a right to my own personal choices”
2. Women’s rights – “I have a right to do what I want with my own body”
3. What’s most beneficial for women – “An abortion of an unwanted pregnancy is best for my career, my relationship, my well-being, etc.” or “An abortion of my pregnancy caused me great emotional distress and illness…”
4. The right to privacy
5. Subjective and arbitrary calculations on the quality of another human life

"The pill can significantly cut a woman's risk of pregnancy when taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex," stated DeWayne Wickham, syndicated columnist in the May 15, Times Recorder Opinion page. The tentacles of the mis-education campaign to deceive the public about the morning-after pill have extended into every newspaper in the country. Abortion advocates such as the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology have adopted a false definition of "pregnancy" which they say commences after the embryo implants into the uterus. Implantation is when pregnancy becomes measurable, but life begins about a week earlier when the sperm fertilizes the egg in the fallopian tubes. That is when you were conceived. No arbitrary point after fertilization makes us any more alive or any more human than we were the moment before.

"The Father of Modern Genetics," Dr. Jerome Lejeune, M.D., testified before the Senate in 1981, "To accept the fact that after fertilization has taken place a new human has come into being is no longer a matter of taste or opinion . . . it is plain experimental evidence."

Letter to the editor, The Dispatch, submitted 3-21-06

Monday's editorial "No protection" argued against Representative Faber's House Bill 469, which would protect medical professionals from litigation and penalty if they refuse to prescribe the morning-after pill.  In the Dispatch's defense of the morning-after pill, all we got was more of the same smoke and mirrors.  Why does the Dispatch continue to beg the question in this debate?

"The morning-after pill does not interfere with pregnancy," the Dispatch claims, and yet two paragraphs later admits, "If fertilization has occurred, the pill might prevent implantation on the uterine wall."  This medication, dear Dispatch editors, does interfere with pregnancy because it prevents implantation.  Implantation is when pregnancy becomes measurable, but life begins before pregnancy is chemically measurable.  Life begins about a week earlier when the sperm fertilizes the egg in the fallopian tubes.  That is when you were conceived.  This is an unambiguous, scientific fact.  No arbitrary point after fertilization makes us any more alive or any more human than we were the moment before.  We're all just fertilized eggs grown up!

True, the morning-after pill may act as a contraceptive.  But a significant percentage of the time (the majority of the time according to a study published in the American Journal of Obstretrics & Gynecology in 1994) it acts after conception, when it causes the death of a living, growing human being by not allowing him or her to implant in the uterus.  The Ohio revised code already allows medical professionals to refuse to perform surgical abortions without penalty, and H.B. 469 is just a consistent application of the principles enshrined in current law.  Prescribing the morning-after pill is equivalent to shooting at someone with three bullets in a six-shooter.  Just as the three empty barrels do not justify pointing and shooting at someone, so the contraceptive potential of the morning-after pill does not justify prescribing it.  Dispensing it is a reckless disregard for human life, all of its contraceptive potential notwithstanding.  Not only should medical professionals have the right to refuse to dispense this medication without penalty, civil authorities should ban it, as they should all other forms of chemical and surgical child-killing.

The devil doesn't want to overthrow God's law - he just wants you to make an exception now and then. Our exceptions to God's commandments, however, are indeed a challenge to God's authority and an assault against His Word-law. If the commandment "Thou shalt not murder" has an exception, then in that instance, "Thou shalt murder." All sophistry aside, there are no exceptions to the divine ordinance against intentionally killing innocent people, and to fancy exceptions is to usurp God's rule and set up a counterfeit moral standard after Lucifer's example.

By Dr. James P. Johnston

For every two Ohioans born today, one is killed by a chemical or surgical abortion. About 246,000 innocent human beings were aborted in Ohio from the 2000 election to mid-2005. Our state's general apathy about the killings would convince an unbiased observer that pro-lifers in Ohio don't really consider the aborted fetus or embryo a real living human being. Do we really believe that unborn children are people? One could only wonder if Ohio's pro-life legislators would be more enthusiastic about ending the slaughter of 50,000 Ohioans annually if it were voters getting ripped to pieces.

For several weeks, the Columbus Dispatch - the largest newspaper of the capital city of Ohio - has printed many editorials and letters to the editor that have defended the morning-after pill and embryonic stem cell research. There has been much criticism of a local pharmacist James Haninger, who in a letter to the Dispatch on May 20 defended his refusal to fill physicians' prescriptions for the "morning-after pill." There seems to be no end of his villification, nor of those "anti-choice militants" who would dare to threaten the health of future generations by protesting taxpayer-funded research of stem cells harvested from human embryos.

Is it "murder" to withdraw artificial means of sustenance that were employed contrary to the patient's wishes? Not necessarily.

Let me explain with a hypothetical, yet likely scenario. A man tells his wife that should he have a severe accident, and cannot eat and drink on his own and is unlikely to recover, he would not want to be kept alive by artificial means. Should a severe accident occur, his family and physician should respect his wishes. If he cannot eat and drink on his own, is unlikely to recover, and a feeding tube is withheld - because he didn't want one - and the patient subsequently dies of malnutrition, he did not die of murder. The patient succumbed to a complication of his accident.

Given by Patrick Johnston to about 1,300 people gathered on the steps of the statehouse in Denver, Colorado

It is a sad day for medicine in America. We are curing more diseases, making great discoveries, and prolonging life like never before, but American medicine has lost its soul. Do you realize that the leading cause of death in America today is not cancer or heart disease. It is murder by a physician, and the vast majority of the medical community and medical schools are absolutely complicit with abortion-on-demand. Medicine in America has become corrupt. Oh, you can find somebody to cure your sinus infection and treat your high blood pressure, but Dr. Josef Mengele could have helped you with that, too. He was the Nazi physician who was responsible for performing grisly experiments on Jews at the Auschwitz concentration camp. American abortionists and medical researchers do things to preborn children that are just as gruesome as Dr. Mengele's practice.

By Patrick Johnston, D.O.

I have boldly gone where few physicians have gone before. Where? you ask. I'll give you a hint. It's a very lonely place. You are liable to be rejected by your peers, slandered by your superiors, and avoided by those following in your footsteps if you dare venture into this arena. It's a place where you defend innocent life against not only the mammon-lusting attackers, but also from those medical colleagues who would turn a blind eye and endorse silence in the face of murder of Holocaust proportions.

Has it ever occurred to you that the Partial Birth Abortion Ban won't save a single life? Millions of dollars have been spent, millions of Emails have been sent, and hundreds of thousands have lent their time and energy for this one purpose: to outlaw partial birth abortion (the dilatation and extraction procedure). We've fought a long, hard battle that it appears we might win, now that both the House and the Senate have passed bans and Bush promises to sign one, but the battle won is a worthless one.