LIFE DIGEST: Doctor loses license after Florida baby killing
- Feb 10, 2009 - 1
The Florida Board of Medicine has revoked the license of a doctor who covered up the 2006 killing of a baby who survived a botched abortion.
Acting Feb. 6, the board barred Pierre Jean-Jacque Renelique from practicing medicine in the state, finding him guilty of malpractice, refusing to keep medical records and assigning duties to unlicensed workers, The Miami Herald reported.
Renelique was scheduled to perform an abortion on 18-year-old Sycloria Williams in July 2006 at a Hialeah, Fla., abortion clinic. After a preliminary procedure to dilate her cervix, Williams, 23 weeks pregnant, gave birth while she waited for Renelique to arrive and complete the abortion, the Florida Department of Health reported, according to the Herald.
A clinic owner cut the umbilical cord, put the newborn into a bag and dumped the bag in a trash can, according to the report. No staff members called 911 or a specialist to care for the child, the report said. Renelique falsified Williams’ medical records after he arrived an hour later, according to the report.
Acting on a tip, police found the baby girl’s decomposing body in a cardboard box in a clinic closet eight days after her death, the report said.
The Hialeah clinic gave up its license and closed after the incident.
The Miami-Dade state attorney’s office has not filed any charges, according to The Herald, but some pro-life advocates say it should.
The case “should not end here,” bioethics specialist Wesley Smith said on his weblog. “The co-owner of the clinic who allegedly failed to call for help for the infant when she was born and instead just threw her away, and any staffers who conspired in the act and the subsequent apparent cover-up, must face justice.”
The Thomas More Society, a Chicago-based, pro-life law firm, filed a lawsuit Jan. 27 in Miami against clinic owner Belkis Gonzalez and 12 other defendants, alleging the murder of the baby girl, named Shanice Denise Osbourne.
Italian woman dies after nutrition removed
Eluana Englaro, 38, a severely impaired Italian woman, died Feb. 9, three days after she was removed from a feeding tube.
Englaro, who had been in a coma since a 1992 auto accident, was at the center of an international debate between pro-life and right-to-die advocates. Her father, Beppino Englaro, had been attempting to have food and water withheld from her so that she might die. While he had the backing of right-to-die activists, pro-lifers opposed the efforts because of their contention food and water are not extraordinary medical measures for someone who is not terminally ill.
Italy’s top court ruled in November that nutrition could be withdrawn from Englaro. Her father, however, had to search for a clinic that would grant his request to help her starve to death.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi issued an emergency order Feb. 6 for doctors to resume feeding her, but President Giorgio Napolitano overturned it, saying it was unconstitutional, accord to Reuters News Service.
Bioethics specialist Wesley Smith said on his weblog Englaro’s death “was too fast to have been caused by dehydration. Perhaps her body just gave out.”
More breakthroughs reported with non-embryonic stem cells
Researchers continue to make progress with non-embryonic stem cells.
Scientists said Jan. 23 they used stem cells from bone marrow to arrest and even reverse, in some cases, the effects of early stage multiple sclerosis (M.S.).
A Feb. 5 article reported researchers have discovered a simpler way of converting non-embryonic stem cells into embryonic-like stem cells in mice. The scientists discovered the process required the addition of only one transcription factor, a gene that regulates the activities of other genes.
The research on 21 adults with M.S. basically rebuilt the patients’ immune systems by removing bad white blood cells and replacing them with stem cells from their bone marrow, according to the Agence France-Presse news agency. The trials were conducted by a team led by Richard Burt of Northwestern University on patients who had been diagnosed with M.S. for about five years. The patients had not responded to normal drug treatments.
In the research involving the conversion of non-embryonic cells into embryonic-like ones, scientists previously had found four transcription factors, or two or three in some cases, could be added to change the cells into induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, according to a Physorg.com report based on an article in the journal Cell.
Embryonic stem cells are considered “pluripotent,” meaning they can develop into all of the different cell types in the body. Non-embryonic stem cells typically have been regarded as “multipotent,” meaning they can form many, though not all, of the body’s cell types.
Embryonic stem cell research (ESCR), however, requires the destruction of an embryo when extracting stem cells from the tiny human being. The use of iPS cells avoids the lethal nature of ESCR while producing stem cells with almost the identical qualities of embryonic ones.
Stem cells are the body’s master cells that can develop into other cells and tissues, giving hope for the development of cures for a variety of diseases and other ailments.
Embryonic stem cells have yet to treat any diseases in human beings and have been plagued by the development of tumors in lab animals, despite their potential. Unlike research using embryos, extracting stem cells from non-embryonic sources has nearly universal support. Such research has produced treatments for at least 73 human ailments, according to Do No Harm, a coalition promoting ethics in research.
Latin female leaders decry Obama’s order
Some Latin American, female legislators have decried President Obama’s reversal of the Mexico City Policy.
Obama rescinded the pro-life rule in a Jan. 23 executive order. His directive overturned a policy that barred international family planning organizations from receiving federal funds unless they agree not to perform or counsel for abortion, or lobby in order to liberalize the pro-life policies of foreign governments.
Honduran Congresswoman Martha Lorena de Casco expressed “deep regret and sorrow” that “one of President Obama’s first decisions” was to invalidate the pro-life policy. “I interpret this action as a promotion of abortion and a threat to the national legislation of my country,” she said, Catholic News Agency (CAN) reported.
Liliana Negre de Alonso, vice president of Argentina’s Senate, criticized the Obama order, saying, according to CNA, “We can’t say we defend human rights if we don’t defend the first human right, the right to life from conception to natural death. To use public funds to finance groups that promote abortion is not respecting the first human right, life.”
President Reagan originally established the Mexico City Policy in 1984, when it was announced at a conference in Mexico City. The policy remained in force until 1993, when President Clinton rescinded it on his second full day in the White House. President Bush reinstated it exactly eight years later.
Planned Parenthood caught again on camera
A third Planned Parenthood employee has been shown on video tape seeking to cover up alleged child sexual abuse.
The latest video report by Live Action, a California-based organization led by college students, shows a nurse at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Tucson, Ariz., telling a supposed 15-year-old, pregnant girl she should not bring her adult boyfriend to a judicial hearing to waive parental consent rights for an abortion.
“Is he not a minor?” the nurse asks the 15 year old. When a friend accompanying the girl tells the nurse the father of the child is 27, the nurse says of a hearing, “I wouldn’t take him with me, no. I mean, don’t take him.”
The 15 year old actually is Jackie Stollar, a member of Live Action, and the friend accompanying her is Lila Rose, a 20-year-old UCLA student who is president of Live Action.
The latest video shows one more part of a multi-state, hidden-camera investigation by Live Action at Planned Parenthood clinics last summer.
“Our footage gives the Arizona public and law enforcement a rare window into Planned Parenthood’s careless abortion-first ideology,” Rose said in a written statement. “With abortion as their first and only solution for the abused victim, Planned Parenthood assists sexual predators by violating the very Arizona state laws that protect children.”
Two Planned Parenthood workers at separate clinics in Indiana lost their jobs in December after a hidden camera caught them telling a supposed 13 year old they would not report her pregnancy by a 31 year old and informing her how to get an out-of-state abortion to avoid Indiana’s parental consent law. The 13 year old actually was Rose, who gained video footage of a similar cover-up in 2007 at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Los Angeles.
Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), the national organization, is the country’s No. 1 abortion provider. Its affiliates performed nearly 290,000 abortions in 2006, the latest year for which statistics are available.
The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission works to protect the sanctity of human life. If you would like to learn more about this issue, additional resources are available here. If your church is interested in purchasing bulletin inserts or other materials on the sanctity of human life, please visit our online bookstore and erlc.com.
Further Learning
Learn more about: Family, Abuse, Child Abuse, Sexual Abuse, Life, Abortion, End-of-Life Issues, Stem-Cell Research, Science, Bioethics
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comments
1 On Feb 10th, 2009, at 4:11pm, James E Reeves wrote:
If God knew Jeremiah before he was formed in the womb and sanctified him before his birth then the conclusion is that abortion is a continued pagan ritual. The ethics of this conclusion is based on God’s word to Jeremiah being true and a real person existing before birth.See Jeremiah 1: 5
The Planned Parenthood may equal Nazi Gestapo, if all the perimeters were met involving a parallel but it goes much deeper because while the government maintains a separation of church and state with Christians it seems to support an old pagan religious ritual.
Does our President have Christian ethics? Then it is up to him as commander-and-chief isn’t it?
Your brother,
James