Culture of death update

avoid reading if you are a crybully.

the WAPO page also provides links to this article, where a girl bullied a depressed friend into killing himself.

Her attorney argues, however, that the charges should be dropped because Carter’s messages are protected by free speech. According to attorney Joseph P. Cataldo, Carter was “brainwashed” into supporting Roy’s plan for suicide.

ah but if you are old, sick, or handicapped, (and costing the government money and/or being a burden on your family) hey, in the near future, not only will your greedy kids cheer you on, and the government pay for your drugs (while limiting medicines that cost a lot, making it hard to get pain pills, and of course cut home health services) but your doctor, like the teenager's "friend" above will cheer you on.

this is why disability advocates like NotDeadYet are so adamant to oppose the latest fad of "assisted suicide".

and although in Europe doctors have protections, in Canada they may be forced to cooperate.

This is why the "Little Sisters of the Poor" case is so important: Once you can state that cooperation with a medical procedure that you see as immoral is mandatory, the law can use that precedent to expand it to other cases.

which is why the death of Scalia bodes ill for freedom of religion, and why the Pope's cluelessness about using contraception if you risk Zika infection is stupid: The risk is 0.1% of all pregnancies in Brazil were diagnosed with microcephaly (and several hundred of the 3000 cases reported were false positives, i.e. did not have the problem).

yes, it is a problem, but why no hysteria about Dengue fever?

As for the poor babies:  The risk is higher from drinking alcohol while pregnant.

 May et al. (2009) estimated that in the U.S., the prevalence of FAS is in the range of 2–7 per 1000, and for FASD their estimates were as high as 2–5% of school children in the US and Western Europe.

NYTimes article discusses Zika conspiracy theories, rumors and what is actually known (so far) HERE

more HERE. There are a lot of studies going on...

so yes, it is serious. Because it is a new disease. But it is not the black plague and although, as that last article notes, ten percent of kids with microcephaly will be profoundly handicapped and the rest with milder handicaps, the disease is probably not as severe as other disease or conditions that are around and ignored and kill people or children, like malaria or Dengue or tuberculosis....

that is why the Pope's message to use the pill will be overstated: Women already use contraception, and he is just saying what Paul II said: Use your conscience. But it will be spun to change the nuanced church rules, not to mention it is a godsend (/s) to the population controllers.