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[Transcripts of Oral Argument (#1) (#2)] the landmark (7-2) abortion decision voided the abortion laws of nearly every state. Striking down a Texas statute that prohibited all abortions except to save the mother's life, the Supreme Court, per Blackmun, held that abortion was a constitutional right that the states could only abridge after the first six months of pregnancy. More specifically, the Court held that: (1) the Court had jurisdiction; (2) Roe's case was not moot, despite the birth of her child, because the case was "capable of repetition, yet evading review;" (3) the right to privacy includes the right to abortion; (4) since abortion is a fundamental right, state regulation must meet the "strict scrutiny" standard, which means the state must show it has a "compelling interest" in having the law; (5) the word "person" in the 14th Amendment, does not apply to the unborn; (6) the state has an important interest in both preserving the heath of a pregnant woman and in protecting fetal life; (7) the state's interest in maternal health becomes compelling at three months; (8) the state's interest in fetal life becomes compelling at viability--six months; (9) the state may not regulate abortion at all during the first trimester; (10) the state may regulate abortion during the second three months, but only for the protection of the woman's health; (11) the state may regulate or ban abortion during the third trimester to protect fetal life. Roe, the only successful suit of a group of test cases designed to challenge validity of the Texas abortion statute, was brought by Norma McCorvey (alias "Jane Roe") and her lawyer, Sarah Weddington. It was heard twice by the Court because the retirement of Black and Harlan had left two vacancies. With Powell and Rehnquist added, the case was then re-heard. Though Douglas was rightly the intellectual father of Roe, it was Blackmun who worked feverishly behind the scenes to build a consensus for the ruling that he would ultimately write for the Court. [Recently released internal memoranda, while shedding fascinating light on the workings of the Roe Court, have also resulted in stark criticism of the majority's conduct.] The two dissenters, Rehnquist and White would champion the cause against Roe for more than twenty years to come. Though legally it has been eclipsed by Casey, it remains as the essential centerpiece of constitutional jurisprudence on abortion.

[Transcripts of Oral Argument (#1) (#2) ] the landmark (7-2) abortion decision voided the abortion laws of nearly every state. Striking down a Texas statute that prohibited all abortions except to save the mother's life, the Supreme Court, per Blackmun, held that abortion was a constitutional right that the states could only abridge after the first six months of pregnancy. More specifically, the Court held that: (1) the Court had jurisdiction; (2) Roe's case was not moot, despite the birth of her child, because the case was "capable of repetition, yet evading review;" (3) the right to privacy includes the right to abortion; (4) since abortion is a fundamental right, state regulation must meet the "strict scrutiny" standard, which means the state must show it has a "compelling interest" in having the law; (5) the word "person" in the 14th Amendment , does not apply to the unborn; (6) the state has an important interest in both preserving the heath of a pregnant woman and in protecting fetal life; (7) the state's interest in maternal health becomes compelling at three months; (8) the state's interest in fetal life becomes compelling at viability--six months; (9) the state may not regulate abortion at all during the first trimester; (10) the state may regulate abortion during the second three months, but only for the protection of the woman's health; (11) the state may regulate or ban abortion during the third trimester to protect fetal life. Roe, the only successful suit of a group of test cases designed to challenge validity of the Texas abortion statute, was brought by Norma McCorvey (alias "Jane Roe") and her lawyer, Sarah Weddington. It was heard twice by the Court because the retirement of Black and Harlan had left two vacancies. With Powell and Rehnquist added, the case was then re-heard. Though Douglas was rightly the intellectual father of Roe, it was Blackmun who worked feverishly behind the scenes to build a consensus for the ruling that he would ultimately write for the Court. [Recently released internal memoranda, while shedding fascinating light on the workings of the Roe Court, have also resulted in stark criticism of the majority's conduct.]   The two dissenters, Rehnquist and White would champion the cause against Roe for more than twenty years to come. Though legally it has been eclipsed by Casey , it remains as the essential centerpiece of constitutional jurisprudence on abortion.

Pro-abortion - TodayThe pro-abortion agenda has matured from back alley abortions, to abortion on demand in all 50 states up to 24-25 weeks after fertilization, and even to the point of allowing partial birth abortions. Pro-abortion advocates believe in the right to choose to terminate a pregnancy. There are even laws now dictating abortion rights of teenagers and their parents. Is the law on the side of pro-abortion, or isn't it?

Pro-abortion - The ProblemPro-abortion - Is the verdict really in? Abortion is legal in all 50 states. On the other hand, murder is illegal in all 50 states. Herein lies the problem -- How can we say it is against the law to kill and allow the abortion rate of 1 in 4 pregnancies to continue? When does the origin of life begin? Were we created at conception, knit together in our mother's womb right from the beginning? Or is it the air in our lungs that changes our status from a fetus to a life? Of course, the pro-abortion position must advocate that life doesn't begin until some time late in the gestation process. However, God's position has always been that we are each a unique individual created by Him for a special purpose from the moment of conception. Recent discoveries in biochemistry confirm what the Bible has declared for centuries, that each of us is "fearfully and wonderfully made." From the moment the sperm miraculously fertilizes the egg, God begins the process of creating our inmost being and knits us together in our mother's womb (Psalm 139:13-14).

Let me first look with you at monism, and then let me do an extended comparison between monism and Christianity.  First, let's look at monism together.  Monism believes the following five things:  Monism, m-o-n-i-s-m, which really just means "oneism"; it believes that all is one.  Monism believes, first, that all is one.  That's the first point of monism.  Monism believes that all is one.  Have you heard Elton John sing, "The Circle of Life" from The Lion King?  Welcome to monism.  All is one.  What's the key point in the story of The Lion King?    It's when the young lion prince looks up and realizes the stars are his father.  See, it's all connected.  It's all part of the circle of life.  He's part of this great river of being.  There are no distinctions.  We're all part of this tremendous circle of life.  You get a taste of monism in Star Wars too, though.  Do you remember when Obi-Won Kenobi, and this is way, way long ago, folks, long before "Attack of the Clones," this is all the way back in the first Star Wars movie in 1976.   Obi-Won Kenobi explains to young Luke Skywalker that there's a force that pervades the universe, and we're all a part of it.  Monism. In contrast, Christianity believes in a Creator/creature distinction.  God created this reality: He is not part of this reality.  This reality did not emanate out of Him.  He is distinct from it.  He spoke it into being.  He is Lord over it--over against monism that sees the divine suffused through created reality in you, in me, in the pews that you're sitting on, in the rocks, in the stones, in the trees, in the wind, in the ocean, in the air.

And then, of course, there's the battle over the traditional view of male/female role relationships: the husband as spiritual leader, the man in the role of protector, all male elders and ministers.  And over against this we find the women's movement, the feminist movement.  We see things like issues regarding women in combat and women's ordination in the churches challenging these traditional views of male/female role relationships.  But behind this set of issues...and these issues I want to suggest to you are bellwether issues.  Pick up Geoffrey Satinover's book, The Politics of Truth, his book on homosexuality, a Baker publication.  He does a good job of showing how this cluster of issues around defining sexuality and marriage and family is the bellwether issue of our culture.  The way this issue goes will let you know how the totality of the culture is going to go over the next 25 to 50 years. 

Shots In The Dark by Barbara Loe Fisher   The worldwide acceptance of mass vaccination to suppress infectious childhood diseases once fiercely resisted is one of the most successful public relations stories in the history of medicine. As a result, epidemics of smallpox, which once swept through 18th- and 19th-century port cities such as Halifax, New York, and Boston without warning and cut down entire families, are now dry facts relegated to medical books. Images of children struggling through whooping cough, walking down the street coughing spasmodically, and stopping at curbs to spit up sticky mucus are only fading memories for grandparents alive to talk about what their parents told them.  Baby boomers and their parents still remember lining up in school in 1955 for polio vaccinations, with the hope that this magic bullet would keep them out of the dreaded iron lung.  Mass vaccination has dramatically suppressed childhood diseases. In Canada, recorded diphtheria cases dropped from 9,000 in 1924 to two to five by 1994.  When measles vaccination began in the United States between 1963 and 1965, doctors reported more than 400,000 cases annually; by 1995, that number had dwindled to 309. Cases of tetanus are almost unheard of in North America and Europe.   Yet the universal use of vaccines as a worthy goal that prevents needless suffering and that benefits all mankind has begun to be challenged.   The voices of critics are heard in the living rooms of families whose children have been injured or have died from reactions to routine childhood vaccinations, and in courtrooms, where parents are suing vaccine makers and challenging mandatory vaccination laws. In the U.S. Congress, legislators who have heard them have set up a vaccine injury compensation program. At scientific conferences and in the pages of prestigious medical journals, researchers and physicians are risking their careers by discussing vaccine side effects.

Today, vaccinations are big business. In 1995, an international high-technology research firm, Frost & Sullivan, projected that the worldwide human vaccine market will increase from $2.9 billion to more than $7 billion by the year 2001.   Public health officials in every country assist the industry�s growth, often by force of laws that ensure citizens use about a dozen different viral and bacterial vaccines, including ones to suppress even generally mild childhood diseases such as chicken pox. Traditional public health measures, improving sanitation, nutrition, living conditions, health education, and access to affordable medical care, especially in underprivileged populations often take a backseat to achieving a 100 per cent vaccination rate.   Most medical doctors consider vaccines their single most important tool in protecting public health. Few would question the profound importance of vaccines to public health, wrote Richard B. Johnston, Jr., MD, medical director of the March of Dimes and chairman of the Institute of Medicine Vaccine Safety Committee, in a 1994 National Academy of Sciences report, 

Adverse Events Associated with Vaccines Not only have deaths from the most common childhood infections been almost eliminated, but also so have the devastating morbidities of diseases like measles, paralytic polio, and congenital rubella. This revolution has . . . led to major savings in medical costs and gains in work productivity, as well as to reductions in deaths and suffering.   An ancient philosophical dispute goes modern   The whole idea of man versus nature can be traced back to the origins of western medicine more than 2,000 years ago. In a four-volume book series Divided Legacy: A History of Schism in Medical Thought by medical historian Harris L. Coulter, PhD, the centuries-old war between empiricism and rationalism in medicine is revealed as a contest between two competing health philosophies. Is each individual governed by a vital force that, through unique reactions to external stimuli, is capable of participating in the healing process, as empiricists, including Hippocrates, have maintained?  Or are all human organisms simply a series of complex chemical reactions governed by the laws of physics, chemistry, and mechanics, as rationalists, including Louis Pasteur, have maintained?   Empiricists accept the existence of viruses and bacteria as part of nature and illness as part of the life process. They consider fevers, diarrhea, and runny noses good, not bad, and do not suppress them with chemically based drugs that might interfere with the body�s natural ability to harness the immune system to participate in the healing process. They stress that each individual is unique and that individualized therapeutic techniques can stimulate the body to restore health. Empiricists dislike the one-size-fits-all mass vaccination approach. 

Why It’s Important to Monitor Vaccine Safety John Iskander, MD, MPH, acting director, Immunization Safety Office, and Robert T. Chen, MD, MA, blood safety specialist, Epidemiology Branch, NCHHSTP, wrote a chapter in the new book Infectious Disease Surveillance to explain why it is important to monitor vaccine safety. Rare Reactions. The most important reason is to detect rare reactions. Although vaccines are tested extensively before they are licensed for use in the United States, not enough people are included in the tests to detect reactions that happen only rarely. If serious reactions are found when the vaccine is in widespread use, the vaccine may be withdrawn. Higher Risk Groups. Vaccine safety monitoring also makes sure new vaccines are safe for groups such as the elderly, those with chronic medical conditions, and pregnant women. Vaccine trials may deliberately exclude members of these groups. Public Confidence in Vaccines. Monitoring vaccine safety also helps to maintain public confidence needed to keep enough people vaccinated to prevent disease outbreaks. How We Know If Vaccines Are Safe Vaccine safety cannot be measured directly. Instead, it is estimated by the number of "adverse events" reported. An adverse event is "... a medical incident that takes place after an immunization ... and is believed to be caused by the immunization."1 Adverse events include— True reactions to the vaccine. Events that would have occurred even if the person had not been vaccinated (unrelated coincidences). Reactions related to mistakes in vaccine preparation, handling, or administration. Events that cannot be related directly to the vaccine; their cause is unknown. A formal scientific study usually is required to distinguish between coincidences and true reactions. It is rarely possible to say for sure whether a vaccine caused a specific adverse event. Almost all national immunization programs have a system for reporting adverse events. The United States Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)2 and the Canadian Adverse Events Following Immunization Surveillance System (CAEFISS)* are examples. People who report a vaccine reaction to VAERS or CAEFISS are asked if the reaction led to hospitalization, life-threatening illness, disability, or death. These events are classified as "serious," and are often subject to further study that yields important information. For example, reports to CAEFISS identified a common illness among people who received flu vaccines from one Canadian manufacturer in one season.3 Equally important, such systems have supported the safety of new vaccines such as the new meningococcal B and C vaccines in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Other monitoring programs include the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) project, the Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment (CISA) Network, and the Brighton Collaboration. The VSD project is a collaboration between CDC's Immunization Safety Office and eight large managed care organizations that allows for planned vaccine safety studies as well as quick investigation of possible issues. The CISA Network of six medical research centers conducts clinical research on vaccine-associated health risks, and the Brighton Collaboration develops standard case definitions for problems following immunization as well as guidelines for data collection, analysis, and presentation. Vaccine safety monitoring becomes more important with new vaccines, expanded vaccine recommendations, and new global immunization initiatives. Reporting systems like VAERS will continue to be used to monitor adverse events, so vaccines can continue to be held to very high standards of safety.

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WASHINGTON, DC, October 5, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, yesterday released new documents obtained from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act, detailing a total of as many as eleven deaths related to Merck's HPV vaccine Gardasil.  Those deaths resulted between June 8, 2006 - when the vaccine received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) - and August 2007 when the latest data was available. The adverse reports coming from the HPV vaccine are increasing daily at an alarming rate.  A LifeSiteNews.com report which scanned a publicly available database of adverse affects coming from the HPV vaccine found 3,137 adverse effects reported on September 28, 2007.  Today the US Government's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) lists 3,779 adverse effects.  52 of the cases were deemed "life threatening" and 119 required hospitalization. In one case highlighted by Judicial Watch a 17 year old girl who was vaccinated in June 2007 died the very day she was vaccinated.  According to the report, she "was vaccinated with a first dose of Gardasil…During the evening of the same day, the patient was found unconscious (lifeless) by the mother. Resuscitation was performed by the emergency physician but was unsuccessful.  The patient subsequently died." Other serious reported side effects associated with Gardasil include paralysis, Bells Palsy, Guillain-Barre Syndrome, and seizures.  Says one report: "Initial and follow-up information has been received from a physician concerning an "otherwise healthy" 13 year old female who was vaccinated with her first and second doses of Gardasil.  Subsequently, the patient experienced…paralysis from the chest down, lesions of the optic nerve…At the time of the report, the patient had not recovered." "In light of this information, it is disturbing that state and local governments might mandate in any way this vaccine for young girls," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.  "These adverse reaction reports suggest the vaccine not only causes serious side effects, but might even be fatal." The toll from the HPV vaccine may be greater still.  Judicial Watch filed its request on August 20, 2007, and received the adverse event reports from the FDA on September, 13 2007, in what the agency described as a "partial response." On October 3, 2007, Judicial Watch filed a new lawsuit against the FDA for its failure to fully respond to Judicial Watch's FOIA request as required by law.

College graduates also enjoy benefits beyond increased income. A 1998 report published by the Institute for Higher Education Policy reviews the individual benefits that college graduates enjoy, including higher levels of saving, increased personal/professional mobility, improved quality of life for their offspring, better consumer decision making, and more hobbies and leisure activities (Institute for Higher Education Policy, 1998). According to a report published by the Carnegie Foundation, non-monetary individual benefits of higher education include the tendency for postsecondary students to become more open-minded, more cultured, more rational, more consistent and less authoritarian; these benefits are also passed along to succeeding generations (Rowley and Hurtado, 2002). Additionally, college attendance has been shown to "decrease prejudice, enhance knowledge of world affairs and enhance social status" while increasing economic and job security for those who earn bachelor's degrees (Ibid.) Research has also consistently shown a positive correlation between completion of higher education and good health, not only for oneself, but also for one's children. In fact, "parental schooling levels (after controlling for differences in earnings) are positively correlated with the health status of their children" and "increased schooling (and higher relative income) are correlated with lower mortality rates for given age brackets" (Cohn and Geske, 1992).

While it is clear that investment in a college degree, especially for those students in the lowest income brackets, is a financial burden, the long-term benefits to individuals as well as to society at large, appear to far outweigh the costs.