Virginia Ironside, a British journalist and novelist, has created a stir with her comments on a BBC program in which she advocates killing a child to end her suffering and also supports abortion as an act of kindness when the baby will be born with disabilities. Here is some background. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1317400/Virginia-Ironside-sparks-BBC-outrage-Id-suffocate-child-end-suffering.html See also http://lifenews.com/int1661.html Here is Wesley […]
Author: Richard Myers
Richard S. Myers, the Vice-President of UFL, is Professor of Law at Ave Maria School of Law, where he teaches Antitrust, Civil Procedure, Conflict of Laws, Constitutional Law, and Religious Freedom. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Kenyon College and earned his law degree at Notre Dame, where he won the law school's highest academic prize. He began his legal career by clerking for Judge John F. Kilkenny of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Professor Myers also worked for Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue in Washington, D.C. He taught at Case Western Reserve University School of Law and the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law before joining the Ave Maria faculty. He is a co-editor of St. Thomas Aquinas and the Natural Law Tradition: Contemporary Perspectives (Catholic University of American Press, 2004) and a co-editor of Encyclopedia of Catholic Social Thought, Social Science, and Social Policy (Scarecrow Press, 2007). He has also published extensively on constitutional law in law reviews and also testified before Congressional and state legislative hearings on life issues.
Married to Mollie Murphy, who is also on the faculty at Ave Maria School of Law, they are the proud parents of six children - Michael, Patrick, Clare, Kathleen, Matthew, and Andrew. http://www.avemarialaw.edu/index.cfm?event=faculty.bio&pid=11705E7D4E0111010366
I thought the recent Time magazine cover story on “How the first nine months shape the rest of your life” http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2020815,00.html was quite interesting. I don’t know anything about the field of fetal origins discussed in the article. I was struck, though, by the assumption that the life of a human being begins ninth months prior to […]
The Call for Papers for the 2011 University Faculty for Life annual meeting/conference was just issued. (See the ad on page 72 of the October 2010 issue of First Things.) The 2011 conference will be at the University of Notre Dame on June 10-11, 2011. The keynote speaker and the recipient of the Smith Award for […]
Here is a link to John Keown’s review of Rita Joseph’s book “Human Rights and the Unborn Child.” http://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/247662/international-human-rights-law-and-unborn-child-john-keown Here is a link to the book. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/9004175601/ref=nosim/nationalreviewon As Professor Keown points out, advocates of abortion rights have been trying to develop a recognition of a right to abortion in international law. (See the article by Richard Wilkins and Jacob […]
abortion and military facilities
Bill Saunders has a good analysis of this issue. See http://www.fed-soc.org/publications/pubid.1966/pub_detail.asp Richard M.
prenatal testing and down syndrome
Wesley Smith has an interesting post entitled “Mothers Refusing Prenatal Testing to Protect Babies with Down.” http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/secondhandsmoke/2010/09/19/mothers-refusing-prenatal-testing-to-protect-babies-with-down/ Smith’s post focuses on a recent article in the New York Times by Amy Julia Becker on “Why Prenatal Testing Harms as Much as it Helps.” http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/deciding-not-to-screen-for-down-syndrome/ Becker’s reflection is particularly poignant. She talks about how prenatal testing is often […]
Courtesy of the Culture of Life Foundation, here is an analysis of the litigation involving the Obama Administration’s policy with regard to funding embryonic stem cell research. http://culture-of-life.org//content/view/657/1/ Richard M.
Here is a link to the Neuhaus Colloquium’s statement on the Obama Administration and the treatment of human embryos. http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/09/1591 The statement is the effort of a group of scientists and intellectuals who were inspired by the life and example of the late Father Richard John Neuhaus. Richard M.
Princeton conference on abortion
Here is a link to an upcoming conference at Princeton. http://uchv.princeton.edu/Life_Choice/ The conference, which is entitled “Open Hearts, Open Minds, and Fair Minded Words: A Conference on Life & Choice in the Abortion Debate,” will be held at Princeton on October 15-16, 2010. The conference features well known speakers with a range of views on the underlying […]
Here is Wesley Smith’s commentary on a recent murder/suicide in Montana and the efforts of Compassion and Choices” to use the incident to promote “aid in dying.” http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/secondhandsmoke/2010/09/04/compassion-and-choices-uses-murdersuicide-to-advertise-doctor-prescribed-death-in-montana/ An 81 year old man shot his 81 year old wife (who had cerebral palsy) and then set their house on fire and then shot himself. According to the […]