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G'day from the Sentinel Team

Exploring the battle against human cloning unmasks a world of cloaks and deception.

In this update we include information & links regarding the fight against human cloning in Australia.

We also look at two fierce court battles in the USA that will be decided in early November. Both NEED our prayers. When you consider the consequences suffered in the 30 years since the US court decision to legalise abortion (Roe vs Wade), we cannot take any threat to morality lightly.

There is a fierce battle raging in the State of Missouri. Biotech lawyers have formulated amendments to the constitution that will:

LEGALLY PROTECT Human Cloning!
GUARANTEE government funding!
INSULATE researchers from legal responsibility! and
CREATE a cottage industry in human eggs!

Scientists have invested $30 million to push this through.

Also in the USA, The fight to uphold the Federal ban on Partial Birth Abortion continues. This procedure is so abhorrent that it has been declared infanticide. The American Center for Law and Justice has calls on the church to speak up:

"The church today must stand as never before in its role as the moral conscience of the nation. It must speak to the vital issues that are confronting our culture. There is no time left for silence for fear of being controversial. The church must speak and speak loudly. May God use His people to, as Isaiah says, "Cry loudly, raise your voice like a trumpet, and declare to the people their transgression." (Isa 58:1)

We haven't majored on the details of how PBA is carried out, it really is horrendous. Rather, we include an explanation by the ACLJ of the clash of worldviews involved in this battle ...

Please pray that our own Leaders will discern and understand the strategies that lead to destruction, and make wise decisions accordingly.

Under His Banner

Bev Holmes-Brown

Geoffrey Bullock, Queensland State Officer for Festival of Light, Australia:

You may have already been approached about signing an e-petition against therapeutic cloning found at the url:

http://www.makeastand.org.au/campaign/index.stw?campaign_id=2

If you haven't, it would be good to do so.

With the parliamentary debate expected to commence on November 6, the e-petition will show our parliamentarians that there are many people who oppose this inhuman technology.

They NEED 10,000 signatures ... 3,355 had been collected at the time of writing this update

The Make A Stand website launched in September 2006 in order to help us understand the Aussie battle against Human Cloning and to equip us with tools to make our voice heard.

The Senate Committee Inquiry into the Legislative Responses to the Lockhart Review began its public hearings on Saturday 20th October. (link)

You can view our last Sentinels Prayer Update (Sept 06) on Human cloning at:
http://www.link-zone.net/sentinelsupdates/2006/septhumancloning.shtml

Topics included: Dr. David Van Gend's KEY FACTS on cloning / Queensland & Victoria's decision to pursue SCNT / Ron Boswell on Human & Animal hybrids / plus articles links.

Website Link: Community Leaders explain why Cloning is WRONG!

http://www.cloning.org.au/whycloningiswrong.html

Follow this link for excellent resources from Doctors / Specialists / Politicians / Scientists ....

The Battle

Missourians Against Human Cloning have created a website called No Cloning.Org in order to expose the double talk and strategies behind this constitutional amendment:

"On November 7, Missouri voters will decide if the State of Missouri will give constitutional protection to the cloning of human beings for research purposes while providing the biotech industry the unchecked authority and tax-payer funding to conduct these unproven and unethical experiments. http://www.nocloning.org/default.html

The Deception

Sister site, 2Tricky.org deals with the intricacies of the strategies:

The lawyers who wrote Amendment 2 work for giant biotechnology labs that plan to make billions of dollars by cloning humans for research. They wanted to guarantee that Missouri lawmakers could never outlaw it. But they knew that most Missourians oppose the idea of creating and destroying human life in a laboratory.

How did Amendment 2's slick promoters get around this? Simple. Instead of being honest about their objective, they came up with a phony definition of "cloning" and pretended to ban it.

The operation used to clone human beings for research is called "Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer." This involves combining a woman's egg with the nucleus of another living cell. The result is a human embryo. Two weeks later, stem cells are "harvested" from that embryo, and it's destroyed.

Backers of Amendment 2 claim that this isn't "cloning." But practically every scientific authority disagrees with them, including the National Academies of Science and the American Medical Association. And a Missouri Appeals Court Judge wrote in March 2006 that "Nuclear transfer is cloning." http://www.2tricky.org/deceptive.htm

Potential for Exploitation!

2Tricky.org also explains the potential for exploitatin and a mini-Gold Rush in human tissue:

Amendment 2's backers want permission to clone an unlimited number of human beings for research. If they succeed, they will need literally millions of human eggs. Amendment 2 would allow fertility clinics to pay women any amount of money for their eggs, creating a mini-Gold Rush in human tissue.

Amendment 2 even allows women to sell any fertilized eggs (frozen human embryos) left over from infertility treatments. Does that amount to buying and selling human beings? You decide. But Amendment 2's backers are keeping it hush-hush. http://www.2tricky.org/exploitive.htm

The Process

"Harvesting" human eggs is difficult and unnatural, and it can be very dangerous. The process involves pumping women so full of hormones and fertility drugs that their ovaries release as many as 15 eggs at once (instead of one at a time). Women can die as a result of their ovaries being over-stimulated, and they risk future infertility problems too.

Once the ovaries release all those "extra" eggs, collecting them is no picnic either. Women are sedated and a long needle is passed through the wall of the vagina. But with the promise of easy money, women—especially cash-strapped college students and minorities—will turn themselves into living egg farms despite the health risks.

Protecting the Researchers

Amendment 2 also includes a legal loophole that would shield cloning researchers from responsibility when women are injured or die while selling their eggs.

Amendment 2 makes it illegal to "discourage" or "create disincentives" for cloning human life. And that could certainly include filing wrongful-death lawsuits.

Deliberately Confusing!

If Amendment 2 were really about banning human cloning, it would be just a few sentences long ... But Amendment 2 will take up five pages on your laser printer. It's over 2,100 words long. What's going on here?:

Amendment 2 is confusing because the special-interest lawyers who wrote it wanted it to be confusing. It would provide legal protections for researchers who create and destroy human life. It would practically guarantee limitless government funding of that research. It would create a cottage industry in human eggs. And it would insulate researchers from legal responsibility when things go wrong. http://www.2tricky.org/confusing.htm

The Permanence !

Its 2,100 words would alter 45 different sections of Missouri's Constitution. And those changes would last forever.

Amendment 2 would create a constitutional right to create, destroy, buy, and sell humanlife. This is among the most controversial topics of our lifetimes, and it's still in its infancy. There's no telling how Missourians' opinions might evolve and shift in the coming decades. But once human cloning is enshrined in the state Constitution, there's no going back.

If Amendment 2's backers successfully lobbied Jefferson City for a law to protect cloning, lawmakers would at least be able to change their minds in the future. But adding it to the Missouri Constitution would prevent any future state General Assembly, county commission, or city council from even "discouraging" human cloning. http://www.2tricky.org/permanent.htm

"The ballot summary [of Amendment 2] will tend to mislead those who are philosophically opposed to all nuclear transfer … nuclear transfer is cloning." Judge James Smart, Missouri Court of Appeals

The Money Behind the Legislation!

Statement from Cathy Ruse, chief spokesperson, Missourians Against Human Cloning

Already the biotech special interests behind the deception that is Amendment 2 have spent $30 million; it’s an attempt to buy an amendment to the Missouri Constitution.

...The biotech special interests have committed to spending whatever it takes because the amendment is so deceptive, the smoking gun language that proves it’s actually a cloning amendment won’t be on the ballot which just has a summary. In reality, Amendment 2 is actually five pages long but the public will not get to see all the fine print on the ballot. http://www.nocloning.org/MAHC_Oct17-Statement.pdf

Partial Birth Abortion: Clash of Worldviews

From the American Center for Law & Justice website:

... Thirty years ago, on January 22, 1973, a major culture shift took place in the United States. With a devastating stroke of a pen the United States Supreme Court shifted the law away from the major worldview that had occupied the thinking of our country since its birth. The decision, Roe v. Wade, made legal the termination of pregnancy by abortion across the nation. It was argued that this would only result in early first trimester abortions - history has proven otherwise. The results of that decision are still being felt today. In the latest reporting data from the Centers for Disease Control there have been approximately 42,036,175 abortions (5) in the past 30 years in the U. S. since Roe v. Wade .

.... One of the clearest voices of the 20th century was Francis Schaeffer, the Christian philosopher. He was like a voice crying in the wilderness over the issue of abortion as legalized by the Roe v. Wade decision.

In the mid-1970's Schaeffer warned that the decision created a "slippery slope" - making it easy to move from early term abortion to late term, like partial-birth abortion, and even euthanasia.

History has proven that Schaeffer was a prophet in speaking to this issue. Abortion has gone from the early trimester, a wrong in itself, to what is called "partial-birth abortion."

Partial-birth abortion is nothing less than infanticide, because the infant is all but completely delivered and then is killed. In most cases this baby is entirely capable of living outside of the mother's womb at the time that this procedure is performed.

There is a clash of worldviews over the issue of partial-birth abortion. The first worldview is, of course, that of the Judeo-Christian tradition. This worldview sees God as the creator of all there is, including life, and man as being under the authority of God and his Word. For over 200 years this was the predominant worldview in the United States.

The second worldview is that of secularism, or humanism, that places man and woman in the position of authority. Under that philosophy, whatever man wants is supreme; God doesn't exist in any real and meaningful way. The shift to this second worldview in our courts and laws is what leads to the approval of procedures like partial-birth abortion.

With a Biblical worldview there are objective and absolute standards by which to judge right and wrong. When there are no objective standards, then there are no absolutes by which to judge society. When there are no absolutes, men and women are left to do what is "right in their own eyes." Society is then shaped by one individual, or group of individuals, becoming the absolute authority. Schaeffer called this being ruled by the "elite." And that can change with the changing of leadership or shifting public opinion.

When Roe v. Wade became the law of the land most people never dreamed that it would push America's view of life to such a low. Schaeffer saw it and he warned about what was to come. But most Americans thought that they could live with unborn children, who were not visible, being "terminated," and they could not see where that view of life would ultimately lead.

Today the practice of partial-birth abortion has pushed the limits of rational procedures. The Supreme Court has yet to affirm life concerning partial-birth abortions, rejecting the constitutionality of a Nebraska ban on the procedure (Stenberg v. Carhart).

This procedure is so repulsive that Justice Antonin Scalia in Stenberg v. Carhart, issued a strong dissent and stated:

The method of killing a human child - one cannot even accurately say and entirely unborn human child - proscribed by this statute is so horrible that the most clinical description of it evokes a shudder of revulsion."

In the same case Justice Clarence Thomas gave a vivid description of the procedure and went on to state:

"... the particular procedure at issue in this case, 'partial-birth abortion,'
closely borders on infanticide . . ."

Source Link: http://www.aclj.org/Issues/Resources/Document.aspx?ID=443

Excerpts from the Senate floor debate on S. 3, the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003.
http://www.aclj.org/Issues/Resources/Document.aspx?ID=441 - excellent speech

News from the Laci Peterson murder case in California sparked a number of questions from callers to "Jay Sekulow Live." Word that Scott Peterson was charged with the murders of both his wife and his unborn child led callers to ask about how causing the death of an unborn child differs from abortion. Jay explains so-called "fetal homicide" laws and the implications of this case on the pro-life movement: http://www.aclj.org/Issues/Resources/Document.aspx?ID=440

Link to Jay Sekulow's TV broadcasts on the latest issues: http://www.aclj.org/OnTheTv/

Also to the latest updates can be found here: http://www.aclj.org/Search/?sc=partial%20birth%20abortions

Brief Bio - Jay Sekulow:

Jay Alan Sekulow is Chief Counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a law firm and educational organization that specializes in constitutional law. He is also Chief Counsel of the European Center for Law and Justice (ECLJ).

In 2005, TIME Magazine named Sekulow one of the "25 Most Influential Evangelicals" in America and called the ACLJ "a powerful counterweight" to the ACLU

Business Week said the ACLJ is "the leading advocacy group for religious freedom." Sekulow's work on the issue of judicial nominees - including possible vacancies at the Supreme Court - has received extensive news coverage including a front page story in The Wall Street Journal. In addition, The National Law Journal has twice named Sekulow one of the "100 Most Influential Lawyers" in the United States. (1994, 1997)