CNN recently published an article with the deeply euphemistic title, "Woman in coma to be allowed to die." While technically true, it sounds as if it refers to a person who has begged to be allowed to stop extreme treatment measures in order to be allowed to pass in peace.

This is not true.

In fact, Eluana Englaro, an Italian woman who has been in a vegetative state, not a coma, since 1992, is not under any extreme treatment measures. (See this link for more information about the difference between coma and vegatative state.) She breathes without a ventilator. The nuns treating her are eager to continue to provide care for her for the rest of her natural life.

But Ms. Englaro's own family wants to stop feeding her so she will die of dehydration. This is not a dignified death.

In a letter published in a local newspaper, her caregivers wrote, "We don’t ask anything but the silence and the liberty to love and to devote ourselves to those who are weak, poor and little in return." (Source: Life Site News.)

What a tragic turn of events. Ms. Englaro is not suffering (not that suffering would justify murdering her through deliberate neglect) and not a burden on anybody (not that being a burden would justify it, either). If she is capable of suffering (and I pray she is not), she certainly will suffer in the two to three weeks it takes her to die of dehydration, a miserable, painful, and barbaric way to die.

Above: Space shuttle Columbia lifting off at the beginning of STS-107, its 28th and final mission. Courtesy of NASA.

To NASA, it's STS-107. To most of the rest of the world, it was the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster of 2003. A briefcase-sized chunk of foam weighing a little over a pound hit the orbiter's wing at 800 feet per second — that's about 550 miles per hour — damaging the thermal protection system (TPS). The compromised TPS was not adequate to the 3000° F reentry temperatures, and on its landing approach, the shuttle broke up into a handful of fireballs over Texas and Louisiana.

The shuttle disaster happened on my birthday. It's the worst birthday I have ever had.

This catastrophic event recalled to mind the Challenger disaster of 1986, seventeen years and four days earlier. I was in elementary school, and they wheeled a TV into our classroom so we could watch the shuttle explode over the Atlantic Ocean.

Stephanie Barr is a NASA engineer who writes the blog Rocket Scientist. She was part of the STS-107 team, and has a blog post remembering the Columbia tragedy. Go over and read it right now. I'll wait.

Then come back and tell me where you were when the Challenger and Columbia disasters happened.

I am a cradle Catholic, but not a typical cradle Catholic. My mother was deeply suspicious of Vatican II and of the new, vernacular liturgy (the Novus Ordo Missae), so I grew up loosely affiliated with parishes of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X (SSPX).

Background on the SSPX

The Society of Saint Pius X is a radical traditionalist group whose leadership was excommunicated in 1988. The story is long and complex, but in a nutshell, the head bishop, Marcel Lefebvre, illicitly consecrated four more bishops, by which action (according to the Vatican) all the bishops involved incurred a canonical latae sententiae excommunication as a result of direct disobedience.

One of Pope Benedict XVI's major missions has been to normalize relations with the SSPX, and the Catholic blogs and news sources have been abuzz with the word that the Pope last week lifted the excommunications on all the bishops of the SSPX.

Bishop Richard Williamson's infamous remarks

Unfortunately, there has been one "black sheep" SSPX bishop doing his best to muck things up. The man who confirmed me, Bishop Richard Williamson, has made many outrageous statements over the years (he once opined that Pope John Paul the Great had a "weak grasp" of Catholicism), and most recently he has publicly denied some aspects of the Holocaust.

The current head of the SSPX, Bishop Bernard Fellay, has made an extraordinary statement in response to Williamson's remarks. According to the blog Creative Minority Report, always a good source for Catholic gossip, Fellay "prohibited him, pending any new orders, from taking any public positions on political or historical questions," and publicly apologized to the Pope and to "all people of good will" for Williamson's statements.

CNN misses the point

CNN, which is among the worse of sources for Catholic gossip, has been silent on this entire issue until Monday. The headline did not refer to the historic end of the twenty-year excommunication, or to the remarkable lengths the Pope is taking to bring lost sheep back into the flock. No, the headline, astonishingly, was about the Jews: "Pope outrages Jews over Holocaust denier."

I wholeheartedly agree with Jewish leaders that Williamson's public opinions about the Holocaust are outrageous. They are outrageous not only to Jewish people, but to all "people of good will." I'm outraged. We're all outraged.

But Williamson was not excommunicated for denying the Holocaust. He was excommunicated for being consecrated a bishop, in open defiance of the will of Pope. The excommunication was an internal, administrative Catholic matter. It had nothing to do with teaching, beliefs, or opinions. And likewise, lifting the excommunication had nothing to do with teaching, beliefs, or opinions.

Bishop Fellay's public censure of Bishop Williamson could not have been expressed more forcefully. With all due respect to Jewish leaders, understandably stunned by Williamson's comments, they should take their cues from this response, not from the contemporaneous but unrelated lifting of the excommunication.

On the site ObamiconMe, one can create images in the style of the famous "CHANGE" poster for Obama. (See my profile.) A change feared by many Americans is the passage of the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), which would undoubtedly increase the rate of abortion and, according to some reports, require hospitals and clinics to provide elective abortions even if the management opposes the procedure.

These "Obamicons" feature the juniormost Leave the lights on blogger, my 13-month-old son. They're under a Creative Commons license, so feel free to share them. If you put one or both on your blog, you can add a link on the Mr. Linky widget below. Please note that if you do not post one of these posters, your link will be deleted.





Edit: Added new versions with improved backgrounds. For the original images, see Choose Life and Fight FOCA.

As a follow-up to my post listing definitions related to the beginning of human life, here are some diagrams I drew (using my mad skills in Microsoft Paint) illustrating how human fertilization takes place. These raster drawings do not do justice to the miracle of the beginning of a human life, but I hope they clarify the technical aspects.

	The egg and sperm immediately before fertilization. Each has a haploid nucleus containing one of every chromosome.*
	The cell membranes of the egg and sperm fuse. This can be said to be the moment of fertilization. Instead of two gametes, there is now a single zygote.
	As the cell membrane fusion is completed, the nuclei remain separate. The cell itself is thus diploid (containing two copies of every chromosome), but instead of one diploid nucleus, it contains two haploid nuclei. The sperm's tail degenerates.
	The nuclear membranes (not shown) dissolve and the chromosomes replicate. The result is that the zygote now contains two diploid sets of DNA in preparation for the first cell division (mitosis).
	The DNA intermingles into two bodies of chromosomes, each of which comes half from the egg and half from the sperm. These begin to undergo mitosis.
	A cell membrane forms across the middle of the zygote, resulting in two cells. It is now an embryo, not a zygote. Each cell contains a diploid nucleus containing a full copy of both the egg's and the sperm's chromosomes.

*For the sake of simplicity, I omitted the completion of meiosis in the egg's nucleus from these illustrations.

If you read any of the many blogs or news sources that deals with bioethics, then you will have heard of the story from the BBC that a British fertility doctor has successfully performed eugenics via in vitro fertilization. He tested embryos for a gene that is associated with an increased risk of breast cancer, and implanted only those embryos that were pure enough to meet his standards; the rest were killed (euphemistically, "discarded"). What was really remarkable about the story was the ridiculous attempt to redefine standard medical terminology to make the act more palatable. Conception is synonymous with fertilization, but the BBC parroted the doctor in incorrectly claiming that conception is actually synonymous with implantation. This allows the doctors to pretend that the genetic test took place before any human individuals were created by saying it was "pre-conception." For more information, see this post on the blog Mary Meets Dolly.

For the benefit of readers who may encounter mendacious doctors and scientists who deal with beginning-of-life issues, here is a glossary of related terms:

abortifacient

A drug or other substance that induces an abortion. Abortifacients may cause expulsion of the embryo or fetus, killing it, or they may prevent the implantation of an embryo. In the narrowest clinical sense, the latter is not technically the termination of a pregnancy, but it does result in the killing of the embryo.

abortion

The termination of a pregnancy; usually used for terminations before about 20 weeks gestation. Abortions may be spontaneous and natural (in which case they are also called miscarriages) or intentional (in which case they are also called induced abortions). An abortion always results in the death of the embryo or fetus.

adult stem cell

Any stem cell derived from an individual after the embryonic stage of development. Despite the name, they can be obtained from fetuses, umbilical cords, and children as well as from adults. Adult stem cells vary widely in potency. They can be obtained without injuring the donor.

baby

A non-scientific, non-specific term referring to a young human individual. Depending on context, it can refer to a zygote, embryo, fetus, newborn, or older child. Obstetricians routinely refer to embryos and fetuses as "babies" when the pregnancy is wanted, but not if the mother intends to abort the pregnancy. See abortion.

chromosome

A unit of genetic material. Every species has a fixed number of chromosomes.

conception

Synonymous with fertilization.

diploid

Having two copies of each chromosome per cell. In mammals, all cells except gametes are diploid.

egg

Also called an ovum, a female gamete. In humans, eggs are very large cells that are usually produced one at a time.

embryo

An organism from the time of the first cell division to a set point such as birth or hatching. In humans, an individual from the first cell division after conception until eight weeks after conception (ten weeks gestation), at which point it is called a fetus.

embryonic stem cell

A stem cell taken from an embryo. Embryonic stem cells are pluripotent, meaning they can differentiate into almost any tissue type. They are obtained by removing the embryo's inner cell mass, killing the embryo.

eugenics

The practice of attempting to improve the human race by either killing individuals perceived as genetically inferior, preventing such individuals from reproducing, or encouraging increased reproduction for individuals perceived as superior.

fertilization

The union of a haploid egg and a haploid sperm, resulting in a new, independent diploid individual. Fertilization naturally takes place in a woman's Fallopian tube after sperm are introduced through sexual intercourse.

fetus

In humans, an individual from eight weeks after fertilization until birth. A fetus that is near term is indistinguishable from a newborn except in certain physiological characteristics that change at birth, such as the closing of a blood vessel called the ductus arteriosus.

gamete

A haploid reproductive cell whose role is to unite with an opposite-sex gamete to create a new individual. Also called sex cells, they consist of eggs and sperm.

haploid

Having one copy of each chromosome per cell. In mammals, only gametes are haploid; all other cells are diploid.

implantation

The point at which an embryo, at the age of a few days in humans, becomes attached to the lining of the uterus.

in vitro fertilization

Fertilization that takes place outside the human body ("in vitro" literally means "in glass"). In vitro fertilization removes the sex act from reproduction. The zygotes are allowed to develop for several days into embryos, at which time one (or more) is placed inside the mother's body in the hope that it (or they) will undergo implantation, resulting in pregnancy. For practical reasons, it involves the fertilization of multiple zygotes, almost always more than can ever be implanted.

miscarriage

Also called spontaneous abortion, the unintentional termination of a pregnancy as a result of natural causes or, less commonly, accident.

newborn

Also called a neonate, an individual who has very recently been born. A newborn is indistinguishable from a late-term fetus except in certain physiological characteristics related to the loss of the placenta.

pregnancy

In mammals, including humans, the carrying of one or more embryos or fetuses in the uterus. In clinical terms, pregnancy begins at implantation, though the embryo exists as a separate individual in the mother's body before implantation. Thus pregnancy begins after the beginning of an individual human life.

sperm

A male gamete. In humans, sperm are small, motile cells that are produced daily in very large numbers by men's bodies.

stem cell

A cell capable of reproducing indefinitely, and usually capable of developing into one of several types of tissue. Stem cells are classified by "potency," that is, how many different types of tissue they can become. Stem cells are found in developing embryos, in umbilical cords, and in various other tissues such as bone marrow.

zygote

A brand-new, single-celled individual from fertilization until the first cell division, at which point it is called an embryo. The zygote stage in humans is very brief; it experiences the first cell division and becomes an embryo even before implantation.