New Pro-Life Sort Film Offers Unique View on the Reality of Abortion

by Susan Tyrrell | Washington, DC | LifeNews.com | 11/21/14 11:59 AM

National

With this opening, viewers are in for a surprise in this new pro-life short film, “The Appointment – a mother’s choice,” both directed and partly produced by filmmaker Brandon Rice.

We see the prisoner, bound in cuffs, behind the screen, but the interrogator says, “What’s in that room is irrelevant… The only significance he has is what you decide to give him.”

The words sound like a pro-abortion argument, but the film uses a twist that will cause viewers to see abortion in a new light. When it comes to controversial issues, it is often difficult to say something new which keeps people from tuning out. That’s the power of this film; it makes people look at abortion differently. And that was the goal.

Rice says he purposely did not make the film either blatantly pro-life or overtly Christian. He says that by not having these overt overtones, the film becomes more accessible to all people, not just the usual pro-life Christian viewers, so they wouldn’t be instantly turned off by a label they might not desire. He says:

“If people without a religious faith see it, it may cause them to think and choose life anyway.”

The ending is powerful and shines light on the real “choice” of abortion a subtle but powerful way. This is what Rice and the filmmakers with this project, which he says he didn’t want to be an “in your face” message movie.

Rice’s vision for the film came about when he was sitting in church on Memorial Day. The pastor made a comment about having a moment of silence for everyone who had died in war, and how it would take years of silence to do that. “It was a crazy amount of time,” he noted. But what the pastor said next moved him more. He said that if you had to have a moment of silence for every aborted child, then it would have to be, as Rice puts it, “astronomically” more time than for the soldiers that had been killed. “I was just like blown away by that; it just hit me really hard.” Later that day, he told his wife he really wanted to do something to highlight the problem of abortion. He says:

“I just don’t see how you could ever even consider it. And I hope that there are more children in the world because of this movie, Even if it’s just one child.

“We’re getting up in arms about all these other… social issues and every single day every single day this is happening and it’s kind of been put to the side a little bit I think. It’s funny because we care more about animals being put down and shelters them we do about babies. We should have adoption drives for babies not animals.”

His passion for the subject was matched by his filmmaking friends. Matt Green and Anthony Tyler Quinn had already written a script for the short film; Rice loved it and asked to direct it. Rice feels short films are “a good way to communicate something to someone in a short chunk.”

The group ran an immensely successful Kickstarter campaign to fund the film. They’re not charging for the film because they think it’s important for people to see. Rice says:

“At the end of the day, all the main crew members and the creators behind it, really the heart is to see this affect people’s lives to the point that they will make the choice to let their babies survive.

“When you have passion involved in something at that level, I just think it just shows on screen.”

He also sees the reality of his 3-year old daughter’s development: “I look at my daughter and I see how she has developed from this infant, even before she was an infant when she was still developing in pregnancy… Not being able to do anything, and now she’s three and she can’t stop talking. “

LifeNews Note:  Susan Michelle Tyrrell writes for Live Action News, reprinted with permission.

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Groundbreaking Technology Could Allow Parents to See Hologram of Their Unborn Baby

by Steven Ertelt | Washington, DC | LifeNews.com | 11/24/14 7:47 PM

If ultrasound has been a marvel, a new groundbreaking technology could help even further. A new hologram technology could allow parents to see a hologram of their developing unborn baby.

Here’s more, along with a fascinating video:

Holographic displays that could show mothers their child before it is born, and let surgeons manipulate a holographic display of a patient’s internal organs are being developed.

Technology giant Philips is developing the system with Israeli firm RealView.

They recently conducted the first trial of the system, with heart surgery.

The pilot study involved eight patients and was conducted in collaboration with the Schneider Children’s Medical Center in Petach Tikva, Israel.

RealView’s system was used to display interactive, real-time 3D holographic images acquired by Philips’ interventional X-ray and cardiac ultrasound systems.

In addition to viewing the patient’s heart on a 2D screen, doctors in the interventional team were able to view detailed dynamic 3D holographic images of the heart ‘floating in free space’ during a minimally-invasive structural heart disease procedure, without using special eyewear.

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Brooke Shields Was Almost an Abortion Victim: My Grandfather Paid My Mother to Abort Me

by Maria Vitale Gallagher | Washington, DC | LifeNews.com | 11/19/14 11:08 AM<!–Email–><!–Email–>

An ‘80s icon, she defined beauty and elegance. She socialized with living legends such as pop star Michael Jackson and tennis great Andre Agassi. I even worked with a TV producer who, during his time as a piano accompanist, had worked with Shields on a musical number.

He said she was the most beautiful woman he had ever met.

From an outsider’s point of view, she seemed to live a charmed life. But it was not Cover Girl perfect—her marriage to Agassi ended in divorce and she battled post-partum depression, a struggle she courageously and, in her own inspiring way, revealed in her book Down Came the Rain.

Now the super celebrity is out with a new missive, There Was a Little Girl. In the interest of full disclosure, I have only read a sample so far, but I was especially struck by a passage about the drama that surrounded her life pre-birth.

Shields writes in her book that, when her mother became pregnant, her boyfriend did not appear ready to assume the role of father. She surmises that he told his own Dad, who in turn, decided to convince her mother to “terminate the pregnancy.” Her grandfather explained to her mother how an out-of-wedlock birth could jeopardize her father’s standing on the “Social Registry.” Her granddad even went so far as to give her mother money for the abortion (This was pre-Roe v. Wade).

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Instead of visiting an abortionist, her mother went to an antique store and used the money to buy a coffee table.

Shields remarks that the table ironically became a favorite of hers, which she used to pull herself up from the floor as a toddler.

She writes, “The table saved my life and helped me to stand.”

It is hard to imagine the pop culture landscape without Brooke Shields. To think someone of such beauty and grace could have had her life ended before birth is so mind-boggling. Shields is a mother herself, so an entire family could easily have been swept away if her mother had chosen to cave into pressure and abort.

How many stars have been lost to abortion? You might think it’s impossible to count, but actually the number is more than 56 million. For every child who is aborted is a star in God’s galaxy—every single life has value and dignity.

We now just have one more beautiful face to remember as we contemplate the thin line between life and death in our world today.

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Advances in Adult Stem Cell Research Make Use of Embryos Outdated and Unnecessary

by Gene Tarne | Washington, DC | LifeNews.com | 11/18/14 1:59 PM<!–Email–><!–Email–>

But for well over a decade now, ethically contentious human embryonic stem cell research (hESCR) has notably failed to live up to all its hype, with promises of miracle cures within “five to 10 years” remaining unfulfilled.

That remains true today, despite all the renewed hype that accompanied recent reports that researchers had coaxed hESCs into becoming insulin-producing cells.

In October, researchers published an article in Cell describing how they had, for the first time, successfully used hESCs to create insulin-producing beta cells that were also responsive to changes in glucose in their environment.  The team was led by Harvard researcher Douglas Melton, who began his quest to create such beta cells from hESCs some 15 years ago.

But during that period, a major breakthrough in stem cell research occurred, a breakthrough that researchers could only dream of when Melton first began his work with hESCs.

In 2007, Shinya Yamanaka developed a method to induce ordinary somatic cells – such as a skin cell – to revert to a fully pluripotent, embryonic-like state.  Yamanaka dubbed these cells “induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs).  Sooner than almost anyone had expected, researchers now had a method to create a relatively abundant supply of pluripotent stem cells without resort to human cloning or the destruction of living human embryos.  Moreover, these stem cells were patient-specific, creating the unprecedented   opportunity to pursue disease tracking and drug testing using human cellular models genetically identical to the patients.  Recognizing the magnitude of Yamanaka’s achievement, the Nobel Prize committee awarded him the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2012 – a mere five years after his discovery.[i]

While they did not receive as much attention in media reports, Melton and his team also reported generating insulin-producing beta cells from iPSCs that were identical to those generated from hESCs.

Writing at his Family Research Council blog site, Dr. David Prentice, FRC’s Senior Fellow for Life Sciences, notes:

“The [Melton et al.] paper itself makes the case that embryonic stem cells are not needed…The authors tested batches of [beta] cells made from hESC as well as from hiPSC.  The results were equivalent no matter the starting cell type.  So for any future production of [beta] cells, the authors have shown that no embryonic stem cells are necessary (emphasis added).”

This recalls the criterion for pursuing hESC research, laid down in 1999 by then- President Clinton’s National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC), the first presidential bioethics panel to recommend federal funding for such research.

According to the NBAC report, harvesting “left-over” In Vitro Fertilization (IVF)  embryos for stem cells “is justifiable only if no less morally problematic alternatives are available for advancing the research (at pg. 53).”  In other words, given the ethical problems associated with hESCR, it should not be pursued if viable, ethically non-contentious alternatives to it exist.  At the time, the NBAC judged that such alternatives did not exist; however, that judgment was provisional and “is a matter that must be revisited continually as science advances.”

Clearly, Melton’s research shows that ethically non-problematic iPSCs are capable of producing functioning, insulin-producing beta cells identical to those he created using hESCR, thus rendering the continued use of hESCs no longer “justifiable.”

Moreover, while it will likely be many years before the beta cells produced by Melton and his team reach clinical trials, patients with Type 1 diabetes have already been successfully treated using ethically non-contentious adult stem cells.

In 2007, Northwestern University’s Dr. Richard Burt, along with a team of Brazilian doctors, led a groundbreaking study that used adult stem cells to reverse Type 1 (juvenile) diabetes in patients.  That study was reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and a second study was also published in JAMA in 2009 (see also the New Scientist, here).

Burt has used a similar adult stem cell treatment to treat patients with other auto-immune disorders, including MS, lupus, and scleroderma.

Dr. Denise Faustman of Massachusetts General Hospital has had promising results in treating Type 1 diabetes without using stem cells at all.  The treatment involves a vaccination made from an inexpensive generic drug that destroys the rogue cells responsible for attacking the insulin-producing cells found in the pancreas.  Using this method, Faustman succeeded in reversing Type 1 diabetes in mice, and she has also completed a Phase 1 clinical trial in human patients.

There is no doubting the technical prowess displayed by Melton and his team in creating beta cells from both hESCs and induced pluripotent stem cells.  The first source is ethically contentious, while the second source is not.

But applying the NBAC standard that hESC research is not justifiable and should not be pursued if alternatives exist, what Melton and his team have demonstrated in terms of possible stem cell treatments for diabetes is not the continued need for hESCs, but rather just how unnecessary, as science advances, they have become.

LifeNews Note: Gene Tarne is senior analyst for the Charlotte Lozier Institute.

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[i] Researchers have found that, in all fields, the frequency of the Nobel being awarded after 20 years is increasing.  While Nobel’s will stipulated that the prize be given to discoveries made during “the previous year,”  a former chairman of the Nobel Prize Committee for Physiology or Medicine, Ralf Pettersson, says the Nobel Assembly today interprets “previous year” to mean “the year the full impact of the discovery has become evident.

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