LIFE DIGEST: Court to rule on benefits for posthumously conceived kids
- Nov 23, 2011 -
The U.S. Supreme Court will rule if children conceived by in vitro fertilization following the death of their father can receive Social Security benefits.
The high court announced Nov. 14 it will decide if the Third Circuit Court of Appeals was correct in ruling twins born four years after the death of their father qualify as his children under the Social Security law of the 1930s.
Also in this edition: More abortion clinics shut down and Geron halts embryonic stem cell trial.
Robert Capato provided semen for deposit in a sperm bank in 1999. After he died of esophageal cancer in March 2002 while a resident of Florida, his widow, Karen, underwent in vitro fertilization with his sperm. She gave birth to twins in September 2003. She had conceived naturally and given birth to a son in 2001.
Karen Capato filed for survivors benefits on behalf of the twins, but the Social Security Administration rejected her claim. An administrative law judge also denied benefits, saying Florida law permits children to inherit personal property only if they are conceived before a parent’s death. A federal judge in New Jersey agreed with that decision.
The Third Circuit, based in Philadelphia, Pa., overturned the lower court, ruling the dependence on state law did not apply in this case. According to the court of appeals, “the undisputed biological children of a deceased wage earner and his widow [are] ‘children’ within the meaning” of the Social Security law.
Lawyers for the Obama administration urged the Supreme Court to review the Third Circuit decision and overturn it, pointing out it conflicts with a ruling by the Fourth Circuit. They said the Social Security Administration has received more than 100 applications for benefits by children conceived after parental deaths, according to Bloomberg News. That number has grown markedly in recent years, they said.
The justices are expected to rule in the case before their term ends next summer.
More abortion clinics shut down
Abortion clinics continue to close around the country.
The two most recent are Michigan centers that were shut down Nov. 21 in an order signed by Circuit Court Judge Calvin Osterhaven of Eaton County. Osterhaven’s judgment closed clinics in Saginaw, Mich., and the Lansing, Mich., area.
It came in an agreement reached by Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette and the clinics’ owners, Richard and Margaret Remund. The order also bars the Remunds from opening another clinic in the state without obtaining the required licenses. The Remunds were not licensed.
Schuette had filed a lawsuit to close the clinics in the wake of a year-long investigation following the discovery by pro-lifers of 17 aborted babies in a dumpster at the Saginaw clinic, according to LifeSiteNews.com.
Monica Migliorino Miller, a Michigan pro-life leader, commended Schuette and said the closing of the clinics “is a huge victory and a direct result of pro-lifers getting active and doing something about illegal clinic practices.”
“We spent hours searching the dumpsters, going through the trash, photographing everything, cataloging everything, going to the sheriff, the county prosecutor and finally the attorney general,” said Miller, director of Citizens for a Pro-life Society, according to LifeSite News. “I have to be honest, there were times when we thought nothing was going to happen. But we just never gave up!”
In other clinic closings:
- The sole abortion clinic in Santa Fe, N.M., is set to close Dec. 23, when abortion doctor Lucia Cies will retire, LifeSite News reported Nov. 18.
- The Eve Surgical Center in Los Angeles, Calif., has closed, according to a Nov. 17 report by the California Catholic Daily. James McMahon , who said he developed the grisly, partial-birth abortion technique, operated the clinic beginning in the 1980s and said he performed about 1,200 abortions a year before his death in 1995, the Catholic Daily reported.
According to LifeSite News, Troy Newman, president of Operation Rescue, said, “The number of surgical abortion clinics has dropped from 2,200 in 1991 to only about 675 today. That is quantifiable evidence that we are winning the hearts and minds of the American people. Abortion is a human rights abuse that will soon be rejected and relegated to the ash heap of history.”
Geron halts embryonic stem cell trial
Geron Corp., which initiated the first federally endorsed embryonic stem cell trial in 2010, has stopped such research – which destroys embryos — because of a lack of funding.
Only 13 months after it received approval for the trial, Geron said it will transfer its funds to cancer research because of the “current environment of capital scarcity and uncertain economic conditions,” Baptist Press reported. The company said it would end the stem cell trial with spinal cord injury patients immediately.
The move “is an atom bomb of a story that will have a serious effect on the entire regenerative medical sector,” said bioethics specialist Wesley Smith in a blog post at National Review Online.
Mailee Smith, staff counsel for Americans United for Life (AUL), said Geron’s decision “hardly comes as a surprise. There simply is no money in research that yields no results.”
“We can hope it is the bell toll for unethical and unproductive embryo stem cell research,” she wrote on the AUL blog. “But it will not have a devastating impact on the field of ‘stem cell research’ as a whole.”
Embryonic stem cell research (ESCR) has been highly touted but has produced no treatments. It is extremely controversial, primarily because extraction of such cells results in the destruction of days-old human embryos.
Meanwhile, human trials with adult stem cells are not only safe for the donor and recipient but have produced treatments for more than 70 ailments in human beings, including spinal cord injuries, according to Do No Harm, a coalition promoting ethics in research.
Research with induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells also has shown promise. This technique involves reprogramming adult skin cells into stem cells virtually identical to those in human embryos, though it has yet to be used in human beings.
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