A friend has written in with this request:
Dear Andrea: my elder daughter is trying to find good resources to help her think about start- and end-of-life issues (recently having to think about the Groningen Protocol). Do you have any suggestions for her?
What might your suggestions to this student in university be? Please write in with any resources you think are helpful.
by 
I have one book that I highly recommend for questions and answers on life issues.
Pro-Life answers to Pro-choice arguments by Randy Alcorn
It is set out methodically by subject matter, listing all the questions people ask about the unborn and their right to life. And Alcorn gives good short answers to all the questions.
Both these sections on the Priests for Life Canada site have a ton of info and a number of external links:
http://www.priestsforlifecanada.com/English/Resources/
http://www.priestsforlifecanada.com/English/The_Facts/
Perhaps one might look at HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE Chapter Eleven, p 218 ff, Revell 1976 for a review of the onset of arbitrariness and the disregard for certain categories of individuals like the unborn.
http://www.mercatornet.com has lots of great articles, searchable by topic.
Thank you, everyone. I might add Margaret Somerville, The Ethical Canary, Peter Kreeft, the Unaborted Socrates, the Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform web site http://www.unmaskingchoice.ca/index.html … Giving Sorrow Words by Melinda Tankard-Reist…
It’s hard to think about “where to get started” on this topic!
I’m writing from an iPod, as my laptop recently took I’ll, but I wanted to add Feminists for Life. There are many good essays there from early writers and info specifically for university students looking to get involved. And also a great speech called “a serious proposal to the Young Ladies” by Mary Astell.
Margaret Somerville is questionable on the issue of abortion; she believes that it should be allowed in the first trimester and that changing that would do more damage than good. I don’t consider her pro-life in the true sense. Her work on end of life issues is tremendous however.
CCBR’s Pro-Life Classroom section (as mentioned above: http://www.unmaskingchoice.ca) for sure – they’ve got both written material and videos with all sorts of good info.
In terms of books, “The Case for Life” by Scott Klusendorf outlines the pro-life case on abortion and the treatment of embryos (cloning, embryonic stem cell research, etc.) with lots of footnotes referring to various studies, court cases, and other books. He’s also written another, shorter book called “Pro-Life 101”.
abort73.com has a section called “The Case Against Abortion” which is also nicely laid out.
And if you’re looking for summaries of arguments in support of abortion, many of the pamphlets, posters, and chants you’re likely to encounter at university can be found right here: http://www.arcc-cdac.ca/student.html
I would recommend National Geographic’s documentary series “In the Womb”.
Work by National Right to Life’s Robert Powell Center for Medical Ethics is excellent for end-of-life issues and the quality-of-life ethic threatening not only the elderly but also the non-terminal disabled. (Though, unfortunately, the website is a little tough to work with, nrlc.org in general is a goldmine of great stuff for everything pro-life.)
Here’s a start on assisted suicide: http://nrlc.org/MedEthics/CaseAgainstAssistingSuicide.html
A lot more great info at the links along the bottom. The work on discriminatory healthcare rationing, and the threat it poses to those arbitrarily perceived as having a poor quality of life, is excellent. Though much focus is on the situation in the US, the growing problem of declaring life-saving medical treatment no longer worthwhile merely because of someone’s age or disability, is sadly widespread.
PLease have her contact me Andrea. I will connect her via email with a mom from holland who did NOT want her baby euthanized but came in to visit in the NICU only to find the morphine IV being set up to kill her little girl. She stopped it just in time.
Her daughter lived for 7 months and was a great joy to her parents.
I would also be pleased to share the policies regarding DNR and narcotic use in the NICUs in Ontario for certain children.
At least some countries are transparent about their actions. Let us not point fingers at others when we have some interesting things happening in house.
If your friend’s daughter is looking for high-calibre philosophical resources, I would recommend:
The Public Discourse the on-line journal of The Witherspoon Institute, Body-Self Dualism in Contemporary Ethics and Politics by Patrick Lee and Robert P. George, The Ethics of Abortion: Women’s Rights, Human Life, and the Question of Justice, by Christopher Kaczor and Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia: A Natural Law Ethics Approach by Craig Paterson.