Category Archives: Global: Sanctity of Life

Center for Reproductive Rights: The Honduras Supreme Court has upheld the country’s absolute ban on emergency contraception, which would criminalize the sale, distribution, and use of the “morning-after pill” — imposing punishment for offenders equal to that of obtaining or performing an abortion, which in Honduras is completely restricted.

LifeSiteNews.com: Experts working for the UNESCO Chair in Bioethics at the University of Barcelona, Spain, are calling for a national registry of doctors who will not perform abortions, in order to “improve” women’s access to “pregnancy termination.”

LifeSiteNews.com: A new “reproductive health” bill being proposed in Tanzania’s National Assembly is “pure western imperialism,” according to a local pro-life leader. Emil Hagamu, Human Life International’s Regional Coordinator for English-Speaking Africa, called the bill “foreign ideology that is being imposed on our African culture whose objective is depopulation.”

News from The Associated Press: Hereditary Prince Alois of Liechtenstein last threatened to use his veto in September to block a plan to legalize abortion.

Janke Blumgart at The Huffington Post: There is a very strong pronatalist [anti-choice] current in Central and Eastern Europe and that goes along with nationalist tendencies in many of these countries,” says Johanna Westeson, European regional director for the Center for Reproductive Rights.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: After the passage of Spain’s liberal abortion law in 2010 the government began subsidizing abortion on demand, providing it at no cost to the mother.

Christian Concern: The Archbishop of Canterbury has warned that any legalisation of assisted suicide or euthanasia would be a “disaster” for Britain, creating circumstances where life would be “legally declared to be not worth living.”

LifeNews.com: The 3-genetic parent embryo is back in the news. This time it is Australia that wants to attempt to genetically engineer a human embryo to have 3 genetic parents.

Telegraph: Girls as young as 13 have been fitted with contraceptive implants at school without their parents knowing.

Telegraph: Two senior judges ruled it would be “manifestly unjust” to stop them helping him prepare a legal challenge to the law on assisted suicide – even if doing so could assist his suicide, which would be illegal.

LifeSiteNews.com: Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s “ironclad” control over Conservative MPs is shutting down debate on public policy, a pro-life MP warned in a recent radio commentary.

LifeSiteNews.com: A report from Taiwanese health authorities says that a crackdown on illegal sex-selective abortions prevented the deaths of nearly 1,000 female unborn babies in 2011.

Fox News: An Australian couple are seeking $10.6 million in damages from their IVF doctor because their son was born with a rare, genetic defect and will suffer a lifelong handicap.

Christian Concern: Andy Stephenson and Kathryn Sloane entered a not-guilty plea yesterday (30 Jan) at Brighton Magistrates’ Court, after being arrested for a demonstration outside an abortion clinic in Brighton on 22 June 2011.

NYTimes.com: The young Afghan woman gave birth to a third girl three months ago — to a husband, the authorities say, who had been demanding a boy.

News from The Associated Press: South Africa is recalling 1.35 million condoms given away at the African National Congress party’s centenary celebrations amid charges some broke during intercourse and others were porous, an official said Tuesday.

LifeSiteNews.com: rotesters demonstrating against abortions being carried out in Barcelona-area Catholic hospitals were attacked by an angry mob pro-abortion counter-demonstrators, some of whom reportedly threw rocks and trash, as well as obscene insults.

Christian Concern: Margo McDonald, the independent MSP, has re-launched her effort to secure legislation which would make assisted dying legal in Scotland, unveiling a new consultation on the issue.

LifeNews.com: The ECLJ welcomes the adoption, by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), of a Resolution setting the principle that “Euthanasia, in the sense of the intentional killing by act or omission of a dependent human being for his or her alleged benefit, must always be prohibited.” This is the first time, in the past decades, that euthanasia is so clearly rejected by a European political institution.

LifeNews.com: Angie Murie, executive director of Planned Parenthood Waterloo Region in Canada, was recently quoted in a National Post article claiming she opposed sex-selection abortions but essentially admitting that women should be able to have abortions for just about any reason.

News from The Associated Press: Spain’s new justice minister says he will reform the country’s abortion law to make parental permission obligatory for 16- and 17-year-olds looking to end pregnancies

Christian Concern: he Advertising Standards Authority has announced its decision to allow commercial abortion providers, which profit from carrying out abortions, to advertise their services on television and radio.

The Christian Institute: Church leaders in Wales have united to criticise “ill-judged” proposals for a system of presumed consent for organ donation.

LifeSiteNews.com (includes video): An appeal to the British Columbia Supreme Court launched by two pro-life activists convicted last June of violating the province’s infamous “bubble zone” law, was dismissed on December 20th by Madam Justice Fisher.

AP on My Way News: To try to ensure that whoever ends his life won’t be jailed, the 57-year-old Nicklinson recently asked Britain’s High Court to declare that any doctor who gives him a lethal injection with his consent won’t be charged with murder. This week, the court will hold its first hearing on the case.

Hertfordshire Mercury News : THE chief executive of a Hertfordshire charity supporting the elderly has defended current legal guidelines for helping seriously ill people to commit suicide.

Christian Concern: When an amendment aimed at giving women with unplanned pregnancies access to independent counselling was lost by 118 votes to 368 last year, things looked grim.

News from The Associated Press: Life seemed to give Karla Zepeda a break when a woman came to her dusty neighborhood of cinderblock homes and dirt roads looking for babies to photograph in an anti-abortion ad campaign.

LifeSiteNews.com: Mexico’s Federal Institute for Access to Information and the Protection of Personal Data (IFAI) has ordered Mexico’s federal prosecutorial wing to begin tracking the number of women in Mexico who have been imprisoned for abortion, according to local media sources.

LifeSiteNews.com: The Irish coalition government has included in an “expert committee” on abortion the lawyer who acted in the notorious “X case,” the 1992 attempt to overturn the country’s constitutional amendment outlawing abortion.

CNSnews.com: In its strategic plan for Africa for the years 2010-215, the International Planned Parenthood Federation has set an organizational goal of increasing its “abortion services” in that part of the world by 82 percent.

LifeSiteNews.com: A majority of legislators in Argentina’s National Congress now say that they support the decriminalization of abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy, according to a poll conducted by the government’s Center for Labor Studies and Investigations (CEIL) and reported by Argentina’s Pagina 12.

LifeSiteNews.com: Mexico’s historically socially-conservative party, the National Action Party (PAN), has nominated a pro-abortion politician for the 2012 Mexico City mayoral race.

Eurasia Review: According to official data from the Belgrade Institute of Public Health, 23,000 abortions are performed in Serbia annually, but unofficial data suggests a number as high as 150,000 . . . A large number of abortions are a potential economic threat to Serbia, because due to its aging population the country can expect a low number of work-age adults in the future.

Business Day: South African Institute for Race Relations survey shows that by 2040, fertility rates are expected to drop below the “replacement level” — where couples have two children to replenish the population

Nyasa Times: University students from several constituent colleges in Malawi have been called up to mull over an idea on the need for Malawi to liberalize laws on abortion which is currently restrictive. The call was made after a panel discussion on abortion held on Saturday in Lecture Theatre One at Malawi College of Medicine which was [...]”

Austin Ruse at LifeSiteNews.com: On the negotiating floor, I approached a Muslim ambassador and said, “This session is going all night long and its going to be very tough going. And when it gets really hard, I want you to know that right over there,” and I pointed to a section of raised seats off to the side, “twenty Christians will be praying for you.” That night this man was a tiger in defense of unborn children.

CBC News: A fetus’s gender should not be revealed until after 30 weeks of pregnancy, says an editorial published in the Canadian Medical Journal. This change in procedure for a fetal ultrasound — where the sex is usually disclosed to parents at 20 weeks — would help prevent female feticide, says Rajendar Kale, editor in chief of the CMAJ.

LifeSiteNews.com: Mexico City’s secretary of health is expressing alarm at the growing number of teen pregnancies in the metropolitan area, according to the city’s Reforma newspaper.

Christian Institute: An increasing number of women expecting multiple births are aborting one or more of their unborn babies.

Catholic Culture: An eye-opening study by Nicholas Eberstadt shows that sex-selection abortion has begun to tip the demographic balance against girls—not just in India and China . . .

The Christian Institute: A contentious plan which would allow terminally ill people to undergo an assisted suicide is not without risk, its own chief architect has admitted.

LifeSiteNews.com: In his first public statement since controversy broke last year, the Winnipeg Catholic school principal who was fired in November after promoting the 40 Days for Life campaign argues that he was used as a “scapegoat” by Church and school leaders to escape negative media attention.

LifeNews.com: Thanks to a recently issued document that analyzes international law, pro-life supporters possess a new and potentially powerful tool to uphold domestic laws protecting unborn human life.

News from The Associated Press: The ministry stopped accepting applications for stem cell procedures until July and is implementing a yearlong campaign to halt unauthorized stem cell therapy trials.

The Christian Institute: Figures in the report show 22.1 per cent of all abortions in the UK in 2008 were carried out on under 20-year-olds – nearly twice the EU average of 12.0 per cent.

LifeNews.com: On Christianity Today’s Her.meneutics blog, BreakPoint editor Gina Dalfonzo wrote a post about girls in India participating in a ceremony to rid themselves of names that mean “unwanted” in Hindi.

LifeSiteNews.com: The groups, representing tens of thousands of pro-life voters across the country, are urging Parliament to consider a proposal by MP Stephen Woodworth (Kitchener-Centre) to revisit section 223 of Canada’s Criminal Code, a 400-year-old provision inherited from British common law that stipulates a child only becomes a “human being” once he or she has fully proceeded from the womb.

ChurchofEngland.org: The commission undertook a quest to find effective safeguards that could be put in place to avoid abuse of any new law legitimising assisted suicide. Unsurprisingly, given the commission’s composition, it has claimed to have found such safeguards. Unlike the commissioners, we are unconvinced that the commission has been successful in its quest.

Christian Concern: Lord Falconer’s ‘Commission on Assisted Dying’ released their proposals today (5 Jan) and recommended that doctors should be allowed to assist terminally ill patients to kill themselves, as long as the patients had less than a year to live, and provided they meet certain criteria.

LifeSiteNews.com: The Forum Research poll, conducted on Dec. 13th, found that 67% support legalizing physician-assisted suicide, while 21% oppose it, and 12% are undecided.

C-Fam Friday Fax: A confidential audit of UNICEF and UNFPA found “gross” failures in transparency and surprisingly billions of dollars of unspent cash. Both agencies refused to disclose information on staff costs and travel. The auditor found that donors have “little knowledge regarding the ultimate destiny” of funds.

Catholic Exchange: The purpose of this article is twofold: first, to point out that the UN isn’t one entity trying to control the U.S. or any other country, and two, that the U.S. is responsible for creating and driving the international agendas that are so abhorrent to pro-lifers.

The Independent: Jody and Simon Blake have spent the past couple of months showing off their twins Reuben and Floren to friends – and delighting in the looks of bemusement that greet them. Because while Reuben went back to school yesterday, his sister Floren will have to wait until 2017.

Christian Today: The UK had the second highest teen abortion rates at a rate of 22.1 per cent, and it has also been reported that a quarter of all abortions in the UK are from teenagers, according to Mail Online.

LifeSiteNews.com: Leaders of the American branch of the Salvation Army have criticized the decision by the international branch of the church to condone abortion in some cases, saying that the new position does not reflect the beliefs of members in the United States.

LifeSiteNews.com: Canada’s Evangelical leaders are backing recent calls by Members of Parliament for a debate on the legal status of children in the womb.

LifeSiteNews.com: Legislation proposed in August 2011, by Angolan Justice Minister Guilhermina Prata to decriminalize abortion in the African country will likely fail now that the Catholic Church has come out in opposition to the measure, according to at least one government minister.

LifeSiteNews.com: Uruguay’s senate passed a bill in late December, by a vote of 17 to 14, that eliminates all penalties for abortions during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.

The Economist: Now, however, comes evidence that India may in fact be succeeding. In a pair of articles in the Indian Express, Surjit Bhalla, an economist, and Ravinder Kaur, a sociologist, use a different set of figures to get a different result. On the basis of the national sample surveys (NSS), they calculate that India’s sex ratio at birth swung from 924 females per 1,000 males in 2004-05 to 977 in 2011, a stunning turnaround in favour of girls.

C-FAM Friday Fax: or decades, a basic tenet of the international population-control lobby has been that declining fertility rates will generate a more stable international order. But according to an impressive panel of scholars who have contributed to a new book, this scenario of “geriatric peace” is untenably optimistic. Population Decline and the Remaking of Great Power Politics is a collection of nine research essays . . .

LifeSiteNews.com: In fact, the opposite is true,” Mr. Woodworth said in a press release. “Canadian law provides no human rights protection whatsoever for children before the moment of complete birth.”

LifeSiteNews.com: The rest of the country is holding on, but only barely, as the Supreme Court stands on the verge of imposing abortion on the entire country. For Americans and Canadians, the above scenario evokes bitter memories of a not-so-distant past, a lost world that slipped away, a society we only dream of having again. But for those of us who live in Mexico, that scenario is a daily reality. It is happening right now.

Turtle Bay and Beyond – International Law, Policy, and Institutions: The U.S. branch of the Salvation Army has quickly distanced itself from the Salvation Army International’s controversial stance on abortion as reported by WND.

LifeSiteNews.com: A new report produced by the United Nations Population Fund, the Armenian ministry of health, and the Institute of Perinatology found that 7,000 Armenian women – or 0.8 percent of all Armenian women of child-bearing age – had elected to have sex-selective abortions since 2006.

LifeSiteNews.com: n a blow to her former leftist supporter base, Peruvian president Ollanta has appointed a pro-life woman to the head of the Ministry of Women and Social Development, after firing her pro-abortion predecessor.

News from The Associated Press: “Batman” star Christian Bale should feel embarrassed for trying to visit a human rights activist while he was in China to promote a movie the country has submitted for an Oscar, a government spokesman said Wednesday.

Turtle Bay and Beyond – International Law, Policy, and Institutions: A report conducted by UNFPA and the Armenian government health ministry revealed that women are aborting their female unborn children. Over the last 5 years over 7,000 women have had sex-selective abortions.

TheAge.com.au: A 42-YEAR-OLD woman died days after attending a controversial abortion clinic in Croydon last week.

LifeSiteNews.com: Use of the abortifacient morning-after pill in Spain has risen by 83% in 2010, the first full year of over-the-counter availability of the dangerous drug, according to a report by ANSAmed news service.

LifeNews: The ABC 20/20 news story is riveting — a revealing look at why there are so many fewer women than men in India. Reporter Elizabeth Vargas traveled to India to bring this story of what is called “Gendercide” home to a stunned American audience.

LifeSiteNews.com: A recently issued report from the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent (IFRC) has caused concerns that the organization may start advocating for abortion rights.

LifeNews: A recently issued report from the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent has caused concerns that the organization may start advocating for abortion rights.

Washington Times: The bill doesn’t actually amend the 2007 law, but does prohibit the administration from spending any money to carry out the light bulb standards — which amounts to at least a temporary reprieve . . . The GOP tried but failed to attach restrictions on the Obama administration’s nuclear waste policy, its international family planning policy and major restrictions on the president’s environmental agenda.

Guardian.co.uk: General Medical Council says law is clear but additional guidance is needed to deal with any complaints against doctors