Category Archives: Global: Sanctity of Life

Christian Concern: More than 7 out of 10 MPs refuse to put their weight behind calls to legalise assisted suicide, a new ComRes poll has revealed.

Christian Institute: A Scottish politician has gathered enough signatures from a handful of MSPs to have a second attempt at legalising assisted suicide.

C-FAM: A new study critiquing a drug’s effectiveness in childbirth sparked a vicious backlash from the abortion lobby this week, deepening concerns over the politicization of international maternal health research. A study published in the prestigious journal of the Royal Society of Medicine investigated how well the drug misoprostol prevents life-threatening bleeding in women who have just delivered a baby. It found that existing research is insufficient to justify the inclusion of misoprostol on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) list of essential medicines.

AP: A woman killed her five infants shortly after giving birth in secret at home and in the woods because each time she got pregnant she worried her husband would leave . . .

Chicago Tribune: Switzerland’s parliament voted against a bid to toughen controls on assisted suicide on Wednesday, rejecting concerns about foreigners travelling to the country to die.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: USAID used the occasion of World Contraception Day to announce a new commitment to provide the longterm contraceptive implant – known as Jadelle, to women in the poorest countries of the world.

Belfast Telegraph: A sexual health charity has challenged the Health Minister to issue guidance on abortion in Northern Ireland to health professionals immediately after the latest round in a legal battle. The Family Planning Association has won High Court permission to challenge the failure to issue new Government guidelines on abortion here.

The Province: A group of Conservative MPs, including at least one cabinet minister, will get the chance to do something Wednesday that’s usually taboo: Vote against Stephen Harper. The prime minister and the Conservative party whip, Gordon O’Connor, have both come out unequivocally against backbench MP Stephen Woodworth’s pro-life motion. They view it as a potential reopening of the abortion debate, something the Conservatives promised not to do during the last election.

ACLU: Today, President Barack Obama signed an executive order that will give better protections to vulnerable workers employed by government contractors. The order, announced on the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, lays out new requirements for U.S. government contractors and their subcontractors operating overseas to prevent human trafficking and forced labor.

AP: Legislators have voted in Uruguay by a razor-thin margin to legalize abortion.

AP: The number of doctor-assisted suicide cases reported in the Netherlands grew by 559 between the years of 2010 and 2011, a commission says.

France24.com: A Danish sperm donor has passed a potentially severe genetic disorder to five children after a screening test failed to catch that he had the disease, health officials said Monday.

LifeSiteNews: A woman studying to be a teacher, who had attempted to abort her child through a chemical abortion, died in the city of Embu North, the capital of Kenya’s Eastern Province. AllAfrica.com reports her fellow students at St. Mark Teachers Training College discovered her “gasping and groaning in pain.” At the same time, a prominent businesswoman died in the eastern part of the country. Judith Amoit, the 31-year-old owner of a hotel in Teso South, died from the after-effects of an abortion last Wednesday.

The World: In Spain a liberalized abortion law could soon be amended, making the procedure once again criminal. In 2006 Spain’s then-socialist government changed the law, allowing any woman to get an abortion up until 14 weeks. Now the conservatives are back in power, and they want the restrictions back too.

BBC: A sexual health charity has been granted High Court permission to challenge the government’s alleged failure to issue new guidelines on abortion in Northern Ireland.

LifeSiteNews: Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party say they will allow a free vote on Stephen Woodworth’s pro-life motion, which will be up for a vote on Wednesday.

LifeNews: Members of the Canadian Parliament spent the second hour today debating Motion 312, which says Canada should re-examine when human life begins.

LifeSiteNews: Tanzania has only about 120 people per square mile, but the population controllers talk endlessly about overpopulation in the country, claiming that more people means more poverty.

LifeNews: On September 13, All Girls Allowed (AGA) sent out a press release with the bold title, “Chinese Government Bans Forced Abortion.” We wish we could agree with our colleagues at AGA. Unfortunately, this time, we cannot.

Globe and Mail: A Conservative MP is passionately defending his bill that would require Parliament to study the point at which a baby becomes a human being – legislation critics say is a backdoor attempt to criminalize abortion. But Stephen Woodworth concedes he is unlikely to get the support needed to move the initiative forward.

BioEdge: China, a nation notorious for stifling fertility with its draconian one-child policy, is now worried about an epidemic of infertility. The head of Guangdong’s family planning commission, Luo Wenzhi, is appealing for sperm donors. “Donating your sperm is healthy,” he told a Chinese newspaper. “It won’t hurt you nor kill you.”

Catholic Herald: It is, on the face of it, encouraging that there has been such widespread, and such critical, reporting of the case of a Down’s syndrome patient who is taking legal action against an NHS trust after a “do not resuscitate” (DNR) order was put on his medical file without his knowledge or the knowledge of his next of kin.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: All Girls Allowed called a family planning officer in Chongqing to verify that China did in fact suspend forced abortions and sterilizations. ”A committee member confirmed that they had issued an order on August 30th prohibiting forced sterilization and banning the use of late-term abortions to enforce the policy.”

Jonathan Van Maren at LifeSiteNews: Did a graphic image of an aborted baby take down China’s policy of forced abortion?

LifeSiteNews: The largest private sector union in Canada staged a protest outside the constituency office of pro-life MP Stephen Woodworth on Wednesday. The Canadian Auto Workers Union (CAW) organized the demonstration against the Kitchener Centre MP to protest Motion 312, according to The Waterloo Record.

Trust.org: Ruth Achieng, one of 40 HIV-positive women planning to sue the Kenyan government for forced or coerced sterilisation, knew nothing about her operation until it was too late.

Christian Science Monitor: Poland has one of Europe’s strictest abortion policies, but critics say it has only driven the practice underground. Now, parliament is expected to consider a bill that would ease restrictions.

Christian Institute: Fears that European judges could force churches to conduct gay weddings against their will are “legitimate”, Cabinet Minister Eric Pickles has said.

C-FAM: A panel of experts warned U.S. lawmakers this week that the UN Disabilities treaty could threaten the rights of parents and advance abortion rights.

SMH.com.au: An anti-abortion conference has been gatecrashed by a group of feminists who threw a ballet shoe at a keynote speaker, as tensions rise over the approval of a controversial pregnancy termination drug.

LifeNews: The British Medical Association Council, the governing body of the UK doctors’ trade union, has just elected a new deputy chairman.

Christian Concern: A witness in the trial of two Brighton residents who face charges for displaying images of aborted babies outside an abortion clinic began today (12 September) said that the BPAS (Wistons) clinic in Brighton which he was attending on 15 June 2011 with his partner offered no counselling .

Christian Institute: Another health minister has spoken out in favour of reforming the law on assisted suicide. Liberal Democrat minister Norman Lamb joins colleague Anna Soubry in calling for a change in the law. He said: “Where there is someone who is facing a terminal illness, there is a case for a debate.”

The Age: Sydney’s Catholic Archbishop has questioned whether the gender imbalance caused by the selective abortion of female foetuses could hinder the rise to affluence of China and India.

Christian Concern: Abortion provider Marie Stopes International (MSI) has threatened to take legal action against a pro-life pregnancy centre for distributing a leaflet on the adverse effects of abortion on mental health.

Christian Institute: Assisted suicide should be allowed in Britain according to a newly-appointed health minister – but her comments have been swiftly criticised by a leading doctors’ union and an MP in her own party.

John Waters at the Irish Times: A STRIKING aspect of the culture we are industriously constructing is the automatic assumption that individual claims regarding “rights” must trump more established concepts of societal organisation and human self-reflection. By a process of purposeful osmosis, Irish culture has of late been painstakingly manipulated to make one set of understandings appear outmoded and pernicious, and the other axiomatic and benign.

Inquirer News: The Senate has removed controversial provisions that purportedly promote abortion and the use of birth control devices in a bid to break a deadlock in its version of the reproductive health (RH) bill.

C-FAM: Several new studies have found abortion drugs – touted as a solution to illegal, unsafe abortions – are linked to increased maternal deaths and suffering.

Melinda Gates says that despite criticisms from the church, she still feels obligated to bring safe contraceptives to the developing world:” We shouldn’t shy away, as a world, from doing things because we have made them difficult. Yes, contraceptives have had some sticky times in the past – absolutely – some not great things happened in Peru, our own country and in India and other places. But it means that we stepped back from it as a world and yet we are letting women die because they can’t space their children.”

LifeSiteNews: As the Uruguayan Chamber of Deputies prepares to vote on the depenalization of abortion, ultra-popular ex-president Tabaré Vázquez has a message for legislators: read my veto—again.

Zenit: Any healthy or decent society rests on three pillars, professor Robert P. George of Princeton University told a group gathered in Sydney earlier this month. George spoke at the John Paul II Australian Leaders Forum on Aug. 11.

LifeNews: Why not? He or she is just a ball of cells, a blastocyst. Why would you even care? Maybe because the lives of “spare” IVF embryos do matter. Let Australian Jen Vuk’s testimony to her growing anxiety over what to do with her last frozen offspring speak a warning to the practice of the mass production of embryos in IVF.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: On 28 August 2012, the second section of the European Court of Human Rights issued its first judgment concerning access to pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). This technique of screening and selection of embryos conceived in vitro aims at giving birth to a child who is not suffering from a genetic disease. It stems from this judgment that access to PGD may de facto be considered a human right in Europe, a right indirectly guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights. This judgment is not final; the Italian Government already announced that it will request the referral of the case before the Grand Chamber for reconsideration.

Christian Concern: The report, published in the Journal Human Reproduction, claimed that the overall risk was still low, even though the data showed that women were three times more likely to have a very premature baby (born before 28 weeks) if they had previously had 3 or more abortions.

Christian Institute: Sex education has failed to tackle teenage pregnancy rates over the last 40 years, an academic analysis of the data concludes. Professor David Paton looked at the statistics and says the under-16 pregnancy rate has not fallen significantly in four decades.

SMH.com.au: THE abortion pill RU486 will be widely available to Australian women after the Therapeutic Goods Administration approved an application to import the drug by the reproductive health group Marie Stopes International.

C-FAM: Top Asian demographers, population experts, and UN staff gathered in Bangkok this week to address the region’s aging crisis. Despite the severity of the low fertility predicament, abortion, contraception, and “reproductive and sexual health” were the subject of one out of every four papers presented.

LifeNews: Pham Thi Cuong, 74, is doing what so many in Vietnam refuse to do — care for little babies who die before birth in abortions. A new story profiles her work, finding and burying more than 4,000 unwanted babies who have been killed.

Irish Times: . The Supreme Court and the European Court of Justice have ruled on the rights of women. Ministers and politicians can no longer prevaricate. They have to decide which takes precedence: canon law or the law of the land.

LifeSiteNews: “In these cases, both the woman and her child are equally innocent victims of the rapist, and we have a moral obligation to do everything that we can to help both of them, without taking an innocent life,” Precious Life noted. “Rape victims need long term care and compassion not a ‘quick-fix’ solution of abortion.”

LifeSiteNews: Sean Brady is the Cardinal Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, but according to Ireland’s Labour Party he should have no right to engage in any campaigning against legal abortion in the country.

Telegraph: Dozens of couples are flying to the US every year to choose the sex of their babies, a practice banned in Britain three years ago.

AP: Kees van der Staaij, leader of the small Christian fundamentalist SGP party, said Tuesday that after a woman is raped “the chance of pregnancy is very small.”

Forbes: Ireland awaits a September report on its abortion laws by a European Court of Human Rights panel of experts at a time of rising political tensions over the issue and a backdrop of steep declines in the popularity of religion.

LifeSiteNews: We’ve come to expect a certain level of divisiveness in the abortion debate. It’s an emotive subject simply because it concerns the most fundamental right of all — the right to life.

LifeSiteNews: Gaping holes in Canadian abortion data and the surreptitious passage of legislation in Ontario saying abortion data can no longer be obtained, even through a Freedom of Information request, is nothing other than the “obstruction” of democracy, according to a new report by the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (EFC).

LifeSiteNews: Conservative MP Stephen Woodworth’s historic motion (M 312) to debate the personhood of the unborn child in Parliament has been scheduled for Friday, September 21, 2012, the MP’s office has revealed.

NY Daily News: A new prenatal test hit the market in Germany and several other European countries Monday, the manufacturer said, amid a controversy over whether it could lead to more abortions.

Telegraph: Manchester man in vegetative state but family says their faith calls for life to be prolonged as long as possible

LifeSiteNews: Catholic schools that fail to uphold Church teaching may be stripped of their affiliation with the Church, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) warned last week.

LifeSiteNews: An Australian judge has ruled that conception occurs at implantation – when an embryo embeds itself in the wall of the uterus around 9 days into a pregnancy – rather than fertilization – when it is created.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: Sotto had his staff research maternal deaths in the Philippines and found the figure to be less than half of what is being reported.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: A report in the BBC quoted Arie Nieuwenhuijzen Kruseman, head of the Royal Dutch Medical Association saying that British doctors euthanize patients despite it being illegal in the UK. These comments came after the UK High Court ruled for a second time against its legalization.

allAfrica.com: Affirming the importance of women’s access to safe and legal abortion, the Rwandan government has lifted its reservation to Article 14(2)(c) of the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights of Women in Africa (also known as the Maputo Protocol). The Maputo Protocol is the only international treaty that explicitly guarantees the right to legal abortion. Under the Protocol, the Rwandan government is now required to “protect the reproductive rights of women by authorizing medical abortion in cases of sexual assault, rape, incest, and where the continued pregnancy endangers the mental and physical health of the mother or the life of the mother or the fetus.”

George Weigel at EPPC: Despite some hiccups caused by the sorry state of the world economy, China is still The Future for many global analysts. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times has even suggested that Americans have a lot to learn politically from the economic successes of Chinese authoritarianism. That China is the rising world power seems taken for granted in many elite foreign policy circles. I’m not buying. I didn’t buy “Japan is Number One” when that was the mantra two decades ago, because Japan had severe demographic problems-as in, very few children; its lack of the most basic form of people power in the most elementary form, I thought, would soon become evident in economic weakness (as it has). China also has serious demographic problems. Thanks to a brutally enforced one-child policy

C-Fam Friday Fax: U.S. ratification of a UN treaty is stumbling due to a problem that has hounded the treaty since its beginning: does “sexual and reproductive health” include abortion?

Hilary White at LifeSiteNews: “The fallacy in the anti-abortion argument lies in the shift from the scientifically accurate claim that the fetus is a living individual of the species Homo sapiens to the ethical claim that the fetus therefore has the same right to life as any other human being.”

LifeNews: Increasingly we are learning about the deep-seeded prejudice against girls in some Asian countries. With an estimated 163 million women in Asia “missing” due to sex-selective abortion, which is equivalent to the entire female population of the United States, the lives of Asian women are getting worse not better.

O.Canada.com: The organization representing Canada’s doctors says life begins when a baby emerges from its mother’s womb. Delegates to the Canadian Medical Association’s annual general council meeting Wednesday supported keeping a section of the Criminal Code that declares a child becomes a human being at the moment of birth. Their moves comes after concerns that a private member’s motion in Parliament could be a backdoor to criminalizing abortion and the doctors who perform it.

Washington Post: More than 250 Pakistani Hindus have arrived in India over the past two weeks bearing tales of religious persecution, according to Indian border officials, fueling perceptions of growing discrimination against minorities in Pakistan.

Newsletter.co.uk: However, although the number of abortions in Northern Ireland – less than 100 a year – is miniscule by comparison to the rest of the UK, concerns have been raised that some doctors may be getting around the strict ban on abortions in all cases other than those where the mother’s life is in immediate danger. Figures released in the House of Lords to the Crossbench peer Lord Alton show that in 43 years there have been just 143 abortions in England and Wales to save the mother’s life.

Inquirer News: Senate majority leader Tito Sotto alleged on Wednesday that at least four non-government organizations presenting themselves as “pro-women” receive funding from international groups advocating abortion.

Yahoo News: “If we go on like that, this place will fold up, because there’ll be no original citizens left to form the majority, and we cannot have new citizens, new PRs to settle our social ethos, our social spirit, our social norms,” he said, noting that Chinese reproduction rate is now at 1.08, Indians at 1.09 and Malays at 1.64.

The Evangelical Fellowship report is here (pdf).