Category Archives: Global: Sanctity of Life

LifeSiteNews: The political arm of Canada’s pro-life movement is urging the federal Justice Minister to use “whatever legal or punitive measures are necessary” to prevent Quebec from “legalizing euthanasia” and thereby violating the country’s Criminal Code.

LifeNews: Despite some reports claiming China may relax or even do away with its brutal one-child policy, that results in forced abortions, coercive sterilizations and other human rights abuses, Chinese officials are renewing its commitment to it.

Reuters: “If this goes on, there will be no taxpayers, no workers and no caregivers for the elderly,” said Gu Baochang, a demography professor at Renmin University.

LifeSiteNews: Pope Benedict XVI says Catholic agencies must sometimes refuse partnerships that would even indirectly support activities opposed to the Christian view of the human person.

CNSNews: Taro Aso, Japan’s 72-year-old finance minister, says he’s worried about the financial burden that end-of-life care is placing on his country.

Christian Institute: The Government is under reporting the number of babies being aborted for Down’s Syndrome, according to national statistics. The National Down Syndrome Cytogenetic Register (NDSCR) reported that 942 babies with the condition were aborted in 2010.

LifeSiteNews: Although Uruguay recently approved legislation allowing first trimester abortions, women who want to kill their unborn children are likely to experience difficulties in finding a doctor who is willing to do the deed, according to local media sources.

LifeSiteNews: The UK’s busiest abortion organization is offering training sessions for Irish medical students who want to “observe the procedure.” Students can attend one-week externships to “witness how abortion procedures are carried out.”

LifeSiteNews: Tens of thousands thronged the streets of Dublin outside the country’s parliament on Friday night to demand that the Fine Gael/Labour coalition government keep a campaign promise to keep Ireland abortion-free. Demonstrators came from around the country for the vigil and rally, the highlight of which was a phone call to the Prime Minister’s office in which 30,000 people chorused, “Enda, Keep Your Promise.”

Daily Mail: They’re usually thought of as a brutish, primitive species. So what woman would want to give birth to a Neanderthal baby? Yet this incredible scenario is the plan of one of the world’s leading geneticists, who is seeking a volunteer to help bring man’s long-extinct close relative back to life. Professor George Church of Harvard Medical School believes he can reconstruct Neanderthal DNA and resurrect the species which became extinct 33,000 years ago.

Times of the India: In a first-of-its-kind step towards regulating the practice of surrogacy in India, the Union home ministry has issued stringent guidelines for visas being issued to foreigners seeking to rent a womb in India.

LifeSiteNews: Twin brothers, 45, who were born deaf, were euthanized in Belgium last month after they learned that they would soon go blind.

LifeNews: It sounds like the best news we could possibly hear: Media reports claim that China is going to phase out its One Child Policy and allow parents to have two children. Within eight years, the government will allow parents to have as many children as they want.

TIME: Until late last week one of Europe’s most progressive nations had one of the continent’s most repressive policies on transgender people. Swedish law had required all transgender people to undergo sterilization if they want to legally change their sex.

Irish Times: Master of the National Maternity Hospital Dr Rhona Mahony said legislation should be broad enough “to allow regulation to provide the detail and flexibility necessary to deal with current and future circumstance”.

New York Times: Volunteers for the Safe Abortion Hot Line in Chile routinely wear masks when showing support in public for the organization in a country where abortion is illegal under any circumstances.

LifeSiteNews: Israel’s two chief rabbis have again issued a letter to all synagogue and community rabbis urging them to condemn abortion and to support the work of Efrat, the country’s pro-life organization.

C-FAM: Advocates for legal abortion in all circumstances continue to make their case in terms of reducing maternal mortality, despite a growing body of evidence showing that dramatic improvements in maternal health worldwide have been achieved without the liberalization of laws restricting abortion.

LifeSiteNews: This is an astonishing comment given that Lord Steele remains supportive of abortion, but it reflects concerns regarding the staggering number of abortions carried out in Britain – up to 200,000 every single year, with some 20 percent of all pregnancies ended by abortion.

Jerusalem Post: Activists set to demonstrate against Jerusalem Conference for awarding a prize to Efrat, an anti-abortion organization.

LifeNews: Colonialism used to be about the rich exploiting the resources of other lands. Now, biological colonialism (as I call it) finds well off (mostly) Westerners exploiting destitute people in developing countries for their body parts and functions, essentially using people as natural resources. Renting uteruses of destitute Indian women for their gestational capacities–just one form of BC–is apparently on the rise . . .

LifeSiteNews: A new study of Canadian women finds that pregnant women who are married suffer less partner abuse, substance abuse, and post-partum depression than women who are cohabitating or single. Dr. Marcelo Urquia, an epidemiologist at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto . . .

AP: resident Vladimir Putin says a draft bill banning U.S. adoptions of Russian children is a legitimate response to a new U.S. law that calls for sanctions on Russians deemed to be human rights violators. But he has not committed to signing it.

LA Times: People who post offensive messages on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter should face criminal charges only if their comments are harassing or threatening and not simply in bad taste, according to new legal guidelines in Britain that follow a spate of controversial prosecutions.

LifeSiteNews: The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) has suspended a candidate after an uproar when he wrote that it should be mandatory to kill all disabled unborn children. Geoffrey Clark wrote on his website that women carrying children suspected of serious disabilities like Downs syndrome and spina bifida should be forced to have abortions in order to cut back on health care costs.

LifeNews: A detailed letter entitled “Methodological flaws in the estimation of abortion in Latin America: Author’s reply to Singh and Bankole” was published yesterday in Ginecología y Obstetricia de México (Ginecol Obstet Mex), a Mexican peer-reviewed journal specialized in Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Wesley Smith at National Review: Belgium has jumped head-first off a vertical moral cliff with its euthanasia law. As I have documented here and elsewhere, the Belgians have permitted joint euthanasia deaths of an elderly couple and now couple organ harvesting with the euthanasia killings of people with disabilities and even, mental illness.

Wesley Smith at National Review: A report out of Denmark says that 1 in 6 aborted late term babies there show signs of life after temporarily escaping death and being born.

First Things: Ireland’s cabinet offered a proposal today that would legalize abortion in cases where the mother’s life is at risk, including from suicide. Irish Prime Minister Edna Kenny says they system will not lead to “abortion on demand” . . .

Telegraph: Parents who lose children in accidents may be able to clone “copies” to replace them within 50 years, a British scientist who won this year’s Nobel prize for medicine has predicted.

LifeSiteNews: A study of the impact of legalized prostitution has found that countries where prostitution is legal experience larger reported human trafficking inflows than countries in which prostitution is prohibited. Professor Eric Neumayer of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a team of researchers analyzed data on human trafficking from a global sample of 116 countries in order to determine what effect a country’s domestic policy on prostitution has on trafficking, whether as a country of origin, transit or destination for victims.

LifeSiteNews: Belgium legalised euthanasia in 2002, with a law containing strict controls to protect the vulnerable. (This is the text of the law in English.) The Belgium-based European Institute of Bioethics has just released a study (link to English translation) of the experience of ten years of euthanasia. It claims that the results are far from encouraging.

AP: Philippine legislators passed a landmark bill Monday that would provide government funding for contraceptives and sexuality classes in schools despite strong opposition by the dominant Roman Catholic Church and its followers, some of whom threatened to ask the Supreme Court to block the legislation.

LifeNews: In Europe, Ireland is a symbol of resistance against abortion. Nevertheless, Ireland is on the point of giving in to the concerted pressure of the Council of Europe and the pro-abortion lobbies.

Religion Clause Blog: In the Philippines today, the House of Representatives in an historic vote passed a Reproductive Health bill (HB 4244) on its important second reading.

LifeNews: One of the great pro-life victories internationally over the past twenty years has been the defeat of the attempt to make abortion a universally recognized right through U.N. documents. Abortion is not mentioned in a single hard-law treaty and therefore has not risen to the legal level of a “human right.”

LifeNews: After fourteen years of debate, political leaders in the Philippines may be on the verge of passing the controversial, anti-life “Reproductive Health Bill” (RH Bill). The legislation is seen as a precursor to potentially legalizing abortion in the pro-life, Catholic nation.

World Magazine: A new study on abortions in Mexico refutes two main arguments for legalizing abortion and proves a pro-abortion research institute overestimated statistics used to advocate for the procedure. The study disproves claims that banning abortion leads to a large number of illegal procedures, which results in high rates of maternal deaths.

The New American: A recent study out of Denmark appears to show a higher incidence of premature death among women who have had an abortion than for women who give birth. The study tracked a group of Danish women over a 25-year period, finding that those who had undergone a single abortion had a 45-percent higher mortality rate over that time period than those who had carried babies to full term.

First Things: While abortion has not made any real progress through the U.N. rights-based approach, it has made serious advances through its promotion as a basic medical practice. The great engine for this has been the World Health Organization.

Christian Institute: More very premature babies are surviving “than ever before”, figures published in the British Medical Journal show. Overall, for babies born between 22 and 25 weeks, chances of survival increased from 40 per cent to 53 per cent between 1995 and 2006. For babies born at 23 weeks the chances of survival rose by 9.5 per cent. The abortion limit is 24 weeks.

NC Register: The Irish bishops’ conference is insisting that almost all the options recommended by a recent report for changing the country’s abortion laws are unacceptable, since allowing abortion cannot be morally justified.

Examiner.com (includes video): Accusations are flying in Parliamentary debates concerning whether passing a law to stop sex selection is really just window dressing to re-open the abortion debate, an article in the Huffington Post indicated, Thursday.

Christian Newswire: The United Nations is singing Attorney General Eric Holder’s praises, both inaccurately and inappropriately, via its United Nations Foundation blog, Reproductive Health Reality Check (also known as RH Reality Check).

The HIll: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is being pressured to address the thorny topic of Irish abortion law when she visits Dublin Thursday on one of her last official foreign trips.

AFP: The sperm count of French men plunged by a third between 1989 and 2005, a finding which fuels concern that environmental pollutants or lifestyle are crimping fertility, scientists said on Wednesday.

SooToday.com: Mark Warawa’s private member’s motion would ask the House of Commons to condemn the practice of sex selection before birth.

LifeSiteNews: “International experience” has shown that attempts to legalize abortion in Ireland in “limited” cases, including where women threaten suicide, would quickly “open the floodgates” for abortion on demand, the Catholic bishops of Ireland have said in a new statement.

Christian Post: A new study from Australia showed that women who underwent an abortion were more likely to struggle with substance abuse than those women who did not have an abortion. Results of the study were made public by Kaeleen Dingle, of the University of Queensland, during a recent conference of the World Psychiatric Association in Melbourne.

allAfrica: Parents have been called upon to draw closer to their girl-children and monitor their movements in order that the teenage girls especially, would not be influenced by ill advice from their peers to indulge in illegal abortion.

LifeSiteNews: Kitty Holland, the Irish Times reporter who broke the story about the death of Savita Halappanavar that launched a global crusade against Ireland’s pro-life laws, has admitted that the story of Mrs. Halappanavar asking for an abortion may have been a little bit “muddled” in the retelling.

Telegraph: The couple have twice appealed to the PCT, which has refused them funding but has said it will review its policy, in the light of new age discrimination laws which mean healthcare should not be denied on grounds of age.

Irish Times: The husband of the late Savita Halappanavar has decided to proceed with an application to the European Court of Human Rights.

Daily Mail: Sick children are being discharged from NHS hospitals to die at home or in hospices on controversial ‘death pathways’. Until now, end of life regime the Liverpool Care Pathway was thought to have involved only elderly and terminally-ill adults. But the Mail can reveal the practice of withdrawing food and fluid by tube is being used on young patients as well as severely disabled newborn babies.

Christian Institute: British proposals to create genetically modified babies with three or four biological parents should be rejected, a new report says. The report, written by bioethics expert Dr Calum MacKellar, says the techniques that are being discussed may carry medical risks for children, and for future generations.

LifeSiteNews: Ireland’s prime minister is reportedly facing a backlash from his own party over rumored plans to legalize abortion in the Republic . . . Taoiseach Enda Kenny is caught between strong public disapproval of abortion and opposition from his own backbench MPs and ministers on the one hand and pressure from Labour coalition partners who have legalisation as part of their party agenda.

Chicago Tribune: When I argued a case challenging Ireland’s ban on abortion before the European Court of Human Rights in 2009, I told the story of my client, “Ms. C,” who had been battling cancer when she became pregnant. Ms. C’s doctors in Ireland, where abortion is illegal and lifesaving abortion is largely unavailable, refused to provide her with even basic information about the risk that continuation of pregnancy posed to her life, and so she had no option but to travel to England to obtain an abortion.

LifeSiteNews: Canadian Blood Services (CBS) has revealed that it is about to exchange the lifetime ban on homosexuals donating blood for a deferral system. According to a plan submitted to Health Canada, men who have not had sex with other men for somewhere between five to ten years would be eligible to donate.

LifeNews: In the past year there have been three reports and two court cases concerning the legalization of euthanasia and/or assisted suicide in Canada and the UK. All three reports concluded that euthanasia and/or assisted suicide can be safely legalized and one of the court cases came to the same conclusion.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: The CRPD includes the extremely controversial term “sexual and reproductive health.” The combination of ill-defined terms and activist treaty bodies is nowhere more obvious than in the interpretation of the controversial term “sexual and reproductive health,” which negotiators did not define before including in the CRPD. This is the first time the term occurs in binding international law.

Jill Stanke at LifeSiteNews: Twelve mothers that we know of died from “safe and legal” abortions in the U.S. in 2008. And as Americans United for Life’s Charmaine Yoest noted to LifeNews.com, “That number is double the deaths reported the previous year and it’s the highest since 1994.”

Reuters: Italy has appealed a European Court of Human Rights ruling that it violated the rights of a couple carrying cystic fibrosis by preventing them from screening in vitro fertilization (IVF) embryos, the Rome government said on Wednesday.

LifeSiteNews: The media-generated uproar over the death of Savita Halappanavar in a hospital in Galway has emboldened Labour Party coalition members to push for legalization of abortion on what they believe to be a wave of public support. The government will act “speedily” to “implement a new legal framework” allowing “limited abortion,” said Brendan Howlin, the Labour Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform.

LifeSiteNews: The tiny principality of Luxembourg has adopted abortion on demand in a vote yesterday of 39 to 21 in the Chamber of Deputies.

LifeNews: Figures from Statistics Canada, a federal government agency, show 491 babies were born alive following botched abortions during the period from 2000-2009 and left to die afterwards. The numbers have pro-life advocates up in arms. Andre Schutten, legal counsel for ARPA Canada, noticed the numbers and blogged about them recently.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: The new UN Population Fund report is riddled with problems which undercut its call for $8.1B a year for ever more contraception in developing countries. The evidence for this ambitious claim is so thin that it should not be hard for critics to refute it, but here are 11 problems that jumped off the very first pages:

CNSNews: Baby boxes are a revival of the medieval “foundling wheels,” where unwanted infants were left in revolving church doors. In recent years, there has been an increase in these contraptions — also called hatches, windows or slots in some countries — and at least 11 European nations now have them, according to United Nations figures. They are technically illegal, but mostly operate in a gray zone as authorities turn a blind eye.

First Things: Indeed, international statistics confirm that Ireland, without abortion, remains one of the safest countries in the world in which to be pregnant and to give birth. This is a position that should continue to be cherished and strengthened in the interests of mothers and unborn children in Ireland.

Wesley J. Smith at National Review: Har de har: The BBC is creating a comedy series called Way to Go about friends who establish an assisted suicide business. “Way to go:” Get it?

BBC: Three Galway-based consultants will now not be part of the inquiry into the death of Savita Halappanavar.

Boston Globe (AP): About 10,000 people marched through Dublin and observed a minute’s silence Saturday in memory of the Indian dentist who died of blood poisoning in an Irish hospital after being denied an abortion.

Hilary White at LifeSiteNews: But I dive in because it seems as if the whole world has suddenly fallen into a frenzy to murder Irish children. I’ll say it again, just so we’re clear: the calls for legalisation of abortion in Ireland, always carefully framed in the media and parliaments as a matter of “women’s rights,” is a call for the unrestricted slaughter of innocent children.

LifeSiteNews: Following numerous revelations of abortions performed or promoted in hospitals affiliated with the Catholic Church in Spain’s Catalonia region, the Holy See’s Pontifical Council for Health Care Workers is addressing the issue in its annual International Conference, which began on November 15 and ends on Saturday.

LifeSiteNews: The death of a young woman in Galway, reportedly from complications of a miscarriage, has abortion-promoters demonstrating in the streets of Dublin, demanding legislation to legalise abortion. Pro-life leaders in Ireland and abroad, however, have slammed the media and abortion campaigners for using the young woman’s tragic death despite the dearth of details about what actually happened. They have also pointed to clear evidence that pro-abortion groups knew about Savita’s case days before it hit the media, and that they were already planning on using the case to further their cause.

LifeNews: We cannot know the all the details about her condition, treatment, and untimely death until the investigations are completed and the results made available to the public. What we do know is that the standard medical practice, in conformity with Irish law and medical ethics, requires that pregnant women receive all essential medical treatment during pregnancy – even if it won’t be possible for the baby to survive that treatment.