Tag Archives: Global: Sanctity of Life

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.

LifeSiteNews (includes video of the arrest): A pro-life activist was arrested in Calgary on Saturday after a police officer objected to his signs, which featured images of aborted babies.

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.

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.

C-Fam Friday Fax: Hungarian leaders have passed a law protecting the traditional family, defying ongoing criticism that their new constitution would curtail abortion and homosexuality.

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.

Matt Ridley at WSJ.com: Even a rational optimist is pessimistic about some things. Here’s one: the gradual distortion of the human sex ratio by sex-selective abortion. A new essay by the demographer Nicholas Eberstadt concludes that “the practice has become so ruthlessly routine in many contemporary societies that it has impacted their very population structures.”

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.

Christian Concern: The Department of Health has announced plans to consult the public on whether a controversial IVF technique should be used to prevent some hereditary diseases from being transferred from women to their children. | Christian Concern: Government plans for three-parent babies

ADF Attorney Steve Aden at Townhall : Last year, Planned Parenthood committed nearly 330,000 abortions, received almost $500,000,000 in taxpayer subsidies, and started a texting campaign so that girls as young as 14 can interact with the abortion provider and receive propaganda from the same. And that was just in the United States. The latest news is that Planned Parenthood is now thinking large, and hopes to bring their existing international abortion services up to par with what they’ve done in the U.S.

ABC News: Unsafe abortions are on the rise across the world, according to a new global analysis by the Guttmacher Institute and the World Health Organization.

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

BBC News: Scotland’s largest health board has been taken to court by Catholic staff who claim conscientious objections over abortion procedures were disregarded.

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 [...]”

Mark Steyn at National Review: Whether or not that’s what Rick Santorum said, it’s certainly the case that “demographic winter” makes Europe’s troubles all but impossible to solve. As you have observed, demographic decline doesn’t have to be an existential threat. The population of my town in New Hampshire peaked in the 1820 census and then dropped steadily until 1940, and we survived it because (unlike the latter-day US and EU) we hadn’t erected a system of government that depended on looting the future to bribe the present.

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.

Independent: It’s a girl, a film being released this year, documents the practice of killing unwanted baby girls in South Asia. The trailer’s most chilling scene is one with an Indian woman who, unable to contain her laughter, confesses to having killed eight infant daughters.

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

LifeSiteNews.com: fter denying a pro-life group official club status in 2010, Carleton University’s student union is proposing a referendum to ban pro-life groups from the campus altogether.

News from The Associated Press: A new study of fertility treatment found that women who get three or more embryos have no better odds of having a baby than those who get just two embryos.

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.

Daily Mail Online: A report sponsored by the former Euthanasia Society was never going to come to any other conclusion: it recommends that assisted dying should be legalised.

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.