Tag Archives: Global: Sanctity of Life

Interview with Mr Piero Tozzim of Defending Freedom Alliance, a defender of life . . . There is something truly ironic and downright perverse that the United States is currently promoting the civilization of death, not only in their area, but also abroad. Meanwhile, in the post-communist countries are reborn movements for the defense of life and the renewal of Christian identity – says Mr Piero Tozzi, American lawyer and defender of life . . .

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.

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.

LifeSiteNews: Over 10,000 gathered outside Ireland’s parliament this week to demand that Prime Minister Enda Kenny keep his campaign promise of 2011 not to bring legalized abortion into the Republic. The crowd included five Catholic bishops, and was organized by a united effort of all of Ireland’s pro-life organizations.

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.

LifeNews: The nephew of Chen Guangcheng has been sentenced to 39 months in prison for supposedly injuring a Chinese government agent who raided his house in the aftermath of Chen’s escape to the United States.

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.

Education News: Why bring this up now, you might ask. Well, recent reports suggest that a new generation of Right-of-centre students are suffering a similar persecution. Such is the institutionalised and increasing hatred of Tory students at Oxford that last week a group of them demanded the same equal-rights protection as gays, disabled people and ethnic minorities. Conservative members of ,Corpus Christi College’s junior common room (JCR) claim they are “often actively isolated, personally attacked and made to feel unwelcome” because of their political views.

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.

Kevin Kukla at LifeSiteNews: The Center for Reproductive Rights is attacking Costa Rica’s IVF laws as a means to push for greater access to abortion and contraception. CRR believes that legalizing IVF in Costa Rica will have, what they consider, positive repercussions for other “reproductive health” issues in the pro-life nations of Latin America. They call laws against IVF a “personhood movement in disguise, similar to efforts in the U.S. to define a fertilized egg as a person.”

Turtle Bay and Beyond: The case had acquired worldwide notoriety when the Court of Justice of the European Union, answering a prejudicial question that had been submitted to it by the BGH, found that the existence of a human embryo begins at the moment of conception, and that therefore inventions that involved the use of embryonic stem cells were therefore excluded from patent protection under the EU Biopatent Directive.

LifeSiteNews: In a letter to the KSA Director of Student Services, John Carpay of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, who is representing Protectores Vitae, wrote, “We sincerely hope that it will not be necessary for Mr. Capko and other students to sue the KSA in order to secure their right to freely associate on the Kwantlen campus, free from discrimination by the student association that they are required by law to join.”

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.

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.

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.

Paul Coleman at Townhall: In late October, a 31-year old female dentist named Savita Halappanavar died in Ireland after being refused an abortion. And although there was no causal link between the refused abortion and her death at the time, and there remains none now, pro-abortion proponents are seizing on her death as sufficient reason to legalize abortions in Ireland.

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.

Christian Institute: Techniques which would create genetically modified babies should be “urgently opposed”, a bioethics group says. The Anscombe Bioethics Centre gave the warning as a Government-backed consultation approaches its conclusion. Commenting on the two techniques being considered, the centre said: “One technique would split genetic motherhood and give the child three genetic parents.

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.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: Can a candidate who embraces the Catholic Church’s teachings on issues such as abortion and homosexuality serve as the European health commissioner? Do such views exist as one of many perspectives within a continent full of diverse opinions, or are they incompatible with “European values”? These proved to be the broader questions surrounding the November 13thhearing in the European Parliament evaluating the Maltese designate Commissioner for Health and Consumer Policy Tonio Borg.

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.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: Parroting UNFPA’s talking point, news stories on the UN’s family planning agency’s annual report focus on the claim that contraception is a human right. The media seem unconcerned that UNFPA has no authority to declare anything a human right, and rather naive in not seeing the crass self-interest inherent in demanding the products and services supplied by UNFPA are a “right.”

Independent.ie: The question that needs to be asked is: was Ms Halappanavar treated in line with existing obstetrical practice in Ireland? In this kind of situation the baby can be induced early (though is very unlikely to survive). The decision to induce labour early would be fully in compliance with the law and the current guidelines set out for doctors by the Irish Medical Council

AP: Medical and police authorities are launching a major international probe into the illegal trafficking in human organs for transplants, to help clamp down on the crime, one of the researchers said Thursday.

AP: Pressure is mounting in Ireland for the government to draft a law spelling out when life-saving abortions can be performed following the death in the hospital of a pregnant woman who was denied an abortion.

Vatican Radio: Do people in Britain want to see genetically modified babies such as children being born with two genetic mothers? This is essentially the question at the heart of an ongoing government consultation over whether to allow two possible techniques intended to eliminate mitrochondrial diseases through genetic engineering of embryos.

Center for Reproductive Rights: Today the European Court of Human Rights re-affirmed its recognition of involuntary sterilization of Romani women as a major human rights violation in its ruling in I.G. and Others v. Slovakia. In the significant decision, the court found that sterilization without prior full and informed consent violated the applicants’ right to be free from inhuman and degrading treatment and their right to respect for private and family life. | Case of I.G and Others v. Slovakia

Washington Post (AP): The debate over legalizing abortion in Ireland flared Wednesday after the government confirmed that a miscarrying woman suffering from blood poisoning was refused a quick termination of her pregnancy and died in an Irish hospital.

BBC: A Canadian man who was believed to have been in a vegetative state for more than a decade, has been able to tell scientists that he is not in any pain.

AP: It is the first time the U.N. Population Fund’s annual report explicitly describes family planning as a human right.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: Strange things are going on in the EU Institutions. First John Dalli, the EU Commissioner for Health and Consumer Protection, was ousted from the European Commission on the basis of (rather flimsy) charges of wrongdoing. Requests to Commission President Barroso to explain why exactly he forced Mr. Dalli to resign have been left unanswered.

Christian Post: A Danish study that was recently published showed that women who had undergone at least one abortion saw an increase in maternal death rate of 45 percent. The study, “Reproductive history patterns and long-term mortality rates: a Danish, population-based record linkage study,” was published in the European Journal of Public Health and looked at the maternal death rates of women in Denmark, over a 25 year period, who had under gone an abortion or experienced a during pregnancy.

LifeSiteNews: Although 92 percent of Canadians oppose sex-selective abortion, a motion to condemn gendercide is being opposed by some pro-choice activists, according to MPs Mark Warawa and Joy Smith.

LifeNews: Women’s Rights Without Frontiers President Reggie Littlejohn co-presented the feature-length documentary, “It’s a Girl,” at the European Parliament, together with the film’s director, Evan Grae-Davis. Littlejohn is featured as an expert on China’s One Child Policy in this powerful new documentary exposing gendercide and forced abortion. The event, hosted by MEP Gay Mitchell packed the auditorium.

C-FAM: A recent article makes the case that any law which restricts abortion–such as waiting periods or parental consent–is the equivalent of China’s brutal forced abortion policy that victimized Mrs. Feng. The articlefrom the Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of the abortion group Planned Parenthood, says this because both represent  “coercion in reproductive decision making.”  According to their analysis, “forcing a woman to terminate a pregnancy she wants or to continue a pregnancy that she does not want both violate the same human rights.”

Bloomberg: Four Turkish women went on trial today for staging an unauthorized protest outside the office of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan against government plans to curb abortion, the Halkevleri activist group said.

LifeSiteNews: Premier Dalton McGuinty was asked today about an Ottawa-area Catholic school’s decision to cancel a trip to support the re-election of President Obama this week and learn about the U.S. political system.

LifeSiteNews: A controversial pro-life group at one of Australia’s highest ranked universities has been barred from affiliation, funding and advertising by the university’s student union.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: While for many years the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has simply failed to protect unborn children against being murdered (the lead case here is the ignominious Vo v. France decision of 2004, where the Court explicitly recognised that the embryo “belongs to the human race”, but at the same expressed doubts as to whether it qualified as a “person”…) it is now trying to fabricate a “Right to Abortion”.

LifeNews: esterday I stumbled across the trailer for a documentary called It’s A Girl. The 3-minute preview stopped me in my tracks – particularly the part in which an Indian woman matter-of-factly describes how she strangled her newborn daughters. Eight of them.

Telegraph: The majority of NHS hospitals in England are being given financial rewards for placing terminally-ill patients on a controversial “pathway” to death, it can be disclosed.

LifeSiteNews: Footage from a hidden video camera leaked to LifeSiteNews.com shows a doctor at a historically Catholic Barcelona hospital recommending a Down syndrome test to a pregnant woman so that she can abort the child if the result is positive.

Wesley J. Smith at National Review: A just released European Court of Human Rights ruling appears to require Poland to squash the conscience rights of doctors who do not wish to be complicit in a legal abortion.

Baptist Press: The recommendation — offered by a think tank under the State Council, China’s Cabinet — called for phasing in termination of the coercive population control program, according to the Associated Press. The foundation recommended:

Boston Globe: A box in which parents can leave their babies anonymously without any legal risk opened Wednesday in a town in northwestern Russia — part of an effort that activists hope will save many young lives.

ChristianConcern: Even though the debate was not expected to result in a vote, those in favour of a reduction are hoping that the issue will go to a vote in Parliament next year.

BBC: Anna Soubry told MPs the government “did not intend to change either the law or the guidelines”.