Pro-Life Times: May 2003

Abortion leaders head government committee

by Antonia Tully

An independent committee on sexual health, appointed by the Government in an attempt to reduce all unintended pregnancies, is dominated by Britain's major pro-abortion groups. Pro-life groups are appalled at this move to intensify the abortion culture in Britain.

The Independent Advisory Committee on Sexual Health and HIV is chaired by Baroness Joyce Gould, who is chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Pro-Choice Group. She is also president of the Family Planning Association (FPA), which is a branch of the world's largest abortion promoter, the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF).

Other pro-abortion groups represented on the committee are Marie Stopes International, the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) and Brook Advisory Services. Also on the committee is Joanne Forrest, who is responsible for all abortion services throughout Liverpool and Sefton.

SPUC political spokesman Anthony Ozimic said, "We have to ask the question: why has this committee been created? The Government wants to curtail unwanted pregnancies and clearly sees abortion and abortifacient drugs and devices as essential to doing this.

"It looks worse when you consider the population control philosophy behind some of the organisations involved. The originators of IPPF and Marie Stopes International had a clear agenda that undesirable groups in society should be prevented from 'breeding'. Today's agenda is aimed at young pregnant women, particularly those who are socially disadvantaged, as well as sick and disabled unborn children. Destroying unborn children is not the way to solve problems."

Clare McCullough of the pregnancy support group, Good Counsel Network said, "The sexual health problems hitting the UK at present - rampant sexually transmitted diseases, teen-age pregnancy rates, high abortion rates - need to be tackled through educating people, especially the young, about chastity, and through providing compassionate support for those who are in unplanned pregnancies.

Comment

Tobias Teuscher

To protect life at the European level requires political will, irrespective of any ideological clashes. However, the fact that the European Union currently intends to combat poverty by financing abortion in developing countries is a clear denial of this principle.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 brought about a new political freedom throughout Europe. To promote this freedom involves taking responsibility for the weakest members of society, including the protection of the unborn child and the sustained promotion of family. Although other ways of life are justified, this protection and promotion remains a challenge to which citizens must make a lasting commitment.

Some politicians may be unaware of this situation. They need to understand that this responsibility requires them to use political freedom responsibly. The more support there is - backed by scientific and academic evidence - the more enduring the political influence will be throughout Europe.

Tobias Teuscher was born in 1975 in the former East Germany. He studied political science in Berlin, Strasbourg and Brussels and works now as an active pro-lifer at European level. He is also working on a doctoral thesis on Father Joseph Wresinski, who founded the ATD Fourth World movement.

Let's turn to God for help

John Smeaton

The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children is a secular body with members of all faiths and none.

Like many people in SPUC, I am a believer and I make no apology for my Catholic faith. As national director of SPUC, I believe we are facing the worst situation we have faced since the passing of the Abortion Act with the government's policy of distributing abortion-inducing drugs and devices to children behind parents' backs.

What could be worse than destroying the innocence of children in this way?

Unashamedly, therefore, I ask believers to turn to God to ask His help in what must seem to so many as a humanly impossible situation:

Almighty God,

Help us, we pray, to mount effective opposition to the Government's policy of providing abortion-inducing drugs and devices to children in schools and elsewhere.

Lord, we are overwhelmingly outnumbered in our campaign to protect your precious children.

With all the earthly power at their disposal the Government is pressing ahead with their policy of providing abortifacient birth control to children as young as eleven without parental knowledge or consent.

Without Your help, dear God, we can do nothing. With Your intervention, all things are possible: the government can be defeated and Your children and Your unborn children can be protected.

Lord, we beg you to help our Child Protection Campaign. Help us to alert this nation to the terrible dangers facing our young people in the light of this wicked policy.

Lord, we need leaders to run the Child Protection Campaign in every corner of Britain and Northern Ireland: to run meetings, to raise signatures for our petition, and to impress on local schools the true nature of what the Government is asking them to do.

Thank You, Lord, for coming to our aid.

We make this prayer through Jesus Christ, Your Son.

New test to target more babies with Down's syndrome

by Amanda Logan

Researchers at the Barts and London medical school are trying to increase detection of Down's syndrome babies by improving the blood tests on expectant mothers. They say that a four-part blood test is better for screening than the triple-marker blood test which has been used up to now. Following a positive blood test, the diagnostic amniocentesis test is offered. This involves sticking an needle into the womb which can cause miscarriage.

At present many Down's babies escape detection because the screening tests are too crude. The new four-part blood test will not reduce the number of amniocentesis tests offered to pregnant mothers, but it will mean that fewer Down's babies escape the net at the screening stage.

SPUC chairman Robin Haig commented, "This will inevitably lead to more pressure on women to have abortions".

Mary Brennan has a 16 year-old daughter with Down's syndrome. "When I hear of "improvements" in the detection of Down's syndrome, a chill runs down my spine. I look at my daughter Maria and ask myself how is her life less valid that the lives of other people?"

Irish government pregnancy agency promotes abortion groups

by Staff Reporter

The government-funded Crisis Pregnancy Agency in Ireland has launched a "Positive Options" campaign in an alleged attempt to give Irish women with unplanned pregnancies information on alternatives to abortion. However, Irish pro-life groups have condemned the initiative because of its pro-abortion slant.

The campaign leaflet lists four agencies which include abortion as one of their options. These include the Irish Family Planning Association (IFPA), which is linked to the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the world's largest abortion promoters. Two pro-life groups are also listed, Life and Cura.

Pat Buckley of European Life Network (ELN) told the Pro-Life Times, "Abortion and abortion referral are illegal in Ireland. The 1992 referendum permits information on abortion to be made available. But when you look at the nature of the pro-abortion organisations featured in the "Positive Options" campaign, there seems to be a very thin line between information and referral."

Anti-euthanasia bill in Lords committee

by Anthony Ozimic

A bill to prevent patients from being killed, by denying them tube-feeding has been given a second reading in the House of Lords. The Patients' Protection Bill, put forward by leading pro-life peeress Baroness Knight of Collingtree, has now been sent without a vote to a committee for further consideration.

The Bill aims to reverse the 1992 Bland judgement which allowed medical staff to withhold or withdraw assisted food and fluids from patients in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) and protect patients with other conditions from suffering the same fate.

Introducing her bill, Lady Knight said: "On the face of it, it is incredible that a Bill such as this should be necessary. Surely patients in hospital are always given such basic necessities as food and fluid? Well, no. I am afraid that sometimes they are not, especially if they are old and a doctor judges their life to be useless."

News in Brief

· Strasbourg - MEPs voted in favour of a proposed directive aimed at banning all human cloning, both for reproductive and so-called therapeutic purposes, and restricting any research which involves the destruction of surplus IVF embryos. Paul Tully, SPUC's general secretary, said, "We applaud MEPs for their stand in support of the dignity of the human embryo, which is in marked contrast to the morally bankrupt position of our own government."

· Finland - The number of abortifacient morning-after pills used in Finland quadrupled last year, while the registered abortion rate remained virtually unchanged. About 36,000 packs of Norlevo morning-after pills were sold last year after the drug became available from pharmacists without a doctor's prescription, four times the number provided in 2001 when a prescription was still required.

· England & Wales - An analysis of official government statistics for England and Wales has indicated that 43% of recorded conceptions outside marriage ended in legal abortions in 2001, compared to only 6% of conceptions within marriage. The analysis by the Office for National Statistics, contained within their Health Statistics Quarterly publication for Spring 2003, also reveals that the proportion of underage conceptions leading to abortion rose from 54% in 2000 to 56% in 2001, and that the proportion of conceptions outside wedlock which ended in abortion rose by 7% between 1990 and 2001.

· Africa - A senior African cardinal has warned Europe against imposing demographic policies on Africa. Cardinal Francis Arinze, prefect of the Vatican's Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, said that there was a drive to solve the continent's problems by controlling the number of children. However, he stressed that the solution was development, not population control. Western abortion promoters and providers, such as Marie Stopes International, are very active in Africa.

How did we come to this?

Euthanasia legalised in Belgium

Dr Philippe Schepens, the Belgian secretary of the World Federation of Doctors who Respect Human Life, recently delivered the following speech to the Pontifical Academy for Life in Rome.

On 16 May 2002 the Belgian Senate passed a law permitting the killing of sick people using medical techniques, under certain conditions. The law was passed by 86 votes to 51. Belgian law now provides for permission to kill two categories of adult patients: those who are in a terminal medical condition and those who are in enduring, constant and unbearable physical or psychological pain.

This means that my country, Belgium, is the second independent country in the world (after Holland) to pass a statute which allows doctors, whose vocation is to preserve life and health, to kill adult patients whom they can no longer cure. In contrast to Holland, in Belgium one can even kill people who are not at short-term risk of dying. A Belgian doctor may kill the incurably ill at any stage.

The King of the Belgians has not had the courage of his predecessor and brother to oppose this law, while the Primate of Belgium refused to adopt any position during several months preceding the vote. In Belgium we probably have the rulers we deserve, seeing that this law was passed amid the almost total indifference of the public at large.

One of the principal functions of the state is to protect the lives of its citizens. Now it allows them to be killed: and the motives are plain.

Of course, limitations and time for reflection are provided for in the law. But the 1990 abortion law is a mockery because of the complete lack of checks (the ad hoc commission contenting itself with producing statistics while checking nothing at all). We can have no doubt about what awaits us: unrestricted euthanasia, at the doctor's discretion, and generally encouraged by the family or even the hospital management.

By and large the same characters who sponsored the law on abortion have concocted the law on euthanasia and got it passed. This law was prepared in the same way as was the one on abortion at the end of the 1980s. There was a great publicity campaign in newspapers and magazines aimed at the public at large, together with television programmes, attempting to prove not just that the thing was possible, but also that this law was becoming supposedly "indispensable"

What struck me most, during the publicity campaign to get the public to swallow the law on euthanasia, was the significant number of studies relating to the cost to social security of the final year of people's lives. It was a case of proving, and this was not difficult, that this final year is by far the most expensive for the state. According to one study quoted by the Ministry of Public Health, hospital medical expenditure devoted solely to people during the last year of their lives makes up about 12.5% of the entire Public Health budget. The final hospitalisation of the 55,000 Belgians (out of a little more than 10 million) who die every year in hospital lasts about 21 days and on its own costs about 5% of this total budget.

It is clear that governments are very preoccupied by this development. People in Europe, and the industrialised world as a whole, are living longer and there has been an explosion in medical costs for people at the end of their lives. Even the European Commission voiced its concern about this, in a communication to the European Parliament (COM(2001)723 of 5 Dec 2001) entitled "On the future of healthcare and the treatment of old people".

This means the legalisation of euthanasia forms part of a wider programme to manage public health and social security costs. Effectively, euthanasia opens prospects for governments to economise in their social security budgets.

How in Belgium, traditionally a very Catholic country where recent statistics show around 80% of the population are baptised into the Catholic Church, could we reach the point of allowing this second "law of death" to be passed? This law, just like that of 4 March 1990 on abortion, voids the very substance of article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which stipulates that "Every individual has the right to life..."?

In fact, for about 30 years our bishops have left religious instruction in secondary education to laymen. There is nothing reprehensible in this itself, if the laymen are well trained. But they have left the training of these laymen to the theological faculty of the Catholic University of Louvain, a university which I dare to call "post-Catholic". In fact this university is not only the source of Liberation Theology, a project to recover the Gospel ideal through militant Marxism, but also where for over ten years in vitro fertilisation has been practised. It is a university which also carries out abortions. In 1983 I had to plead a case as far as Rome in order that abortions in its university clinics should be stopped. These abortions used to be carried out on the quiet on Saturdays by a professor who, following our intervention, has had to leave the service with a number of others.

For about 40 years we have allowed this dechristianisation to be orchestrated in the Catholic world chiefly by this university. Though still said to be Catholic, for many years it has not followed the teachings of the Lord. This has had repercussions on the whole of Christ's flock in Belgium. The law on euthanasia, passed 12 years after the law on abortion, is only the lethal outcome of a slow but constant decadence of the Church in my country.

Pray for the Church of Belgium which, like the Church of Laodicea, is neither hot nor cold, and which is poor when it thinks itself rich (Revelation ch.3, v.15-17).

From the desk of Joanna Bogle

Pro-Life in South Africa

News comes in from Dr Margaret White of the Anna Fund. This excellent initiative was launched by Dr White (a past president of SPUC) in honour of her little granddaughter, Anna. Anna had Down's syndrome and died as a baby. Funds raised over the years have helped research into Down's syndrome and care of children with this condition. The message of the Anna Fund is that such children can have full and enriching lives and that there should be no question of aborting them before birth.

On a recent trip to South Africa Dr White spoke at Durban and at Cape Town (Stellenbosch University), meeting with parents and doctors and finding much support. She also met pro-life campaigners, including two members of the African Christian Democratic Party in Parliament. She says "The pro-life workers are somewhat isolated but are well informed via the internet and are up against a very socialist ANC which has inscribed abortion-on-demand into the constitution. There is a euthanasia bill which has been in Parliament since 1999 but is not progressing - it is said because of international criticism. The ANC are more sensitive to external pressures than internal, where MPs are expected to follow the Party line, or else!"

Violence and the Unborn

Research carried out at a hospital in Hull reveals that violence to children in the womb is surprisingly prevalent. In reply to a questionnaire, 17 per cent of the women said that they had been subjected to physical harm during their pregnancy, in domestic disputes. The researchers are now recommending that women be routinely questioned about the possibility of such violence, just as they are asked about other threats to their unborn children such as smoking or alcohol. It seems not to have occurred to anyone that the social acceptance of abortion has contributed in any way to removing the age-old taboo against attacking a pregnant woman. At one time, even a violent and evil-tempered attacker would have been deterred by the recognition that he might kill an unborn child - and incur extra penalties for doing so, over and above the harm inflicted on the mother. Perhaps this is another example of the way in which British society seems to have become more brutalised, and less respectful of the vulnerable, since the legalising of abortion in 1967.

Abortion - who are we losing?

The latest statistics on abortion make depressing reading. In 2001, the latest year for which full figures are available, 23.2 per cent of all children conceived in England and Wales were aborted (a total of 186,274 lives lost). That is edging up to one quarter of all children conceived. No country can survive this deliberate destruction of its own future. We are building up huge problems - social, economic, moral and cultural. This is unmapped territory. There has never been a time in our history when we have wilfully destroyed nearly a quarter of our own children before birth each year. These are the children who would have been the businessmen and builders, teachers and technicians, doctors and designers, thinkers, bankers, writers, ... all right, there would have been some ne'er-do-wells and criminals among them too, presumably - but the point is that these were our fellow citizens, people with us and part of us, and now we'll never know what they might have done because their lives were swiftly ended before any hope of achievement was possible. And as their parents and grandparents grow old and need help, and our society faces new challenges of every sort, the lost unborn will not be there to offer solutions or to respond to any need. On human and practical grounds alone, abortion on this scale is a national tragedy.

Pro-life TV

We need to foster courage and hope. I have just returned from America, where I worked on a series of programmes for the international TV station, EWTN, based in Alabama. This is Christian, unashamedly pro-life, and with an upbeat feel to it - lively, informative, forward-looking. And it's not just American - while working on my series of programmes I lunched with people from India and Cuba and helped work on a promotional video for Scandinavia. For the price of a satellite dish, you can now receive this station in Britain: send me a SAE for details.

Scottish call for better abortion information

British Victims of Abortion in Scotland has submitted a petition to the Scottish Parliament calling for all abortion providers to give better information for women facing an abortion.

In Scotland a petition is a submission from an individual to the Scottish Parliament's Public Petitions Committee on any subject of public interest. Ms Jane MacMaster, a volunteer worker for British Victims of Abortion, sent in a petition demanding that the Scottish Parliament take the necessary steps to ensure that all NHS trusts, and other abortion services, provide full written information to every woman considering an abortion. This information should not only include details of the possible risks of the procedure but also warn of the long-term physical and mental health risks to the woman.

Following Ms MacMaster's submission, the Public Petitions Committee (PPC) agreed to write to the Scottish Executive regarding these concerns about the adequacy and monitoring of information for women. Ms MacMaster was also assured that this issue would be taken up in the next parliamentary session in May.

Ian Murray, director of SPUC Scotland said, "SPUC believes that women are being badly let down by the health service. Abortion is a matter reserved to Westminster. However the Scottish Parliament because it is responsible for health, should ensure that the NHS in Scotland provides women with full information to make an informed choice. When women know the risks to their mental health and are told the full facts about the developing child in their womb, I feel sure we will see a fall in the number of abortions."

Pro-euthanasia postcards to every household in Guernsey

by Dominic Baster

Pro-euthanasia campaigners in the Channel Islands, attempting to intensify their campaign, have sent postcards to every household on the island of Guernsey. Ann Crocker, a local campaigner for assisted dying, claims that as many as 2,000 people have returned the postcards with pledges of support, although only nine people attended the first meeting of her action group.

Pro-lifers are increasingly alarmed that Guernsey - an autonomous British protectorate in the English Channel with a population of about 63,000 - could become one of the few territories in the world to legalise doctor-assisted killing. Euthanasia became a distinct possibility after members of the island's parliament voted last September by two to one in favour of launching an official investigation into the matter.

Six months on, pro-euthanasia campaigners have become frustrated by the lack of progress made by the working group charged with looking into the issue. Deputy Pat Mellor, a Guernsey legislator, has condemned the delay as "absolutely disgraceful".

Angela Meadowcroft, chairperson of Channel Islands Right to Life (which is affiliated to SPUC), took issue with the argument that so-called assisted dying was a compassionate option, and pledged to mount a vigorous campaign against any change in the law. She said, "The thought of having full control over one's own life and time of death might be very comforting, but the legalisation of euthanasia would, in a lot of cases, take the matter out of the hands of the patient. A change in the law would make the frail and infirm feel vulnerable and afraid, and legalised killing would be seen as a convenient solution to a lack of resources.

BBC says no to abortion pictures

The House of Lords, Britain's highest court, has ruled that the BBC was within its rights to refuse to broadcast a party election film by the ProLife Alliance which depicted images of abortion on the grounds that it was "grossly offensive". The Law Lords' 4-1 decision overturns an earlier ruling by three Appeal Court judges, who accused the BBC of censorship.

"We will fight on and on and on, until the nation opens its eyes to the barbarism of abortion," said a spokesperson for the ProLife Alliance.

"A nation justly weeps for the terrible injuries inflicted on the Iraqi child who was maimed by war, and his dramatic plight is pictured on the front pages of the media worldwide.

"But the same compassionate nation is prohibited from seeing the reality of the fate of aborted unborn children, massacred every day in the United Kingdom, with figures now reaching beyond 6,000,000.

"Channel 4 can show unchallenged a Chinese artist eating a baby, but abortion pictures offend the taste and decency of the BBC."