The Annual General Meeting of Galway For Life was held on 16th June in the Westwood House Hotel, Moycullen House, Galway at 8pm.
The meeting was chaired by Deputy Chairperson Luc Desbonnet who spoke to attendees about the recent initiatives of Galway For Life in particular the online projects.
The meeting was well attended and was also addressed by Dr. Joe McCarroll, Chairperson of the Pro Life Campaign who discussed the issue of the need for legislation to protect the human embryo in light of the recent Supreme Court decision in the case of R-v-R Case.
The attendees resolved to work in the coming year to seek such legislation.
Refreshments were served and a pleasent evening was enjoyed by all.
Friday, July 2, 2010
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Galway For Life Annual General Meeting
The Annual General Meeting of Galway For Life will be held tonight in the Westwood House Hotel, Moycullen House, Galway at 8pm.
The meeting will be addressed by Dr. Joe McCarroll, Chairperson of the Pro Life Campaign who will discuss the issue of the need for legislation to protect the human embryo in light of the recent Supreme Court decision in the case of R -v- R.
All are welcome. Tea/Coffee will be served.
The meeting will be addressed by Dr. Joe McCarroll, Chairperson of the Pro Life Campaign who will discuss the issue of the need for legislation to protect the human embryo in light of the recent Supreme Court decision in the case of R -v- R.
All are welcome. Tea/Coffee will be served.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Pro Life Campaign welcomes reduction in abortion rate
The latest Irish abortion figures released today by the British Department of Health* show another reduction in the number of Irish women travelling to Britain for abortion.
In 2009, 4,422 Irish women travelled to Britain for abortions, down from 4,600 for the previous year. It is the eighth consecutive year that Irish abortions have declined after more than a decade of upward trends.
Commenting on the latest figures, Dr Ruth Cullen of the Pro-Life Campaign said:
The Pro-Life Campaign welcomes the downward trend in Ireland's abortion rate.
Some have suggested the reduction in abortions may be as a result of more Irish women opting for abortions in other European countries. But this is purely anecdotal as there is no statistical evidence to back up these claims. Holland is often mentioned as a country where more Irish women may increasingly travel for abortions but the official Dutch figures in recent years show little or no change in the number of abortions on foreign nationals.
Groups advocating abortion in Ireland claim that we need to introduce abortion here to “confront the reality of crisis pregnancy.” This attitude completely ignores the humanity of the unborn child and the latest peer reviewed research showing the negative consequences of abortion for women. Rather than seek to have abortion introduced in Ireland, we should see the latest reduction in the abortion rate as very encouraging and work together to ensure this downward trend continues.
Ireland’s abortion rate is now 4.4 per 1,000 female residents aged 15-44 where Britain’s is 17.5.
In 2009, 4,422 Irish women travelled to Britain for abortions, down from 4,600 for the previous year. It is the eighth consecutive year that Irish abortions have declined after more than a decade of upward trends.
Commenting on the latest figures, Dr Ruth Cullen of the Pro-Life Campaign said:
The Pro-Life Campaign welcomes the downward trend in Ireland's abortion rate.
Some have suggested the reduction in abortions may be as a result of more Irish women opting for abortions in other European countries. But this is purely anecdotal as there is no statistical evidence to back up these claims. Holland is often mentioned as a country where more Irish women may increasingly travel for abortions but the official Dutch figures in recent years show little or no change in the number of abortions on foreign nationals.
Groups advocating abortion in Ireland claim that we need to introduce abortion here to “confront the reality of crisis pregnancy.” This attitude completely ignores the humanity of the unborn child and the latest peer reviewed research showing the negative consequences of abortion for women. Rather than seek to have abortion introduced in Ireland, we should see the latest reduction in the abortion rate as very encouraging and work together to ensure this downward trend continues.
Ireland’s abortion rate is now 4.4 per 1,000 female residents aged 15-44 where Britain’s is 17.5.
Irish Stem Cell Foundation accused of distorting Stem Cell Research debate
The Irish Stem Cell Foundation today called for legislation to allow human embryonic stem cell research to take place in Ireland. The Supreme Court ruled last year in R v. R (frozen embryos case) that human embryos outside the mother’s womb do not enjoy Constitutional protection. This decision, however, in no way impedes the Government from introducing legislation that protects the human embryo from destructive research or abuses in assisted human reproduction.
Responding to the Irish Stem Cell Foundation's call for legislation to allow human embryonic research, Dr. Ruth Cullen of the Pro-Life Campaign said that since its launch the Irish Stem Cell Foundation has been a staunch promoter of embryo research so it’s not at all surprising that it now seeks legislation to give it legal backing.
What is disconcerting is the manipulative way it distorts any alleged benefits of this type of research without mentioning the fact that it also involves the destruction of human life at its earliest stages of development.
The Irish Stem Cell Foundation states correctly that false claims about cures for debilitating conditions are being made by some stem cell practitioners. However, these scams occur in both embryonic and adult stem cell research and, unfortunately, are not uncommon in medical research generally. To use this, as the Irish Stem Cell Foundation does, as a cover to promote embryo research is both bizarre and intellectually dishonest.
The reality is all breakthroughs and treatments we read about in the media involve adult stem cell research, which is perfectly ethical. Embryo stem cell research on the other hand is highly controversial, unethical and has led to no valid treatments for patients.
Instead of calling for socially divisive legislation sanctioning embryo destructive research, the Irish Stem Cell Foundation should join with others in seeking to make Ireland a centre of excellence for adult stem cell research, which is extremely promising scientifically and does not lead to the destruction of human life at its fragile beginnings.
Responding to the Irish Stem Cell Foundation's call for legislation to allow human embryonic research, Dr. Ruth Cullen of the Pro-Life Campaign said that since its launch the Irish Stem Cell Foundation has been a staunch promoter of embryo research so it’s not at all surprising that it now seeks legislation to give it legal backing.
What is disconcerting is the manipulative way it distorts any alleged benefits of this type of research without mentioning the fact that it also involves the destruction of human life at its earliest stages of development.
The Irish Stem Cell Foundation states correctly that false claims about cures for debilitating conditions are being made by some stem cell practitioners. However, these scams occur in both embryonic and adult stem cell research and, unfortunately, are not uncommon in medical research generally. To use this, as the Irish Stem Cell Foundation does, as a cover to promote embryo research is both bizarre and intellectually dishonest.
The reality is all breakthroughs and treatments we read about in the media involve adult stem cell research, which is perfectly ethical. Embryo stem cell research on the other hand is highly controversial, unethical and has led to no valid treatments for patients.
Instead of calling for socially divisive legislation sanctioning embryo destructive research, the Irish Stem Cell Foundation should join with others in seeking to make Ireland a centre of excellence for adult stem cell research, which is extremely promising scientifically and does not lead to the destruction of human life at its fragile beginnings.
Stop Gendercide Now Petition Launch - End lethal bias against baby girls
100 million baby girls are missing - and the number is rising. They were aborted or killed at birth. Why? Because of a preference for baby boys.
It is a human rights violation on a massive scale perhaps the most widespread form of violent anti-female discrimination in the world today.
The mission of Stop Gendercide Now is to highlight the fact that so many baby girls have disappeared through abortion, infanticide, or neglect and to work for political change to remedy this.
By signing the Stop Gendercide Now Petition, you’ll be joining others in sending a strong message to the leaders of countries like China and India, which have deplorable records in defending the rights of baby girls, born and unborn. Your voice can really make a difference.
The number of baby girls’ lives lost through gendercide has risen sharply as cultural pressures against the birth of baby girls are reinforced by harsh inhumane traditions, coercive population control policies as well as political ideologies. As a result of this, 100 million baby girls have been aborted, killed or left to die. It is a human rights violation on a massive scale.
Boy-preference leading to dramatically fewer baby girls being born and surviving is concentrated primarily in China but also in India and other countries. The mass destruction of girls has produced a systemic gender imbalance in whole populations for example; there are more unmarried young men in China than the entire population of young men in America.
The Stop Gendercide Now Petition puts pressure on the governments of countries with significant sex ratio imbalances:
- To introduce measures to ensure that the killing, fatal neglect or abandonment of baby girls because they are girls is ended.
- To carry out and publish an annual audit giving the sex ratio, the measures put in place to address it, and the progress or otherwise of these measures.
The Stop Gendercide Now Petition will also be copied to the Secretary General of the United Nations calling on the UN to adopt a meaningfully proactive leadership role in ending the horrific practice of signalling out baby girls for abortion and infanticide.
Many steps can be taken. Initiatives can be developed to encourage education for girls: reform of laws and customs that exclude or disadvantage daughters in property inheritance; facilitation of women’s participation in all dimensions of public life; requiring family planning officials, midwives and hospitals to publish the birth sex ratios, and reward advances towards the normal balance of girls to boys.
It is a human rights violation on a massive scale perhaps the most widespread form of violent anti-female discrimination in the world today.
The mission of Stop Gendercide Now is to highlight the fact that so many baby girls have disappeared through abortion, infanticide, or neglect and to work for political change to remedy this.
By signing the Stop Gendercide Now Petition, you’ll be joining others in sending a strong message to the leaders of countries like China and India, which have deplorable records in defending the rights of baby girls, born and unborn. Your voice can really make a difference.
The number of baby girls’ lives lost through gendercide has risen sharply as cultural pressures against the birth of baby girls are reinforced by harsh inhumane traditions, coercive population control policies as well as political ideologies. As a result of this, 100 million baby girls have been aborted, killed or left to die. It is a human rights violation on a massive scale.
Boy-preference leading to dramatically fewer baby girls being born and surviving is concentrated primarily in China but also in India and other countries. The mass destruction of girls has produced a systemic gender imbalance in whole populations for example; there are more unmarried young men in China than the entire population of young men in America.
The Stop Gendercide Now Petition puts pressure on the governments of countries with significant sex ratio imbalances:
- To introduce measures to ensure that the killing, fatal neglect or abandonment of baby girls because they are girls is ended.
- To carry out and publish an annual audit giving the sex ratio, the measures put in place to address it, and the progress or otherwise of these measures.
The Stop Gendercide Now Petition will also be copied to the Secretary General of the United Nations calling on the UN to adopt a meaningfully proactive leadership role in ending the horrific practice of signalling out baby girls for abortion and infanticide.
Many steps can be taken. Initiatives can be developed to encourage education for girls: reform of laws and customs that exclude or disadvantage daughters in property inheritance; facilitation of women’s participation in all dimensions of public life; requiring family planning officials, midwives and hospitals to publish the birth sex ratios, and reward advances towards the normal balance of girls to boys.
Time and Newsweek Magazines highlight 'waning' influence of pro-choice movement
Remember Roe!’, an article by Sarah Kliff in Newsweek (21st April 2010), paints a dramatic picture of a greying abortion rights leadership in the US racked by a growing anxiety about who will take over the torch from them when they retire.
One of the strongest abortion rights groups in the US is the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), founded in 1969.
Its current president, Nancy Keenan, described in the article her response to the huge crowds flocking to the March for Life in Washington DC this January - ‘my gosh, they are so young - there are so many of them and they are so young.’
There were 400,000 at the March for Life. Two months earlier, the pro-abortionists held a rally against Congressman Bart Stupak’s proposed abortion opt outs in the Health Care Bill and only 1,300 turned up. Over 300-times as many activists came to the March for Life as bothered to turn up to oppose restrictions on abortion in Obama’s health-care package.
In her Newsweek piece, Sarah Kliff says that the difficulties encountered by pro-choice activists during the recent US health care debate marks ‘the day when they became aware of their waning influence in Washington.’
The Newsweek article said that research carried out by the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws found that 51% of under 30s opposed to abortion see it as a ‘very important voting issue’. Only 26% of young people who support abortion see it as a very important voting issue. Their research found a similar though lesser difference among older voters.
This means that it is a live political issue for the pro-life voters especially the young, whereas it is not a hot issue for those who are pro-abortion. So the pro-life activists are pushing an open political door that the pro-abortion activists are not holding shut.
In a separate article in the current Time magazine (3rd May 2010) Terry O’Neill, President of the pro-abortion National Organization for Women, concedes in passing that those on the pro-life side ‘are winning the abortion fight.’
Her intuition was reflected in a number of polls in the last year suggesting that a tipping point may have been reached in American public opinion with the pro-abortion view on the brink of slipping into a minority position as the trend edges in a pro-life direction.
Polls by Gallup and Pew have found rises in the numbers taking a pro-life position and falls in the numbers taking a pro-abortion position. Gallup’s poll exactly a year ago, found ‘51% of Americans calling themselves “pro-life” on the issue of abortion and 42% “pro-choice”.’
Gallup says “this is the first time a majority of US adults have identified themselves as pro-life since Gallup began asking this question in 1995.”
At a time when pro-choice campaigners should be exulting in their current successes – the election of the most pro-abortion politician in America as President, control of Congress by the Democrats, pro-abortion since 1980 - they are instead keenly aware that things are not going their way. Without becoming complacent, pro-life supporters should take heart from these encouraging and uplifting developments.
One of the strongest abortion rights groups in the US is the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), founded in 1969.
Its current president, Nancy Keenan, described in the article her response to the huge crowds flocking to the March for Life in Washington DC this January - ‘my gosh, they are so young - there are so many of them and they are so young.’
There were 400,000 at the March for Life. Two months earlier, the pro-abortionists held a rally against Congressman Bart Stupak’s proposed abortion opt outs in the Health Care Bill and only 1,300 turned up. Over 300-times as many activists came to the March for Life as bothered to turn up to oppose restrictions on abortion in Obama’s health-care package.
In her Newsweek piece, Sarah Kliff says that the difficulties encountered by pro-choice activists during the recent US health care debate marks ‘the day when they became aware of their waning influence in Washington.’
The Newsweek article said that research carried out by the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws found that 51% of under 30s opposed to abortion see it as a ‘very important voting issue’. Only 26% of young people who support abortion see it as a very important voting issue. Their research found a similar though lesser difference among older voters.
This means that it is a live political issue for the pro-life voters especially the young, whereas it is not a hot issue for those who are pro-abortion. So the pro-life activists are pushing an open political door that the pro-abortion activists are not holding shut.
In a separate article in the current Time magazine (3rd May 2010) Terry O’Neill, President of the pro-abortion National Organization for Women, concedes in passing that those on the pro-life side ‘are winning the abortion fight.’
Her intuition was reflected in a number of polls in the last year suggesting that a tipping point may have been reached in American public opinion with the pro-abortion view on the brink of slipping into a minority position as the trend edges in a pro-life direction.
Polls by Gallup and Pew have found rises in the numbers taking a pro-life position and falls in the numbers taking a pro-abortion position. Gallup’s poll exactly a year ago, found ‘51% of Americans calling themselves “pro-life” on the issue of abortion and 42% “pro-choice”.’
Gallup says “this is the first time a majority of US adults have identified themselves as pro-life since Gallup began asking this question in 1995.”
At a time when pro-choice campaigners should be exulting in their current successes – the election of the most pro-abortion politician in America as President, control of Congress by the Democrats, pro-abortion since 1980 - they are instead keenly aware that things are not going their way. Without becoming complacent, pro-life supporters should take heart from these encouraging and uplifting developments.
Baby boy who survived abortion left to die in Italian Hospital
In ancient Rome, a newborn baby unwanted because of disability or otherwise was legally allowed to be disposed of by exposure as res vacantes, an unwanted thing.
Often they were left in the Velabrum, a busy street in the middle of the oil and cheese markets or at the columna lactaria in the Forum Olitorium.
In modern Europe, of course, such things would never happen. Certainly not. Nowadays when we are exposing a child born after an abortion has failed to kill them, they are abandoned exposed in a hospital. Much more civilised.
In southern Italy, last month, an abortion was carried out on a mother, pregnant for the first time, after a prenatal scan suggested her baby might be disabled. The baby boy, born at 22 weeks, despite the abortion procedure, was left to die by the doctors in the Rossano Calabria Hospital.
He was found 20 hours later by the hospital chaplain still alive wrapped in a sheet, his umbilical cord still attached, still moving and breathing. The priest raised the alarm and the baby was moved to the intensive neonatal care unit in a nearby hospital, but died there the next day.
This is the second case in three years in Italy of a baby aborted at 22 weeks because of suspected disability who survived the abortion living for 3 days.
Italy’s abortion 1978 law allows abortion on demand for the first three months of pregnancy but allow it on the grounds of suspected disability in the second three months, but its infanticide law imposes a legal obligation on doctors to attempt to preserve the life of a child who survives abortion. In England, however, there is no time limit at all for abortions where disability is suspected. They can be aborted right up to birth.
Since the purpose of abortion is the deliberate and direct procuring of the destruction of the life of the baby, the doctors expose babies who survive so that they will die.
Since medical ethics require that a patient be informed about the nature of the procedure to which they are to be subjected and consent to it. Are women considering abortion on the grounds of suspected disability informed by their doctor that the abortion involves inducing the birth and that if their baby survives the doctors will be hiding it away and exposing it so that it will die for lack of due care. Are the mothers asked to consent to this protocol of exposure without care where a baby is born alive after an abortion?
The Confidential Enquiry into Maternal and Child Health, 2007 commissioned by the UK Government, found that 66 infants survived NHS termination attempts in hospitals in England and Wales during 2005.
Instead of dying during the abortion procedure as intended, they survived, able to breathe unaided. They were exposed without medical care, left to die, some living for half an hour, one for ten hours.
The only way to step back from this horror show is to reaffirm the first principle of medical ethics – primum non nocere – first do no harm. Do not deliberately destroy human life in the womb or after birth. Once we step away from that principle of respect for life we find ourselves sliding back down to the columna lactaria in the Forum Olitorium.
Often they were left in the Velabrum, a busy street in the middle of the oil and cheese markets or at the columna lactaria in the Forum Olitorium.
In modern Europe, of course, such things would never happen. Certainly not. Nowadays when we are exposing a child born after an abortion has failed to kill them, they are abandoned exposed in a hospital. Much more civilised.
In southern Italy, last month, an abortion was carried out on a mother, pregnant for the first time, after a prenatal scan suggested her baby might be disabled. The baby boy, born at 22 weeks, despite the abortion procedure, was left to die by the doctors in the Rossano Calabria Hospital.
He was found 20 hours later by the hospital chaplain still alive wrapped in a sheet, his umbilical cord still attached, still moving and breathing. The priest raised the alarm and the baby was moved to the intensive neonatal care unit in a nearby hospital, but died there the next day.
This is the second case in three years in Italy of a baby aborted at 22 weeks because of suspected disability who survived the abortion living for 3 days.
Italy’s abortion 1978 law allows abortion on demand for the first three months of pregnancy but allow it on the grounds of suspected disability in the second three months, but its infanticide law imposes a legal obligation on doctors to attempt to preserve the life of a child who survives abortion. In England, however, there is no time limit at all for abortions where disability is suspected. They can be aborted right up to birth.
Since the purpose of abortion is the deliberate and direct procuring of the destruction of the life of the baby, the doctors expose babies who survive so that they will die.
Since medical ethics require that a patient be informed about the nature of the procedure to which they are to be subjected and consent to it. Are women considering abortion on the grounds of suspected disability informed by their doctor that the abortion involves inducing the birth and that if their baby survives the doctors will be hiding it away and exposing it so that it will die for lack of due care. Are the mothers asked to consent to this protocol of exposure without care where a baby is born alive after an abortion?
The Confidential Enquiry into Maternal and Child Health, 2007 commissioned by the UK Government, found that 66 infants survived NHS termination attempts in hospitals in England and Wales during 2005.
Instead of dying during the abortion procedure as intended, they survived, able to breathe unaided. They were exposed without medical care, left to die, some living for half an hour, one for ten hours.
The only way to step back from this horror show is to reaffirm the first principle of medical ethics – primum non nocere – first do no harm. Do not deliberately destroy human life in the womb or after birth. Once we step away from that principle of respect for life we find ourselves sliding back down to the columna lactaria in the Forum Olitorium.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Groups presssure Lancet editor to delay publication of maternal mortality research
Lancet, a leading medical journal, has just published a new study of international maternal mortality rates, which finds that the World Bank, the WHO and UNICEF statistics for maternal mortality were over 100,000 too high due to reporting and methodological problems.
But in a corrupt and brazen, and thankfully, unsuccessful, attempt to subordinate science to politics, ‘advocacy groups’ lobbied the editor of Lancet, Dr Richard Horton to delay the publication of the new study until after upcoming meetings of the UN Commission on Population and Development, the Women Deliver Conference and the next UN Assembly, which are scheduled to discuss maternal mortality.
What’s bugging these ‘advocates’? Dr Donna Harrison, President of the American Academy of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, said of the new Lancet article:
"The study uses the best statistical methods currently available and clearly demonstrates that worldwide legalization of abortion is unnecessary to bring about significant decreases in maternal mortality. The American Academy of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynaecologists encourages the UN member nations to continue to develop even better statistical information by improving the identification of maternal mortality causality, especially induced abortion related mortality, which is most often underreported or misreported".
Where the UN bodies have been pushing for ‘safe’ and ‘legal’ abortion as the key to bringing improving maternal mortality rates, the new Lancet article does not. It found key causal factors improving maternal mortality – falling pregnancy rates in some countries, higher per capita income, higher education rates for women, and increasing availability of basic medical care, and in particular, ‘skilled birth attendants’.
But in a corrupt and brazen, and thankfully, unsuccessful, attempt to subordinate science to politics, ‘advocacy groups’ lobbied the editor of Lancet, Dr Richard Horton to delay the publication of the new study until after upcoming meetings of the UN Commission on Population and Development, the Women Deliver Conference and the next UN Assembly, which are scheduled to discuss maternal mortality.
What’s bugging these ‘advocates’? Dr Donna Harrison, President of the American Academy of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, said of the new Lancet article:
"The study uses the best statistical methods currently available and clearly demonstrates that worldwide legalization of abortion is unnecessary to bring about significant decreases in maternal mortality. The American Academy of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynaecologists encourages the UN member nations to continue to develop even better statistical information by improving the identification of maternal mortality causality, especially induced abortion related mortality, which is most often underreported or misreported".
Where the UN bodies have been pushing for ‘safe’ and ‘legal’ abortion as the key to bringing improving maternal mortality rates, the new Lancet article does not. It found key causal factors improving maternal mortality – falling pregnancy rates in some countries, higher per capita income, higher education rates for women, and increasing availability of basic medical care, and in particular, ‘skilled birth attendants’.
US National Public Radio has just issued a mandatory censorship protocol for reporters.
They are no longer allowed to use the word ‘pro-life’ to those campaigning for the right to life of unborn children. They have to call them ‘abortion rights opponents’.
In describing those who support abortion, reporters have been forbidden to use the phrase ‘pro-abortion.’ They may, naturally, describe those who oppose abortion as ‘anti-abortion’.
Similar thought-control policies have been adopted by major US news corporations Associated Press, Washington Post, New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, CNN, CBS and NBC.
Dictats on what words reporters are allowed to use? Prescribed words? Forbidden words? Sound familiar?
This kind of ideological censorship was chillingly diagnosed by George Orwell in his final novel, 1984. The totalitarian society seeks to suppress and eventually eliminate dissent from the officially desired thoughts by gradually imposing a new obligatory official language called Newspeak so that dissenting opinion, not only cannot be articulated in a publicly approved way, but, in the end, cannot even be thought privately.
As Orwell put it, the purpose was not only to provide a medium of expression for the ‘proper’ worldview and mental habits, ‘but to make all other modes of thought impossible’ – it was intended that when Newspeak.had been adopted for once and for all, an unorthodox thought ‘should be literally unthinkable.’ This was done, he says, ‘chiefly by the eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings.’ The imposed words, Orwell says, ‘had been deliberately constructed for political purposes’, that is, they ‘were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them.’
What a terrible irony – major news organizations in the free world are imposing Newspeak on their reporters.
Now we have major news outlets in the free world succumbing to the ideology of abortion rights which renders the unborn child what in Orwellian Newspeak presciently calls an ‘unperson.’
In Nazi Germany, gleichschaltung was the process by which one institution after another conformed to the totalitarian ideology in power, sometimes without even having to be compelled - they just saw the way the wind was blowing and got in line voluntarily.
The fact that major news institutions in the US are engaging in a self-imposed pro-abortion gleichschaltung is hard not to read it as a move of desperation on the part of the pro-abortion ideological elite.
They sense public opinion gradually shifting from majority pro-abortion to majority pro-life. They see this reflected in polls showing a majority in the US for the first time in recent years describing itself as pro-life rather than pro-abortion.
They see one movie after another exploring unexpected pregnancies in a positive light and showing ways forward, movies like Waitress, Knocked Up, Juno, Precious and Leonera, and on the other hand, the even more radical emergence of movies showing the dark side of abortion, movies like 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days.
They see women who’ve been through abortion coming forward together asking for their experience to be heard and heeded.
They’re losing the debate, so they’re changing tack. ‘If we can’t win the debate, let’s not have the debate, let’s suppress it’, they seem to be saying.
If news outlets opt to turn themselves into a pro-abortion echo-chamber – talking to one another in a fake language designed to pretend that abortion is not destroying a human life - they will lose half the public.
With the click of a mouse, the days of this kind of censorship are well and truly numbered.
In describing those who support abortion, reporters have been forbidden to use the phrase ‘pro-abortion.’ They may, naturally, describe those who oppose abortion as ‘anti-abortion’.
Similar thought-control policies have been adopted by major US news corporations Associated Press, Washington Post, New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, CNN, CBS and NBC.
Dictats on what words reporters are allowed to use? Prescribed words? Forbidden words? Sound familiar?
This kind of ideological censorship was chillingly diagnosed by George Orwell in his final novel, 1984. The totalitarian society seeks to suppress and eventually eliminate dissent from the officially desired thoughts by gradually imposing a new obligatory official language called Newspeak so that dissenting opinion, not only cannot be articulated in a publicly approved way, but, in the end, cannot even be thought privately.
As Orwell put it, the purpose was not only to provide a medium of expression for the ‘proper’ worldview and mental habits, ‘but to make all other modes of thought impossible’ – it was intended that when Newspeak.had been adopted for once and for all, an unorthodox thought ‘should be literally unthinkable.’ This was done, he says, ‘chiefly by the eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings.’ The imposed words, Orwell says, ‘had been deliberately constructed for political purposes’, that is, they ‘were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them.’
What a terrible irony – major news organizations in the free world are imposing Newspeak on their reporters.
Now we have major news outlets in the free world succumbing to the ideology of abortion rights which renders the unborn child what in Orwellian Newspeak presciently calls an ‘unperson.’
In Nazi Germany, gleichschaltung was the process by which one institution after another conformed to the totalitarian ideology in power, sometimes without even having to be compelled - they just saw the way the wind was blowing and got in line voluntarily.
The fact that major news institutions in the US are engaging in a self-imposed pro-abortion gleichschaltung is hard not to read it as a move of desperation on the part of the pro-abortion ideological elite.
They sense public opinion gradually shifting from majority pro-abortion to majority pro-life. They see this reflected in polls showing a majority in the US for the first time in recent years describing itself as pro-life rather than pro-abortion.
They see one movie after another exploring unexpected pregnancies in a positive light and showing ways forward, movies like Waitress, Knocked Up, Juno, Precious and Leonera, and on the other hand, the even more radical emergence of movies showing the dark side of abortion, movies like 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days.
They see women who’ve been through abortion coming forward together asking for their experience to be heard and heeded.
They’re losing the debate, so they’re changing tack. ‘If we can’t win the debate, let’s not have the debate, let’s suppress it’, they seem to be saying.
If news outlets opt to turn themselves into a pro-abortion echo-chamber – talking to one another in a fake language designed to pretend that abortion is not destroying a human life - they will lose half the public.
With the click of a mouse, the days of this kind of censorship are well and truly numbered.
Cannes Film Festival Features Pro-Life Movie
The Cannes Film Festival next month is to premier a new film called 22 Weeks. It tells the true story of Angele, a woman in her 30's who had an abortion in Florida in 2005.
She chose what was called a 'labour and delivery' type of abortion , which was to take two days. She opted for this rather than other forms of abortion, which she felt would be more distressing and harmful for her baby.
The film is significant for a number of reasons.
Firstly, it will show graphically the mindset of the abortionists in action. An abortion is a procedure the entire intention, aim and purpose of which is that the baby does not survive. Sometimes a baby does not die during the procedure but is deliberately left to die after it.
Secondly, it will give us a sense of how profoundly misguided some politicians are on the issue. As a State senator in Illinois, President Obama voted against a Bill to protect babies who survive abortions.
But thirdly and most importantly, it is a testimony to the confused and suddenly traumatic experience of the mother.
Driven by who knows what pressure to opt for abortion, Angele allowed herself to be seduced by the soothing reassurances of the abortionists, which at one level she wanted to believe.
She asked them what would happen if the baby were born alive and they said ‘they would guide a needle into his heart and it would put him to sleep, and he wouldn’t feel anything.’
She took pills to induce labour and by the time she arrived at the abortion clinic she was experiencing painful contractions, but it was not open. The contractions were getting closer. Eventually she got in and delivered her son, apparently on her own.
Then suddenly she sees. She sees her baby for the first time in the flesh. Fighting for his life. And her motherliness awakens and she calls for help. Surely they will look after him.
When a women working in the abortion clinic staff arrived, she refused the give her baby emergency medical care or to call a 911 for medical help for him. Angele called a friend to ring for an ambulance, but the clinic staff turned them away when they arrived and he died.
That terrible journey made at the speed of light from dreamlike denial to full waking, seeing her baby face to face, real at last but too late, is a precious part of women’s experience of abortion.
22 weeks is yet another straw in the wind that shows the cultural consensus on abortion is turning.
She chose what was called a 'labour and delivery' type of abortion , which was to take two days. She opted for this rather than other forms of abortion, which she felt would be more distressing and harmful for her baby.
The film is significant for a number of reasons.
Firstly, it will show graphically the mindset of the abortionists in action. An abortion is a procedure the entire intention, aim and purpose of which is that the baby does not survive. Sometimes a baby does not die during the procedure but is deliberately left to die after it.
Secondly, it will give us a sense of how profoundly misguided some politicians are on the issue. As a State senator in Illinois, President Obama voted against a Bill to protect babies who survive abortions.
But thirdly and most importantly, it is a testimony to the confused and suddenly traumatic experience of the mother.
Driven by who knows what pressure to opt for abortion, Angele allowed herself to be seduced by the soothing reassurances of the abortionists, which at one level she wanted to believe.
She asked them what would happen if the baby were born alive and they said ‘they would guide a needle into his heart and it would put him to sleep, and he wouldn’t feel anything.’
She took pills to induce labour and by the time she arrived at the abortion clinic she was experiencing painful contractions, but it was not open. The contractions were getting closer. Eventually she got in and delivered her son, apparently on her own.
Then suddenly she sees. She sees her baby for the first time in the flesh. Fighting for his life. And her motherliness awakens and she calls for help. Surely they will look after him.
When a women working in the abortion clinic staff arrived, she refused the give her baby emergency medical care or to call a 911 for medical help for him. Angele called a friend to ring for an ambulance, but the clinic staff turned them away when they arrived and he died.
That terrible journey made at the speed of light from dreamlike denial to full waking, seeing her baby face to face, real at last but too late, is a precious part of women’s experience of abortion.
22 weeks is yet another straw in the wind that shows the cultural consensus on abortion is turning.
Survey finds overwhelming support for legal protection of unborn child
The latest research on abortion shows a substantial majority of the public supporting a prohibition on abortion, while allowing necessary medical interventions in pregnancy to save the life of the mother.
The Pro-Life Campaign commissioned Millward Brown Lansdowne to carry out the survey on a quota controlled sample of 950 people aged 18+ between 27th January and 6th February 2010.
The question reads as follows:
“Are you in favour of, or opposed to, constitutional protection for the unborn that prohibits abortion but allows the continuation of the existing practice of intervention to save a mother’s life in accordance with Irish medical ethics?”
The finding shows that 70% support constitutional protection for the unborn, 13% oppose it and 16% don’t know or have no opinion.
What distinguishes this finding from polls showing support for abortion is the distinction it makes between necessary medical interventions in pregnancy and induced abortion where the life of the unborn child is directly targeted.[1]
This is a critical ethical distinction which abortion advocates constantly seek to blur. Some abortion advocates claim that legalised abortion ‘confronts the reality of crisis pregnancy.’ However, this contention ignores the humanity of the unborn child throughout the entire nine months of pregnancy and the latest research highlighting the negative consequences of abortion for women.[2]
If we are to have a genuinely honest debate on abortion we cannot arbitrarily airbrush the unborn child out of the debate or the many testimonies of women who regret their abortions.
As a country we should be immensely proud of the fact that Ireland without abortion is currently listed as the safest country in the world in which to be pregnant, according to the latest UN survey on maternal health.[3]
All human beings share a common dignity by virtue of their humanity. To deny the right to life simply because the unborn child is at an early stage of development completely undermines an authentic vision of human rights.
The Millward Brown Lansdowne research published today is hugely reassuring as it points to overwhelming public support for an ethos of care for both mother and baby during pregnancy.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] YouGov online poll showing support for abortion conducted for Marie Stopes, released on 08-03-2010
[2] David M. Fergusson, L. John Horwood and Joseph M. Boden, "Abortion and mental health disorders: evidence from a 30-year longitudinal study," The British Journal of Psychiatry, 2008
[3] Report on Maternal Mortality by World Health Organisation, UNICEF, UNFPA and the World Bank, 2007
The Pro-Life Campaign commissioned Millward Brown Lansdowne to carry out the survey on a quota controlled sample of 950 people aged 18+ between 27th January and 6th February 2010.
The question reads as follows:
“Are you in favour of, or opposed to, constitutional protection for the unborn that prohibits abortion but allows the continuation of the existing practice of intervention to save a mother’s life in accordance with Irish medical ethics?”
The finding shows that 70% support constitutional protection for the unborn, 13% oppose it and 16% don’t know or have no opinion.
What distinguishes this finding from polls showing support for abortion is the distinction it makes between necessary medical interventions in pregnancy and induced abortion where the life of the unborn child is directly targeted.[1]
This is a critical ethical distinction which abortion advocates constantly seek to blur. Some abortion advocates claim that legalised abortion ‘confronts the reality of crisis pregnancy.’ However, this contention ignores the humanity of the unborn child throughout the entire nine months of pregnancy and the latest research highlighting the negative consequences of abortion for women.[2]
If we are to have a genuinely honest debate on abortion we cannot arbitrarily airbrush the unborn child out of the debate or the many testimonies of women who regret their abortions.
As a country we should be immensely proud of the fact that Ireland without abortion is currently listed as the safest country in the world in which to be pregnant, according to the latest UN survey on maternal health.[3]
All human beings share a common dignity by virtue of their humanity. To deny the right to life simply because the unborn child is at an early stage of development completely undermines an authentic vision of human rights.
The Millward Brown Lansdowne research published today is hugely reassuring as it points to overwhelming public support for an ethos of care for both mother and baby during pregnancy.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] YouGov online poll showing support for abortion conducted for Marie Stopes, released on 08-03-2010
[2] David M. Fergusson, L. John Horwood and Joseph M. Boden, "Abortion and mental health disorders: evidence from a 30-year longitudinal study," The British Journal of Psychiatry, 2008
[3] Report on Maternal Mortality by World Health Organisation, UNICEF, UNFPA and the World Bank, 2007
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Groundbreaking Stem Cell Surgery in London
12th Apr 10
Source: Family & Life
Doctors carried out groundbreaking surgery to rebuild the windpipe of a 10-year-old British boy with his own stem cells. If the procedure succeeds, they say it could bring a revolution in regenerative medicine. The operation, which lasted almost nine hours, took place at London’s Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital last month.
Doctors injected stem cells from the boy’s bone marrow into the fibrous collagen “scaffold” of a donor trachea (windpipe). Then they implanted the organ, which had first been stripped of its own cells, into the boy.
Over the next month, doctors expect the stem cells to start transforming themselves into internal and external tracheal cells. The boy, whose identity is a secret, is reportedly doing well and breathing normally. Because they are derived from his own tissue, there is no danger of the newly grown cells triggering an immune response. In an ordinary transplant, doctors would suppress the patient’s immune system with drugs to prevent rejection of the organ.
The new procedure was a big step forward from the pioneering surgery done in Spain two years ago on 30-year-old mother of two Claudia Castillo, the first person ever to receive a transplant organ created from stem cells. She received a section of tracheal airway rebuilt from stem cells, but using a much more complex and costly process.
Prof Martin Birchall, head of translational regenerative medicine at University College London, said, “This procedure is different in a number of ways, and we believe it’s a real milestone”. The Irish Times. March 23.
Source: Family & Life
Doctors carried out groundbreaking surgery to rebuild the windpipe of a 10-year-old British boy with his own stem cells. If the procedure succeeds, they say it could bring a revolution in regenerative medicine. The operation, which lasted almost nine hours, took place at London’s Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital last month.
Doctors injected stem cells from the boy’s bone marrow into the fibrous collagen “scaffold” of a donor trachea (windpipe). Then they implanted the organ, which had first been stripped of its own cells, into the boy.
Over the next month, doctors expect the stem cells to start transforming themselves into internal and external tracheal cells. The boy, whose identity is a secret, is reportedly doing well and breathing normally. Because they are derived from his own tissue, there is no danger of the newly grown cells triggering an immune response. In an ordinary transplant, doctors would suppress the patient’s immune system with drugs to prevent rejection of the organ.
The new procedure was a big step forward from the pioneering surgery done in Spain two years ago on 30-year-old mother of two Claudia Castillo, the first person ever to receive a transplant organ created from stem cells. She received a section of tracheal airway rebuilt from stem cells, but using a much more complex and costly process.
Prof Martin Birchall, head of translational regenerative medicine at University College London, said, “This procedure is different in a number of ways, and we believe it’s a real milestone”. The Irish Times. March 23.
Friday, April 9, 2010
Human Rights China - Babies' bodies found in river
Friday, April 9th, 2010
As highlighted on SKY News last week, the bodies of 21 babies, believed dumped by hospitals, recently washed ashore on a riverbank in eastern China.
Video footage showed that the bodies "stashed in yellow plastic bags, at least one of which was marked 'medical waste'" included some infants several months old.
Some wore identification tags with their mothers' names, birth dates, measurements and weights. The official Xinhua News Agency said there were also female unborn babies among the bodies.
While this particular incident made the news the story itself is not entirely surprising given the imposition in China of the one-child policy which results in 13 million babies being aborted annually. As the recent cover story in The Economist magazine pointed out, the practice of gendercide or female foeticide means that female children are targeted both before and after birth through abortion, infanticide or neglect.
In addition to the massive human rights violations involved in ending the lives of children born and unborn the specific targeting of female babies has also created a huge gender imbalance where there are more unmarried young men in China than the entire population of young men in America.
How come radical feminist groups are turning a blind eye to this widespread gender based human rights abuse? Where is the genuine sense of outrage and concern for women’s rights? The truth is there is logic behind the silence. Marianne Mollman, spokesperson for abortion advocacy group Human Rights Watch* has publicly advised pro-choice groups not to campaign against laws permitting sex selection abortion. The reason is clear - if abortion advocates concede that the lives of some unborn children should be protected it would completely undermine their rigid dogma that unborn children have no rights throughout the nine months of pregnancy.
It is incumbent therefore on pro-life groups to continue to pressure the Irish government to adopt a more robust stand in opposition to human rights abuses in China.
*Human Rights Watch is the same group that recently critisised Ireland’s pro-life status.
As highlighted on SKY News last week, the bodies of 21 babies, believed dumped by hospitals, recently washed ashore on a riverbank in eastern China.
Video footage showed that the bodies "stashed in yellow plastic bags, at least one of which was marked 'medical waste'" included some infants several months old.
Some wore identification tags with their mothers' names, birth dates, measurements and weights. The official Xinhua News Agency said there were also female unborn babies among the bodies.
While this particular incident made the news the story itself is not entirely surprising given the imposition in China of the one-child policy which results in 13 million babies being aborted annually. As the recent cover story in The Economist magazine pointed out, the practice of gendercide or female foeticide means that female children are targeted both before and after birth through abortion, infanticide or neglect.
In addition to the massive human rights violations involved in ending the lives of children born and unborn the specific targeting of female babies has also created a huge gender imbalance where there are more unmarried young men in China than the entire population of young men in America.
How come radical feminist groups are turning a blind eye to this widespread gender based human rights abuse? Where is the genuine sense of outrage and concern for women’s rights? The truth is there is logic behind the silence. Marianne Mollman, spokesperson for abortion advocacy group Human Rights Watch* has publicly advised pro-choice groups not to campaign against laws permitting sex selection abortion. The reason is clear - if abortion advocates concede that the lives of some unborn children should be protected it would completely undermine their rigid dogma that unborn children have no rights throughout the nine months of pregnancy.
It is incumbent therefore on pro-life groups to continue to pressure the Irish government to adopt a more robust stand in opposition to human rights abuses in China.
*Human Rights Watch is the same group that recently critisised Ireland’s pro-life status.
Conjoined twin boys a 'gift' to their family
Friday, April 9, 2010
What an inspiring story the Benhaffaf family from Cork has to share. For those who haven’t already heard, the Benhaffaf’s youngest children – twin boys Hassan and Hussein - were born conjoined at the chest last December.
Yesterday the baby boys underwent a 14 hour operation at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London in an intricate surgery to separate them led by Cork born paediatric surgeon Edward Kiely. Thankfully the boys are stable after the surgery and doing well though their doctors have warned that getting through the next few days is key to their survival. The incidence of conjoined twins surviving separation operations and dying thereafter is high and so the Benhaffaf babies family are praying that their boys will endure.
The story of Hassan and Hussein’s lives in the womb is as sensational as their young lives have been so far. Their mother Angie Benhaffaf said her family’s world was turned upside down when they realised the babies were conjoined. She explained how the boys interacted in the womb “they were holding hands and were helping each other – they always mind one another” She explains that despite the struggles and doubts of her pregnancy, the children have been an extraordinary gift to their family.
“The first day I held the two boys in my arms I knew I was chosen. They were a gift. We do feel blessed by them. It was never expected that they would live or do as well as they probably have been doing so hence their name, "the little fighters".
Angie Benhaffaf wrote a poem to her babies as a tribute to them no matter what the outcome of the operation. In it she imparts in an ordinary way the struggles and joy of their lives from the moment she first knew the babies would be conjoined at just four weeks gestation.
"I loved you both from the very start, when doctors thought you shared one heart. I cried so much during that time, we did not think, that all would be fine. Your two big sisters got me through the worst; I really felt that I had been cursed. For eight months I was in such a lonely place, as the birth was something I thought I couldn't face. But then came that beautiful winter's morn, on the 2nd of December my "little fighters" were born!”
She continues “You both have given me courage and strength, What a wonderful "gift", we have been sent!.... Boys - you have filled us all with love and hope, Without you both, we would never cope….No matter how this will all end, I am forever grateful for the time we did spend.
Speaking to the media yesterday after the operation Mrs. Benhaffaf said “We are so proud of the courage and strength Hassan and Hussein have shown and they have both made the world a much better place with them in it”
The attitude of the Benhaffafs is inspiring. They are treating their time with the baby boys as a gift to be celebrated. As we reflect on the lives so far of the Benhaffaf twins we should also consider the many children who are not born because pre-natal diagnoses result in their parents choosing abortion. The Benhaffaf’s story proves that every life no matter how short or threatened is a gift to celebrate and a life worth living. The Benhaffaf babies have certainly brought inspiration to their family and to the country. Let’s hope ‘the little fighters’ persevere.
What an inspiring story the Benhaffaf family from Cork has to share. For those who haven’t already heard, the Benhaffaf’s youngest children – twin boys Hassan and Hussein - were born conjoined at the chest last December.
Yesterday the baby boys underwent a 14 hour operation at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London in an intricate surgery to separate them led by Cork born paediatric surgeon Edward Kiely. Thankfully the boys are stable after the surgery and doing well though their doctors have warned that getting through the next few days is key to their survival. The incidence of conjoined twins surviving separation operations and dying thereafter is high and so the Benhaffaf babies family are praying that their boys will endure.
The story of Hassan and Hussein’s lives in the womb is as sensational as their young lives have been so far. Their mother Angie Benhaffaf said her family’s world was turned upside down when they realised the babies were conjoined. She explained how the boys interacted in the womb “they were holding hands and were helping each other – they always mind one another” She explains that despite the struggles and doubts of her pregnancy, the children have been an extraordinary gift to their family.
“The first day I held the two boys in my arms I knew I was chosen. They were a gift. We do feel blessed by them. It was never expected that they would live or do as well as they probably have been doing so hence their name, "the little fighters".
Angie Benhaffaf wrote a poem to her babies as a tribute to them no matter what the outcome of the operation. In it she imparts in an ordinary way the struggles and joy of their lives from the moment she first knew the babies would be conjoined at just four weeks gestation.
"I loved you both from the very start, when doctors thought you shared one heart. I cried so much during that time, we did not think, that all would be fine. Your two big sisters got me through the worst; I really felt that I had been cursed. For eight months I was in such a lonely place, as the birth was something I thought I couldn't face. But then came that beautiful winter's morn, on the 2nd of December my "little fighters" were born!”
She continues “You both have given me courage and strength, What a wonderful "gift", we have been sent!.... Boys - you have filled us all with love and hope, Without you both, we would never cope….No matter how this will all end, I am forever grateful for the time we did spend.
Speaking to the media yesterday after the operation Mrs. Benhaffaf said “We are so proud of the courage and strength Hassan and Hussein have shown and they have both made the world a much better place with them in it”
The attitude of the Benhaffafs is inspiring. They are treating their time with the baby boys as a gift to be celebrated. As we reflect on the lives so far of the Benhaffaf twins we should also consider the many children who are not born because pre-natal diagnoses result in their parents choosing abortion. The Benhaffaf’s story proves that every life no matter how short or threatened is a gift to celebrate and a life worth living. The Benhaffaf babies have certainly brought inspiration to their family and to the country. Let’s hope ‘the little fighters’ persevere.
The mother of conjoined twins Hassan and Hussein Benhaffaf has written a poem in tribute to her sons as they undergo surgery to be separated.
The mother of Hassan and Hussein Banhaffaf pens a poetic tribute to them
Angie Benhaffaf penned For My Little Fighters for the boys, who are being operated on at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London.
Here is the full text of the poem:
I loved you both from the very start, When doctors thought you shared one heart.
I cried so much during that time, We did not think, that all would be fine.
Your two big sisters got me through the worst, I really felt that I had been cursed.
For eight months I was in such a lonely place, As the birth was something I thought I couldn't face.
But then came that beautiful winter's morn, On the 2nd of December my "little fighters" were born!
To hear you both cry was music to our ears, Your dad and I cried so many tears.
You both have given me courage and strength, What a wonderful "gift", we have been sent!
"Hassan" is the quiet one, and a minute older, "Hussein" is the naughty one - he's a little bit bolder!!
Two wonderful boys joined together in love, You truly are a "gift" sent from above.
I feel so honoured to be your mum, I need just one more miracle to come.
"The little fighters" is the name ye share, You have earned it well, as you fought to be here.
Your final battle is getting near, We are all behind you, so have no fear.
Boys - you have filled us all with love and hope, Without you both, we would never cope.
Keep on fighting to stay strong, Always remember your big sisters' song.
"You are not alone" is the song they sing for you, And those words could not be more true!
So as we prepare for the surgery ahead, Many a tear will be shed.
All I can ask of God now, is that ye feel no pain, I'm so proud of my boys - "Hassan and Hussein".
No matter how this will all end, I am forever grateful for the time we did spend.
You have brought the country together, in love and prayer, You have made 2010 a special year!
Always remember, "you are not alone", Please God someday, we'll all return home.
I feel I must be one of the luckiest mums, To have not one, but two precious sons.
Love you both with all my heart and soul
Mummy xx
Angie Benhaffaf penned For My Little Fighters for the boys, who are being operated on at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London.
Here is the full text of the poem:
I loved you both from the very start, When doctors thought you shared one heart.
I cried so much during that time, We did not think, that all would be fine.
Your two big sisters got me through the worst, I really felt that I had been cursed.
For eight months I was in such a lonely place, As the birth was something I thought I couldn't face.
But then came that beautiful winter's morn, On the 2nd of December my "little fighters" were born!
To hear you both cry was music to our ears, Your dad and I cried so many tears.
You both have given me courage and strength, What a wonderful "gift", we have been sent!
"Hassan" is the quiet one, and a minute older, "Hussein" is the naughty one - he's a little bit bolder!!
Two wonderful boys joined together in love, You truly are a "gift" sent from above.
I feel so honoured to be your mum, I need just one more miracle to come.
"The little fighters" is the name ye share, You have earned it well, as you fought to be here.
Your final battle is getting near, We are all behind you, so have no fear.
Boys - you have filled us all with love and hope, Without you both, we would never cope.
Keep on fighting to stay strong, Always remember your big sisters' song.
"You are not alone" is the song they sing for you, And those words could not be more true!
So as we prepare for the surgery ahead, Many a tear will be shed.
All I can ask of God now, is that ye feel no pain, I'm so proud of my boys - "Hassan and Hussein".
No matter how this will all end, I am forever grateful for the time we did spend.
You have brought the country together, in love and prayer, You have made 2010 a special year!
Always remember, "you are not alone", Please God someday, we'll all return home.
I feel I must be one of the luckiest mums, To have not one, but two precious sons.
Love you both with all my heart and soul
Mummy xx
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Thursday, April 1, 2010
100 million ‘missing’ girls
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | March 14, 2010
Source: Boston Globe
IN INDIA each year, it is estimated that as many as a million baby girls are aborted by parents determined not to raise a daughter. Those unborn girls are the victims of a fierce cultural preference for boys — and of modern imaging technology that makes it easy to learn the sex of a baby in the womb. Ultrasound scans started becoming widely available in India in the 1980s; since then, an estimated 10 million female babies have been destroyed during pregnancy.
Sex-selection tests are illegal in India. So are sex-selective abortions. But the laws are rarely enforced and easily circumvented. Rather than openly disclose the sex of a fetus after an ultrasound exam, for example, some Indian doctors signal the results by giving the parents pink or blue candies or candles. Others dispense with subtlety altogether, advertising their services with such brazen slogans as “Spend 500 rupees now and save 50,000 rupees later’’ — an allusion to the potentially crippling dowry that an Indian bride’s parents are expected to pay when their daughter gets married. Many couples have taken that deal. The result is an alarming shortage of young Indian women — and a growing population of young Indian men with little prospect of finding a wife.
It isn’t only in India that unborn girls are being killed on such a mass scale.
Last week, in a chilling cover story titled “The worldwide war on baby girls," The Economist noted that in many parts of China, the ratio of boys to girls is now 124-to-100. “These rates are biologically impossible without human intervention,’’ the magazine observed, and their consequences will be dire. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences recently warned that within 10 years, 24 million Chinese men will find themselves condemned to permanent bachelorhood. Among Chinese 19 and younger, the prospects are even worse: By 2020, there will be 30 million to 40 million more males in this age group than females. That is a staggering number of what the Chinese call guanggun, or “bare branches’’ — young males with little prospect of marriage and a stable family life.
“In any country,’’ says The Economist, “rootless young males spell trouble; in Asian societies, where marriage and children are the recognized routes into society, single men are almost like outlaws. Crime rates, bride trafficking, sexual violence, even female suicide rates are all rising and will rise further as the lopsided generations reach their maturity.’’
The war against baby girls has spread to South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan, to the former Soviet republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, and even to Asian-American communities in the United States. And if you think that the antidote to this “gendercide’’ is modernization, better living standards, and more education, think again.
“It is not the country’s poorest but its richest who are eliminating baby girls at the highest rate, regardless of religion or caste,’’ the Times of London reported in 2007. “Delhi’s leafiest suburbs have among the lowest ratio of girls to boys in India, while the two states with the absolute lowest ratio are those with the highest per-capita income: Punjab and Haryana.’’ Similarly in China, the higher a province’s literacy rate or income per head, the more skewed its sexual disparities.
It is not material poverty that leads these cultures to blithely accept the killing of their very youngest girls. It is a poverty of values, an ancient prejudice that views daughters as a financial burden to be avoided, rather than a blessing to be cherished.
The Chinese writer Xinran Xue writes in a new book, “Message from an Unkown Chinese Mother,’’ about visiting a peasant family in Shandong while the mother is giving birth. The baby turns out to be a girl, and Xinran hears a man’s voice mutter: “Useless thing!’’ To her horror, the “useless thing’’ is thrown into a pail of slops to be drowned.
“That’s a living child,’’ I said in a shaking voice, pointing at the slops pail.
“It’s not a child,’’ she corrected me. “It’s a girl baby, and we can’t keep it. Around these parts, you can’t get by without a son. Girl babies don’t count.’’
On its cover, The Economist asks: “What happened to 100 million baby girls?’’ The answer is simple — and sickening: They didn’t count.
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com.
Source: Boston Globe
IN INDIA each year, it is estimated that as many as a million baby girls are aborted by parents determined not to raise a daughter. Those unborn girls are the victims of a fierce cultural preference for boys — and of modern imaging technology that makes it easy to learn the sex of a baby in the womb. Ultrasound scans started becoming widely available in India in the 1980s; since then, an estimated 10 million female babies have been destroyed during pregnancy.
Sex-selection tests are illegal in India. So are sex-selective abortions. But the laws are rarely enforced and easily circumvented. Rather than openly disclose the sex of a fetus after an ultrasound exam, for example, some Indian doctors signal the results by giving the parents pink or blue candies or candles. Others dispense with subtlety altogether, advertising their services with such brazen slogans as “Spend 500 rupees now and save 50,000 rupees later’’ — an allusion to the potentially crippling dowry that an Indian bride’s parents are expected to pay when their daughter gets married. Many couples have taken that deal. The result is an alarming shortage of young Indian women — and a growing population of young Indian men with little prospect of finding a wife.
It isn’t only in India that unborn girls are being killed on such a mass scale.
Last week, in a chilling cover story titled “The worldwide war on baby girls," The Economist noted that in many parts of China, the ratio of boys to girls is now 124-to-100. “These rates are biologically impossible without human intervention,’’ the magazine observed, and their consequences will be dire. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences recently warned that within 10 years, 24 million Chinese men will find themselves condemned to permanent bachelorhood. Among Chinese 19 and younger, the prospects are even worse: By 2020, there will be 30 million to 40 million more males in this age group than females. That is a staggering number of what the Chinese call guanggun, or “bare branches’’ — young males with little prospect of marriage and a stable family life.
“In any country,’’ says The Economist, “rootless young males spell trouble; in Asian societies, where marriage and children are the recognized routes into society, single men are almost like outlaws. Crime rates, bride trafficking, sexual violence, even female suicide rates are all rising and will rise further as the lopsided generations reach their maturity.’’
The war against baby girls has spread to South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan, to the former Soviet republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, and even to Asian-American communities in the United States. And if you think that the antidote to this “gendercide’’ is modernization, better living standards, and more education, think again.
“It is not the country’s poorest but its richest who are eliminating baby girls at the highest rate, regardless of religion or caste,’’ the Times of London reported in 2007. “Delhi’s leafiest suburbs have among the lowest ratio of girls to boys in India, while the two states with the absolute lowest ratio are those with the highest per-capita income: Punjab and Haryana.’’ Similarly in China, the higher a province’s literacy rate or income per head, the more skewed its sexual disparities.
It is not material poverty that leads these cultures to blithely accept the killing of their very youngest girls. It is a poverty of values, an ancient prejudice that views daughters as a financial burden to be avoided, rather than a blessing to be cherished.
The Chinese writer Xinran Xue writes in a new book, “Message from an Unkown Chinese Mother,’’ about visiting a peasant family in Shandong while the mother is giving birth. The baby turns out to be a girl, and Xinran hears a man’s voice mutter: “Useless thing!’’ To her horror, the “useless thing’’ is thrown into a pail of slops to be drowned.
“That’s a living child,’’ I said in a shaking voice, pointing at the slops pail.
“It’s not a child,’’ she corrected me. “It’s a girl baby, and we can’t keep it. Around these parts, you can’t get by without a son. Girl babies don’t count.’’
On its cover, The Economist asks: “What happened to 100 million baby girls?’’ The answer is simple — and sickening: They didn’t count.
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Gendercide in China and India
Source: Gendercide Watch
Case Study:
Female Infanticide
Focus:
(1) India
(2) China
Summary
The phenomenon of female infanticide is as old as many cultures, and has likely accounted for millions of gender-selective deaths throughout history. It remains a critical concern in a number of "Third World" countries today, notably the two most populous countries on earth, China and India. In all cases, specifically female infanticide reflects the low status accorded to women in most parts of the world; it is arguably the most brutal and destructive manifestation of the anti-female bias that pervades "patriarchal" societies. It is closely linked to the phenomena of sex-selective abortion, which targets female fetuses almost exclusively, and neglect of girl children.
The background
"Female infanticide is the intentional killing of baby girls due to the preference for male babies and from the low value associated with the birth of females." (Marina Porras, "Female Infanticide and Foeticide".) It should be seen as a subset of the broader phenomenon of infanticide, which has also targeted the physically or mentally handicapped, and infant males (alongside infant females or, occasionally, on a gender-selective basis). As with maternal mortality, some would dispute the assigning of infanticide or female infanticide to the category of "genocide" or, as here, "gendercide." Nonetheless, the argument advanced in the maternal mortality case-study holds true in this case as well: governments and other actors can be just as guilty of mass killing by neglect or tacit encouragement, as by direct murder. R.J. Rummel buttresses this view, referring to infanticide as
another type of government killing whose victims may total millions ... In many cultures, government permitted, if not encouraged, the killing of handicapped or female infants or otherwise unwanted children. In the Greece of 200 B.C., for example, the murder of female infants was so common that among 6,000 families living in Delphi no more than 1 percent had two daughters. Among 79 families, nearly as many had one child as two. Among all there were only 28 daughters to 118 sons. ... But classical Greece was not unusual. In eighty-four societies spanning the Renaissance to our time, "defective" children have been killed in one-third of them. In India, for example, because of Hindu beliefs and the rigid caste system, young girls were murdered as a matter of course. When demographic statistics were first collected in the nineteenth century, it was discovered that in "some villages, no girl babies were found at all; in a total of thirty others, there were 343 boys to 54 girls. ... [I]n Bombay, the number of girls alive in 1834 was 603."
Rummel adds: "Instances of infanticide ... are usually singular events; they do not happen en masse. But the accumulation of such officially sanctioned or demanded murders comprises, in effect, serial massacre. Since such practices were so pervasive in some cultures, I suspect that the death toll from infanticide must exceed that from mass sacrifice and perhaps even outright mass murder." (Rummel, Death by Government, pp. 65-66.)
Focus (1): India
As John-Thor Dahlburg points out, "in rural India, the centuries-old practice of female infanticide can still be considered a wise course of action." (Dahlburg, "Where killing baby girls 'is no big sin'," The Los Angeles Times [in The Toronto Star, February 28, 1994.]) According to census statistics, "From 972 females for every 1,000 males in 1901 ... the gender imbalance has tilted to 929 females per 1,000 males. ... In the nearly 300 poor hamlets of the Usilampatti area of Tamil Nadu [state], as many as 196 girls died under suspicious circumstances [in 1993] ... Some were fed dry, unhulled rice that punctured their windpipes, or were made to swallow poisonous powdered fertilizer. Others were smothered with a wet towel, strangled or allowed to starve to death." Dahlburg profiles one disturbing case from Tamil Nadu:
Lakshmi already had one daughter, so when she gave birth to a second girl, she killed her. For the three days of her second child's short life, Lakshmi admits, she refused to nurse her. To silence the infant's famished cries, the impoverished village woman squeezed the milky sap from an oleander shrub, mixed it with castor oil, and forced the poisonous potion down the newborn's throat. The baby bled from the nose, then died soon afterward. Female neighbors buried her in a small hole near Lakshmi's square thatched hut of sunbaked mud. They sympathized with Lakshmi, and in the same circumstances, some would probably have done what she did. For despite the risk of execution by hanging and about 16 months of a much-ballyhooed government scheme to assist families with daughters, in some hamlets of ... Tamil Nadu, murdering girls is still sometimes believed to be a wiser course than raising them. "A daughter is always liabilities. How can I bring up a second?" Lakshmi, 28, answered firmly when asked by a visitor how she could have taken her own child's life eight years ago. "Instead of her suffering the way I do, I thought it was better to get rid of her." (All quotes from Dahlburg, "Where killing baby girls 'is no big sin'.")
A study of Tamil Nadu by the Community Service Guild of Madras similarly found that "female infanticide is rampant" in the state, though only among Hindu (rather than Moslem or Christian) families. "Of the 1,250 families covered by the study, 740 had only one girl child and 249 agreed directly that they had done away with the unwanted girl child. More than 213 of the families had more than one male child whereas half the respondents had only one daughter." (Malavika Karlekar, "The girl child in India: does she have any rights?," Canadian Woman Studies, March 1995.)
The bias against females in India is related to the fact that "Sons are called upon to provide the income; they are the ones who do most of the work in the fields. In this way sons are looked to as a type of insurance. With this perspective, it becomes clearer that the high value given to males decreases the value given to females." (Marina Porras, "Female Infanticide and Foeticide".) The problem is also intimately tied to the institution of dowry, in which the family of a prospective bride must pay enormous sums of money to the family in which the woman will live after marriage. Though formally outlawed, the institution is still pervasive. "The combination of dowry and wedding expenses usually add up to more than a million rupees ([US] $35,000). In India the average civil servant earns about 100,000 rupees ($3,500) a year. Given these figures combined with the low status of women, it seems not so illogical that the poorer Indian families would want only male children." (Porras, "Female Infanticide and Foeticide".) Murders of women whose families are deemed to have paid insufficient dowry have become increasingly common, and receive separate case-study treatment on this site.
India is also the heartland of sex-selective abortion. Amniocentesis was introduced in 1974 "to ascertain birth defects in a sample population," but "was quickly appropriated by medical entrepreneurs. A spate of sex-selective abortions followed." (Karlekar, "The girl child in India.") Karlekar points out that "those women who undergo sex determination tests and abort on knowing that the foetus is female are actively taking a decision against equality and the right to life for girls. In many cases, of course, the women are not independent agents but merely victims of a dominant family ideology based on preference for male children."
Dahlburg notes that "In Jaipur, capital of the western state of Rajasthan, prenatal sex determination tests result in an estimated 3,500 abortions of female fetuses annually," according to a medical-college study. (Dahlburg, "Where killing baby girls 'is no big sin'.") Most strikingly, according to UNICEF, "A report from Bombay in 1984 on abortions after prenatal sex determination stated that 7,999 out of 8,000 of the aborted fetuses were females. Sex determination has become a lucrative business." (Zeng Yi et al., "Causes and Implications of the Recent Increase in the Reported Sex Ratio at Birth in China," Population and Development Review, 19: 2 [June 1993], p. 297.)
Deficits in nutrition and health-care also overwhelmingly target female children. Karlekar cites research
indicat[ing] a definite bias in feeding boys milk and milk products and eggs ... In Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh [states], it is usual for girls and women to eat less than men and boys and to have their meal after the men and boys had finished eating. Greater mobility outside the home provides boys with the opportunity to eat sweets and fruit from saved-up pocket money or from money given to buy articles for food consumption. In case of illness, it is usually boys who have preference in health care. ... More is spent on clothing for boys than for girls[,] which also affects morbidity. (Karlekar, "The girl child in India.")
Sunita Kishor reports "another disturbing finding," namely "that, despite the increased ability to command essential food and medical resources associated with development, female children [in India] do not improve their survival chances relative to male children with gains in development. Relatively high levels of agricultural development decrease the life chances of females while leaving males' life chances unaffected; urbanization increases the life chances of males more than females. ... Clearly, gender-based discrimination in the allocation of resources persists and even increases, even when availability of resources is not a constraint." (Kishor, "'May God Give Sons to All': Gender and Child Mortality in India," American Sociological Review, 58: 2 [April 1993], p. 262.)
Indian state governments have sometimes taken measures to diminish the slaughter of infant girls and abortions of female fetuses. "The leaders of Tamil Nadu are holding out a tempting carrot to couples in the state with one or two daughters and no sons: if one parent undergoes sterilization, the government will give the family [U.S.] \\$160 in aid per child. The money will be paid in instalments as the girl goes through school. She will also get a small gold ring and on her 20th birthday, a lump sum of $650 to serve as her dowry or defray the expenses of higher education. Four thousand families enrolled in the first year," with 6,000 to 8,000 expected to join annually (as of 1994) (Dahlburg, "Where killing baby girls 'is no big sin'.") Such programs have, however, barely begun to address the scale of the catastrophe.
Focus (2): China
"A tradition of infanticide and abandonment, especially of females, existed in China before the foundation of the People's Republic in 1949," note Zeng et al.. ("Causes and Implications," p. 294.) According to Ansley J. Coale and Judith Banister, "A missionary (and naturalist) observer in [China in] the late nineteenth century interviewed 40 women over age 50 who reported having borne 183 sons and 175 daughters, of whom 126 sons but only 53 daughters survived to age 10; by their account, the women had destroyed 78 of their daughters." (Coale and Banister, "Five Decades of Missing Females in China," Demography, 31: 3 [August 1994], p. 472.)
According to Zeng et al., "The practice was largely forsaken in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s." (Zeng et al., "Causes and Implications," p. 294.) Coale and Banister likewise acknowledge a "decline of excess female mortality after the establishment of the People's Republic ... assisted by the action of a strong government, which tried to modify this custom as well as other traditional practices that it viewed as harmful." (Coale and Banister, "Five Decades," p. 472.) But the number of "missing" women showed a sharp upward trend in the 1980s, linked by almost all scholars to the "one-child policy" introduced by the Chinese government in 1979 to control spiralling population growth. Couples are penalized by wage-cuts and reduced access to social services when children are born "outside the plan." Johansson and Nygren found that while "sex ratios [were] generally within or fairly near the expected range of 105 to 106 boys per 100 girls for live births within the plan ... they are, in contrast, clearly far above normal for children born outside the plan, even as high as 115 to 118 for 1984-87. That the phenomenon of missing girls in China in the 1980s is related to the government's population policy is thus conclusively shown." (Sten Johansson and Ola Nygren, "The Missing Girls of China: A New Demographic Account," Population and Development Review, 17: 1 [March 1991], pp. 40-41.)
The Chinese government appeared to recognize the linkage by allowing families in rural areas (where anti-female bias is stronger) a second child if the first was a girl. Nonetheless, in September 1997, the World Health Organization's Regional Committee for the Western Pacific issued a report claiming that "more than 50 million women were estimated to be 'missing' in China because of the institutionalized killing and neglect of girls due to Beijing's population control program that limits parents to one child." (See Joseph Farah, "Cover-up of China's gender-cide", Western Journalism Center/FreeRepublic, September 29, 1997.) Farah referred to the gendercide as "the biggest single holocaust in human history."
According to Peter Stockland, "Years of population engineering, including virtual extermination of 'surplus' baby girls, has created a nightmarish imbalance in China's male and female populations." (Stockland, "China's baby-slaughter overlooked," The Calgary Sun, June 11, 1997.) In 1999, Jonathan Manthorpe reported a study by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, claiming that "the imbalance between the sexes is now so distorted that there are 111 million men in China -- more than three times the population of Canada -- who will not be able to find a wife." As a result, the kidnapping and slave-trading of women has increased: "Since 1990, say official Chinese figures, 64,000 women -- 8,000 a year on average -- have been rescued by authorities from forced 'marriages'. The number who have not been saved can only be guessed at. ... The thirst for women is so acute that the slave trader gangs are even reaching outside China to find merchandise. There are regular reports of women being abducted in such places as northern Vietnam to feed the demand in China." (Jonathan Manthorpe, "China battles slave trading in women: Female infanticide fuels a brisk trade in wives," The Vancouver Sun, January 11, 1999.)
Since the first allegations of widespread female infanticide in China connected to the government's "one-child" policy, controversy has raged over the number of deaths that can be ascribed to infanticide as opposed to other causes. Zeng et al. argued in 1993 that "underreporting of female births, an increase in prenatal sex identification by ultrasound and other diagnostic methods for the illegal purpose of gender-specific birth control, and [only] very low-level incidence of female infanticide are the causes of the increase in the reported sex ratio at birth in China." (Zeng et al., "Causes and Implications," p. 285.) They add: "Underreporting of female births accounts for about 43 percent to 75 percent of the difference between the reported sex ratio at birth during the second half of the 1980s and the normal value of the true sex ratio at birth" (p. 289). The authors contended that "sex-differential underreporting of births and induced abortion after prenatal sex determination together explain almost all of the increase in the reported sex ratio at birth during the late 1980s," and thus "the omission ... of victims of female infanticide cannot be a significant factor." Moreover, "Both the social and administrative structure and the close bond among neighbors in China make it difficult to conceal a serious crime such as infanticide," while additionally "Infanticide is not a cost-effective method of sex selection. The psychological and moral costs are so high that people are unlikely to take such a step except under extreme circumstances" (p. 295). They stress, however, that "even small numbers of cases of female infanticide, abandonment, and neglect are a serious violation of the fundamental human rights of women and children" (p. 296). (2002 update: A recent article by John Gittings of the UK Guardian cites national census results released in May 2002 that show that "more than 116 male births were recorded for every 100 female births," but claims the cause is overwhelmingly sex-selective abortion: "Female infanticide, notorious in China's past as a primitive method of sex selection, is now thought to be infrequent." See Gittings, "Growing Sex Imbalance Shocks China", The Guardian, May 13, 2002.)
In a similar vein, in April 2000, The New York Times reported that "many 'illegal' children are born in secret, their births never officially registered." And "as more women move around the country to work, it is increasingly hard to monitor pregnancies ... Unannnounced spot checks by the State Statistics Bureau have discovered undercounts of up to 40 percent in some villages, Chinese demographers say." (See Elisabeth Rosenthal, "China's Widely Flouted One-Child Policy Undercuts Its Census", The New York Times, April 14, 2000.)
Johansson and Nygren attracted considerable notice with a somewhat different claim: "that adoptions (which often go unreported) account for a large proportion of the missing girls. ... If adopted children are added to the live births ... the sex ratio at birth becomes much closer to normal for most years in the 1980s. ... Adding the adopted children to live births reduces the number of missing girls by about half." (Johansson and Nygren, "The Missing Girls of China," pp. 43, 46.) They add (p. 50): "That female infanticide does occur on some scale is evidenced by reports in the Chinese press, but the available statistical evidence does not help us to determine whether it takes place on a large or a small scale."
Even if millions of Chinese infant girls are unregistered rather than directly murdered, however, the pattern of discrimination is one that will severely reduce their opportunities in life. "If parents do hide the birth of a baby girl, she will go unregistered and therefore will not have any legal existence. The child may have difficulty receiving medical attention, going to school, and [accessing] other state services." (Porras, "Female Infanticide and Foeticide".)
Likewise, if a Chinese infant girl is turned over for adoption rather than being killed, she risks being placed in one of the notorious "Dying Rooms" unveiled in a British TV documentary. Chinese state orphanages have come in for heavy criticism as a result of the degrading and unsanitary conditions that usually pervade them. In one orphanage, documentary producer Brian Woods found that "every single baby ... was a girl, and as we moved on this pattern was repeated. The only boys were mentally or physically disabled. 95% of the babies we saw were able-bodied girls. We also discovered that, although they are described as orphans, very few of them actually are; the overwhelming majority do have parents, but their parents have abandoned them, simply because they were born the wrong sex." Woods estimated that "up to a million baby girls every year" were victims of this "mass desertion," deriving from "the complex collision of [China's] notorious One Child Policy and its traditional preference for sons." (See Brian Woods, "The Dying Rooms Trust".)
The phenomenon of neglect of girl children is also dramatically evident in China. According to the World Health Organization, "In many cases, mothers are more likely to bring their male children to health centers -- particularly to private physicians -- and they may be treated at an earlier stage of disease than girls." (Cited in Farah, "Cover-up of China's gender-cide".)
The Chinese government has taken some energetic steps to combat the practice of female infanticide and sex-selective abortion of female fetuses. It "has employed the Marriage Law and Women's Protection Law which both prohibit female infanticide. The Women's Protection Law also prohibits discrimination against 'women who give birth to female babies.' ... The Maternal Health Care Law of 1994 'strictly prohibits' the use of technology to identify the gender of a fetus." However, "although the government has outlawed the use of ultrasound machines, physicians continue to use them to determine the gender of fetuses, especially in rural areas." (Porras, "Female Infanticide and Foeticide".)
How many die?
Gendercide Watch is aware of no overall statistics on the numbers of girls who die annually from infanticide. Calculations are further clouded by the unreliability and ambiguity of much of the data. Nonetheless, a minimum estimate would place the casualties in the the hundreds of thousands, especially when one takes into consideration that the phenomenon is most prevalent in the world's two most populous countries. Sex-selective abortions likely account for an even higher number of "missing" girls.
Who is responsible?
As already noted, female infanticide reflects the low status accorded to women in many societies around the world. The "burden" of taking a woman into the family accounts for the high dowry rates in India which, in turn, have led to an epidemic female infanticide. Typical also is China, where
culture dictates that when a girl marries she leaves her family and becomes part of her husband's family. For this reason Chinese peasants have for many centuries wanted a son to ensure there is someone to look after them in their old age -- having a boy child is the best pension a Chinese peasant can get. Baby girls are even called "maggots in the rice" ... ("The Dying Rooms Trust")
Infanticide is a crime overwhelmingly committed by women, both in the Third and First Worlds. (This contrasts markedly with "infanticide in nonhuman primates," which "is carried out primarily by migrant males who are unrelated to the infant or its parents and is a manifestation of reproductive competition among males." [Glenn Hausfater, "Infanticide: Comparative and Evolutionary Perspectives," Current Anthropology, 25: 4 (1984), p. 501.] It also serves as a reminder that gendercide may be implemented by those of the same gender.) In India, according to John-Thor Dahlburg, "many births take place in isolated villages, with only female friends and the midwife present. If a child dies, the women can always blame natural causes." (Dahlburg, "Where killing baby girls 'is no big sin'.") In the United States, "every year hundreds of women commit neonaticide [the killing of newborns] ... Prosecutors sometimes don't prosecute; juries rarely convict; those found guilty almost never go to jail. Barbara Kirwin, a forensic psychologist, reports that in nearly 300 cases of women charged with neonaticide in the United States and Britain, no woman spent more than a night in jail." Much of "the leniency shown to neonaticidal mothers" reflects the fact that they are standardly "young, poor, unmarried and socially isolated," although it is notable that similar leniency is rarely extended to young, poor, and socially isolated male murderers. (Steven Pinker, "Why They Kill Their Newborns", The New York Times, November 2, 1997.)
A number of strategies have been proposed and implemented to try to address the problem of female infanticide, along with the related phenomena of sex-selective abortion and abandonment and neglect of girl children. Zeng et al.'s prescriptions for Chinese policymakers can easily be generalized to other countries where female infanticide is rife:
The principle of equality between men and women should be more widely promoted through the news media to change the attitude of son preference and improve the awareness of the general public on this issue; the principle should also be reflected in specific social and economic policies to protect the basic rights of women and children, especially female children. ... Government regulations prohibiting the use of prenatal sex identification techniques for nonmedical purposes should be strictly enforced, and violators should be punished accordingly. The laws that punish people who commit infanticide, abandonment, and neglect of female children, and the laws and regulations on the protection of women and children[,] should be strictly enforced. The campaigns to protect women and children from being kidnapped or sold into servitude should be effectively strengthened. Family planning programs should focus on effective public education, good counseling and service delivery, and the fully voluntary participation of the community and individuals to increase contraceptive prevalence, reduce unplanned pregnancies, and minimize the need for an induced abortion. (Zeng, et al., p. 298.)
Case Study:
Female Infanticide
Focus:
(1) India
(2) China
Summary
The phenomenon of female infanticide is as old as many cultures, and has likely accounted for millions of gender-selective deaths throughout history. It remains a critical concern in a number of "Third World" countries today, notably the two most populous countries on earth, China and India. In all cases, specifically female infanticide reflects the low status accorded to women in most parts of the world; it is arguably the most brutal and destructive manifestation of the anti-female bias that pervades "patriarchal" societies. It is closely linked to the phenomena of sex-selective abortion, which targets female fetuses almost exclusively, and neglect of girl children.
The background
"Female infanticide is the intentional killing of baby girls due to the preference for male babies and from the low value associated with the birth of females." (Marina Porras, "Female Infanticide and Foeticide".) It should be seen as a subset of the broader phenomenon of infanticide, which has also targeted the physically or mentally handicapped, and infant males (alongside infant females or, occasionally, on a gender-selective basis). As with maternal mortality, some would dispute the assigning of infanticide or female infanticide to the category of "genocide" or, as here, "gendercide." Nonetheless, the argument advanced in the maternal mortality case-study holds true in this case as well: governments and other actors can be just as guilty of mass killing by neglect or tacit encouragement, as by direct murder. R.J. Rummel buttresses this view, referring to infanticide as
another type of government killing whose victims may total millions ... In many cultures, government permitted, if not encouraged, the killing of handicapped or female infants or otherwise unwanted children. In the Greece of 200 B.C., for example, the murder of female infants was so common that among 6,000 families living in Delphi no more than 1 percent had two daughters. Among 79 families, nearly as many had one child as two. Among all there were only 28 daughters to 118 sons. ... But classical Greece was not unusual. In eighty-four societies spanning the Renaissance to our time, "defective" children have been killed in one-third of them. In India, for example, because of Hindu beliefs and the rigid caste system, young girls were murdered as a matter of course. When demographic statistics were first collected in the nineteenth century, it was discovered that in "some villages, no girl babies were found at all; in a total of thirty others, there were 343 boys to 54 girls. ... [I]n Bombay, the number of girls alive in 1834 was 603."
Rummel adds: "Instances of infanticide ... are usually singular events; they do not happen en masse. But the accumulation of such officially sanctioned or demanded murders comprises, in effect, serial massacre. Since such practices were so pervasive in some cultures, I suspect that the death toll from infanticide must exceed that from mass sacrifice and perhaps even outright mass murder." (Rummel, Death by Government, pp. 65-66.)
Focus (1): India
As John-Thor Dahlburg points out, "in rural India, the centuries-old practice of female infanticide can still be considered a wise course of action." (Dahlburg, "Where killing baby girls 'is no big sin'," The Los Angeles Times [in The Toronto Star, February 28, 1994.]) According to census statistics, "From 972 females for every 1,000 males in 1901 ... the gender imbalance has tilted to 929 females per 1,000 males. ... In the nearly 300 poor hamlets of the Usilampatti area of Tamil Nadu [state], as many as 196 girls died under suspicious circumstances [in 1993] ... Some were fed dry, unhulled rice that punctured their windpipes, or were made to swallow poisonous powdered fertilizer. Others were smothered with a wet towel, strangled or allowed to starve to death." Dahlburg profiles one disturbing case from Tamil Nadu:
Lakshmi already had one daughter, so when she gave birth to a second girl, she killed her. For the three days of her second child's short life, Lakshmi admits, she refused to nurse her. To silence the infant's famished cries, the impoverished village woman squeezed the milky sap from an oleander shrub, mixed it with castor oil, and forced the poisonous potion down the newborn's throat. The baby bled from the nose, then died soon afterward. Female neighbors buried her in a small hole near Lakshmi's square thatched hut of sunbaked mud. They sympathized with Lakshmi, and in the same circumstances, some would probably have done what she did. For despite the risk of execution by hanging and about 16 months of a much-ballyhooed government scheme to assist families with daughters, in some hamlets of ... Tamil Nadu, murdering girls is still sometimes believed to be a wiser course than raising them. "A daughter is always liabilities. How can I bring up a second?" Lakshmi, 28, answered firmly when asked by a visitor how she could have taken her own child's life eight years ago. "Instead of her suffering the way I do, I thought it was better to get rid of her." (All quotes from Dahlburg, "Where killing baby girls 'is no big sin'.")
A study of Tamil Nadu by the Community Service Guild of Madras similarly found that "female infanticide is rampant" in the state, though only among Hindu (rather than Moslem or Christian) families. "Of the 1,250 families covered by the study, 740 had only one girl child and 249 agreed directly that they had done away with the unwanted girl child. More than 213 of the families had more than one male child whereas half the respondents had only one daughter." (Malavika Karlekar, "The girl child in India: does she have any rights?," Canadian Woman Studies, March 1995.)
The bias against females in India is related to the fact that "Sons are called upon to provide the income; they are the ones who do most of the work in the fields. In this way sons are looked to as a type of insurance. With this perspective, it becomes clearer that the high value given to males decreases the value given to females." (Marina Porras, "Female Infanticide and Foeticide".) The problem is also intimately tied to the institution of dowry, in which the family of a prospective bride must pay enormous sums of money to the family in which the woman will live after marriage. Though formally outlawed, the institution is still pervasive. "The combination of dowry and wedding expenses usually add up to more than a million rupees ([US] $35,000). In India the average civil servant earns about 100,000 rupees ($3,500) a year. Given these figures combined with the low status of women, it seems not so illogical that the poorer Indian families would want only male children." (Porras, "Female Infanticide and Foeticide".) Murders of women whose families are deemed to have paid insufficient dowry have become increasingly common, and receive separate case-study treatment on this site.
India is also the heartland of sex-selective abortion. Amniocentesis was introduced in 1974 "to ascertain birth defects in a sample population," but "was quickly appropriated by medical entrepreneurs. A spate of sex-selective abortions followed." (Karlekar, "The girl child in India.") Karlekar points out that "those women who undergo sex determination tests and abort on knowing that the foetus is female are actively taking a decision against equality and the right to life for girls. In many cases, of course, the women are not independent agents but merely victims of a dominant family ideology based on preference for male children."
Dahlburg notes that "In Jaipur, capital of the western state of Rajasthan, prenatal sex determination tests result in an estimated 3,500 abortions of female fetuses annually," according to a medical-college study. (Dahlburg, "Where killing baby girls 'is no big sin'.") Most strikingly, according to UNICEF, "A report from Bombay in 1984 on abortions after prenatal sex determination stated that 7,999 out of 8,000 of the aborted fetuses were females. Sex determination has become a lucrative business." (Zeng Yi et al., "Causes and Implications of the Recent Increase in the Reported Sex Ratio at Birth in China," Population and Development Review, 19: 2 [June 1993], p. 297.)
Deficits in nutrition and health-care also overwhelmingly target female children. Karlekar cites research
indicat[ing] a definite bias in feeding boys milk and milk products and eggs ... In Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh [states], it is usual for girls and women to eat less than men and boys and to have their meal after the men and boys had finished eating. Greater mobility outside the home provides boys with the opportunity to eat sweets and fruit from saved-up pocket money or from money given to buy articles for food consumption. In case of illness, it is usually boys who have preference in health care. ... More is spent on clothing for boys than for girls[,] which also affects morbidity. (Karlekar, "The girl child in India.")
Sunita Kishor reports "another disturbing finding," namely "that, despite the increased ability to command essential food and medical resources associated with development, female children [in India] do not improve their survival chances relative to male children with gains in development. Relatively high levels of agricultural development decrease the life chances of females while leaving males' life chances unaffected; urbanization increases the life chances of males more than females. ... Clearly, gender-based discrimination in the allocation of resources persists and even increases, even when availability of resources is not a constraint." (Kishor, "'May God Give Sons to All': Gender and Child Mortality in India," American Sociological Review, 58: 2 [April 1993], p. 262.)
Indian state governments have sometimes taken measures to diminish the slaughter of infant girls and abortions of female fetuses. "The leaders of Tamil Nadu are holding out a tempting carrot to couples in the state with one or two daughters and no sons: if one parent undergoes sterilization, the government will give the family [U.S.] \\$160 in aid per child. The money will be paid in instalments as the girl goes through school. She will also get a small gold ring and on her 20th birthday, a lump sum of $650 to serve as her dowry or defray the expenses of higher education. Four thousand families enrolled in the first year," with 6,000 to 8,000 expected to join annually (as of 1994) (Dahlburg, "Where killing baby girls 'is no big sin'.") Such programs have, however, barely begun to address the scale of the catastrophe.
Focus (2): China
"A tradition of infanticide and abandonment, especially of females, existed in China before the foundation of the People's Republic in 1949," note Zeng et al.. ("Causes and Implications," p. 294.) According to Ansley J. Coale and Judith Banister, "A missionary (and naturalist) observer in [China in] the late nineteenth century interviewed 40 women over age 50 who reported having borne 183 sons and 175 daughters, of whom 126 sons but only 53 daughters survived to age 10; by their account, the women had destroyed 78 of their daughters." (Coale and Banister, "Five Decades of Missing Females in China," Demography, 31: 3 [August 1994], p. 472.)
According to Zeng et al., "The practice was largely forsaken in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s." (Zeng et al., "Causes and Implications," p. 294.) Coale and Banister likewise acknowledge a "decline of excess female mortality after the establishment of the People's Republic ... assisted by the action of a strong government, which tried to modify this custom as well as other traditional practices that it viewed as harmful." (Coale and Banister, "Five Decades," p. 472.) But the number of "missing" women showed a sharp upward trend in the 1980s, linked by almost all scholars to the "one-child policy" introduced by the Chinese government in 1979 to control spiralling population growth. Couples are penalized by wage-cuts and reduced access to social services when children are born "outside the plan." Johansson and Nygren found that while "sex ratios [were] generally within or fairly near the expected range of 105 to 106 boys per 100 girls for live births within the plan ... they are, in contrast, clearly far above normal for children born outside the plan, even as high as 115 to 118 for 1984-87. That the phenomenon of missing girls in China in the 1980s is related to the government's population policy is thus conclusively shown." (Sten Johansson and Ola Nygren, "The Missing Girls of China: A New Demographic Account," Population and Development Review, 17: 1 [March 1991], pp. 40-41.)
The Chinese government appeared to recognize the linkage by allowing families in rural areas (where anti-female bias is stronger) a second child if the first was a girl. Nonetheless, in September 1997, the World Health Organization's Regional Committee for the Western Pacific issued a report claiming that "more than 50 million women were estimated to be 'missing' in China because of the institutionalized killing and neglect of girls due to Beijing's population control program that limits parents to one child." (See Joseph Farah, "Cover-up of China's gender-cide", Western Journalism Center/FreeRepublic, September 29, 1997.) Farah referred to the gendercide as "the biggest single holocaust in human history."
According to Peter Stockland, "Years of population engineering, including virtual extermination of 'surplus' baby girls, has created a nightmarish imbalance in China's male and female populations." (Stockland, "China's baby-slaughter overlooked," The Calgary Sun, June 11, 1997.) In 1999, Jonathan Manthorpe reported a study by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, claiming that "the imbalance between the sexes is now so distorted that there are 111 million men in China -- more than three times the population of Canada -- who will not be able to find a wife." As a result, the kidnapping and slave-trading of women has increased: "Since 1990, say official Chinese figures, 64,000 women -- 8,000 a year on average -- have been rescued by authorities from forced 'marriages'. The number who have not been saved can only be guessed at. ... The thirst for women is so acute that the slave trader gangs are even reaching outside China to find merchandise. There are regular reports of women being abducted in such places as northern Vietnam to feed the demand in China." (Jonathan Manthorpe, "China battles slave trading in women: Female infanticide fuels a brisk trade in wives," The Vancouver Sun, January 11, 1999.)
Since the first allegations of widespread female infanticide in China connected to the government's "one-child" policy, controversy has raged over the number of deaths that can be ascribed to infanticide as opposed to other causes. Zeng et al. argued in 1993 that "underreporting of female births, an increase in prenatal sex identification by ultrasound and other diagnostic methods for the illegal purpose of gender-specific birth control, and [only] very low-level incidence of female infanticide are the causes of the increase in the reported sex ratio at birth in China." (Zeng et al., "Causes and Implications," p. 285.) They add: "Underreporting of female births accounts for about 43 percent to 75 percent of the difference between the reported sex ratio at birth during the second half of the 1980s and the normal value of the true sex ratio at birth" (p. 289). The authors contended that "sex-differential underreporting of births and induced abortion after prenatal sex determination together explain almost all of the increase in the reported sex ratio at birth during the late 1980s," and thus "the omission ... of victims of female infanticide cannot be a significant factor." Moreover, "Both the social and administrative structure and the close bond among neighbors in China make it difficult to conceal a serious crime such as infanticide," while additionally "Infanticide is not a cost-effective method of sex selection. The psychological and moral costs are so high that people are unlikely to take such a step except under extreme circumstances" (p. 295). They stress, however, that "even small numbers of cases of female infanticide, abandonment, and neglect are a serious violation of the fundamental human rights of women and children" (p. 296). (2002 update: A recent article by John Gittings of the UK Guardian cites national census results released in May 2002 that show that "more than 116 male births were recorded for every 100 female births," but claims the cause is overwhelmingly sex-selective abortion: "Female infanticide, notorious in China's past as a primitive method of sex selection, is now thought to be infrequent." See Gittings, "Growing Sex Imbalance Shocks China", The Guardian, May 13, 2002.)
In a similar vein, in April 2000, The New York Times reported that "many 'illegal' children are born in secret, their births never officially registered." And "as more women move around the country to work, it is increasingly hard to monitor pregnancies ... Unannnounced spot checks by the State Statistics Bureau have discovered undercounts of up to 40 percent in some villages, Chinese demographers say." (See Elisabeth Rosenthal, "China's Widely Flouted One-Child Policy Undercuts Its Census", The New York Times, April 14, 2000.)
Johansson and Nygren attracted considerable notice with a somewhat different claim: "that adoptions (which often go unreported) account for a large proportion of the missing girls. ... If adopted children are added to the live births ... the sex ratio at birth becomes much closer to normal for most years in the 1980s. ... Adding the adopted children to live births reduces the number of missing girls by about half." (Johansson and Nygren, "The Missing Girls of China," pp. 43, 46.) They add (p. 50): "That female infanticide does occur on some scale is evidenced by reports in the Chinese press, but the available statistical evidence does not help us to determine whether it takes place on a large or a small scale."
Even if millions of Chinese infant girls are unregistered rather than directly murdered, however, the pattern of discrimination is one that will severely reduce their opportunities in life. "If parents do hide the birth of a baby girl, she will go unregistered and therefore will not have any legal existence. The child may have difficulty receiving medical attention, going to school, and [accessing] other state services." (Porras, "Female Infanticide and Foeticide".)
Likewise, if a Chinese infant girl is turned over for adoption rather than being killed, she risks being placed in one of the notorious "Dying Rooms" unveiled in a British TV documentary. Chinese state orphanages have come in for heavy criticism as a result of the degrading and unsanitary conditions that usually pervade them. In one orphanage, documentary producer Brian Woods found that "every single baby ... was a girl, and as we moved on this pattern was repeated. The only boys were mentally or physically disabled. 95% of the babies we saw were able-bodied girls. We also discovered that, although they are described as orphans, very few of them actually are; the overwhelming majority do have parents, but their parents have abandoned them, simply because they were born the wrong sex." Woods estimated that "up to a million baby girls every year" were victims of this "mass desertion," deriving from "the complex collision of [China's] notorious One Child Policy and its traditional preference for sons." (See Brian Woods, "The Dying Rooms Trust".)
The phenomenon of neglect of girl children is also dramatically evident in China. According to the World Health Organization, "In many cases, mothers are more likely to bring their male children to health centers -- particularly to private physicians -- and they may be treated at an earlier stage of disease than girls." (Cited in Farah, "Cover-up of China's gender-cide".)
The Chinese government has taken some energetic steps to combat the practice of female infanticide and sex-selective abortion of female fetuses. It "has employed the Marriage Law and Women's Protection Law which both prohibit female infanticide. The Women's Protection Law also prohibits discrimination against 'women who give birth to female babies.' ... The Maternal Health Care Law of 1994 'strictly prohibits' the use of technology to identify the gender of a fetus." However, "although the government has outlawed the use of ultrasound machines, physicians continue to use them to determine the gender of fetuses, especially in rural areas." (Porras, "Female Infanticide and Foeticide".)
How many die?
Gendercide Watch is aware of no overall statistics on the numbers of girls who die annually from infanticide. Calculations are further clouded by the unreliability and ambiguity of much of the data. Nonetheless, a minimum estimate would place the casualties in the the hundreds of thousands, especially when one takes into consideration that the phenomenon is most prevalent in the world's two most populous countries. Sex-selective abortions likely account for an even higher number of "missing" girls.
Who is responsible?
As already noted, female infanticide reflects the low status accorded to women in many societies around the world. The "burden" of taking a woman into the family accounts for the high dowry rates in India which, in turn, have led to an epidemic female infanticide. Typical also is China, where
culture dictates that when a girl marries she leaves her family and becomes part of her husband's family. For this reason Chinese peasants have for many centuries wanted a son to ensure there is someone to look after them in their old age -- having a boy child is the best pension a Chinese peasant can get. Baby girls are even called "maggots in the rice" ... ("The Dying Rooms Trust")
Infanticide is a crime overwhelmingly committed by women, both in the Third and First Worlds. (This contrasts markedly with "infanticide in nonhuman primates," which "is carried out primarily by migrant males who are unrelated to the infant or its parents and is a manifestation of reproductive competition among males." [Glenn Hausfater, "Infanticide: Comparative and Evolutionary Perspectives," Current Anthropology, 25: 4 (1984), p. 501.] It also serves as a reminder that gendercide may be implemented by those of the same gender.) In India, according to John-Thor Dahlburg, "many births take place in isolated villages, with only female friends and the midwife present. If a child dies, the women can always blame natural causes." (Dahlburg, "Where killing baby girls 'is no big sin'.") In the United States, "every year hundreds of women commit neonaticide [the killing of newborns] ... Prosecutors sometimes don't prosecute; juries rarely convict; those found guilty almost never go to jail. Barbara Kirwin, a forensic psychologist, reports that in nearly 300 cases of women charged with neonaticide in the United States and Britain, no woman spent more than a night in jail." Much of "the leniency shown to neonaticidal mothers" reflects the fact that they are standardly "young, poor, unmarried and socially isolated," although it is notable that similar leniency is rarely extended to young, poor, and socially isolated male murderers. (Steven Pinker, "Why They Kill Their Newborns", The New York Times, November 2, 1997.)
A number of strategies have been proposed and implemented to try to address the problem of female infanticide, along with the related phenomena of sex-selective abortion and abandonment and neglect of girl children. Zeng et al.'s prescriptions for Chinese policymakers can easily be generalized to other countries where female infanticide is rife:
The principle of equality between men and women should be more widely promoted through the news media to change the attitude of son preference and improve the awareness of the general public on this issue; the principle should also be reflected in specific social and economic policies to protect the basic rights of women and children, especially female children. ... Government regulations prohibiting the use of prenatal sex identification techniques for nonmedical purposes should be strictly enforced, and violators should be punished accordingly. The laws that punish people who commit infanticide, abandonment, and neglect of female children, and the laws and regulations on the protection of women and children[,] should be strictly enforced. The campaigns to protect women and children from being kidnapped or sold into servitude should be effectively strengthened. Family planning programs should focus on effective public education, good counseling and service delivery, and the fully voluntary participation of the community and individuals to increase contraceptive prevalence, reduce unplanned pregnancies, and minimize the need for an induced abortion. (Zeng, et al., p. 298.)
China's One Child Policy - The Results
Steve Davies, Sky News Online
Two hospital mortuary workers have been arrested after the bodies of 21 babies were found in plastic bags in a river in eastern China.
Eight of the babies found were admitted to the same hospital
Eight of the bodies found wore identification tags, which were traced back to Jining Medical College Hospital in Shandong province.
An investigation has discovered that of the eight identified, three were admitted to the hospital in a critical condition.
The identification tags contained the mothers' names, birth dates, measurements and weight.
Some were placed in hazardous waste bags, before being dumped into the river.
Local authorities claim that some of the babies were aborted foetuses or babies that had died from illness.
Video footage of the discovery has been posted online, showing the babies ranged from newborn to several months old.
Local residents found the bodies, which were floating near the shore.
A spokesman for the Jining Health Bureau told the Chinese state news agency Xinhua, that the hospital staff members involved in the investigation had been suspended.
Abortion is not uncommon in China, with records showing that 13 million babies are terminated each year.
The high level of abortion is largely down to the country's policy of only allowing one child per family in urban areas.
Many of the terminations are female foetuses, as male children are often favoured in Chinese families.
Two hospital mortuary workers have been arrested after the bodies of 21 babies were found in plastic bags in a river in eastern China.
Eight of the babies found were admitted to the same hospital
Eight of the bodies found wore identification tags, which were traced back to Jining Medical College Hospital in Shandong province.
An investigation has discovered that of the eight identified, three were admitted to the hospital in a critical condition.
The identification tags contained the mothers' names, birth dates, measurements and weight.
Some were placed in hazardous waste bags, before being dumped into the river.
Local authorities claim that some of the babies were aborted foetuses or babies that had died from illness.
Video footage of the discovery has been posted online, showing the babies ranged from newborn to several months old.
Local residents found the bodies, which were floating near the shore.
A spokesman for the Jining Health Bureau told the Chinese state news agency Xinhua, that the hospital staff members involved in the investigation had been suspended.
Abortion is not uncommon in China, with records showing that 13 million babies are terminated each year.
The high level of abortion is largely down to the country's policy of only allowing one child per family in urban areas.
Many of the terminations are female foetuses, as male children are often favoured in Chinese families.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Gendercide
Stories of Loss and Love: The shocking truth about China’s treatment of baby girls
The book Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love* by Xinran eloquently and poignantly tells individual stories and uses them to explain the traditional cultural and modern ideological and consumerist forces behind the abortion and killing at birth of girls, and why they are also given away or allowed to die through neglect.
Chapter 3, for example, tells how, when Xinran’s bike got a puncture, she brought it to a woman who ran a small bike repair shop near the radio station in Nanjing where she presented the Words on a Night Breeze programme on women’s issues. They got talking.
The woman told her that before she opened the bike repair shop she had worked as a travelling midwife. Her rate varied for different kinds of birth. For a boy who was a firstborn “I could quote three times the normal rate for that. If the mother was the wife of the eldest son, the birth was very auspicious because it continued the family line, and then it was six times.” And what if it was a girl and the family didn’t want a girl? ‘”If they wanted it put out of the way, you charged sky high”.
Xinran asked her how she killed the girls and the midwife listed three different ways, and then said, ‘”And for women who’d never had a baby boy, just girl after girl after girl until the family were fed up with it, it was simple enough to chuck it in the slops pail”.
Over ten chapters each focusing on different situations where a baby girl was not wanted, Xinran lets us see and feel what it is like to be a woman in China subject to the immense cultural, legal, bureaucratic and ideological pressures that combine to force pregnant women to have their girls aborted, destroyed at birth or neglected or given away.
Any pro-life person who wants to get a feel for the causes of the pressures behind the 100 million missing baby girls needs to read Xinran’s Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother.
* Xinran, Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love, Chatto and Windus, 2010, London.
The book Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love* by Xinran eloquently and poignantly tells individual stories and uses them to explain the traditional cultural and modern ideological and consumerist forces behind the abortion and killing at birth of girls, and why they are also given away or allowed to die through neglect.
Chapter 3, for example, tells how, when Xinran’s bike got a puncture, she brought it to a woman who ran a small bike repair shop near the radio station in Nanjing where she presented the Words on a Night Breeze programme on women’s issues. They got talking.
The woman told her that before she opened the bike repair shop she had worked as a travelling midwife. Her rate varied for different kinds of birth. For a boy who was a firstborn “I could quote three times the normal rate for that. If the mother was the wife of the eldest son, the birth was very auspicious because it continued the family line, and then it was six times.” And what if it was a girl and the family didn’t want a girl? ‘”If they wanted it put out of the way, you charged sky high”.
Xinran asked her how she killed the girls and the midwife listed three different ways, and then said, ‘”And for women who’d never had a baby boy, just girl after girl after girl until the family were fed up with it, it was simple enough to chuck it in the slops pail”.
Over ten chapters each focusing on different situations where a baby girl was not wanted, Xinran lets us see and feel what it is like to be a woman in China subject to the immense cultural, legal, bureaucratic and ideological pressures that combine to force pregnant women to have their girls aborted, destroyed at birth or neglected or given away.
Any pro-life person who wants to get a feel for the causes of the pressures behind the 100 million missing baby girls needs to read Xinran’s Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother.
* Xinran, Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love, Chatto and Windus, 2010, London.
Ireland and Stem Cell Research
Pro Life Campaign and Family and Life host Stem Cell Experts in Dublin
Source: Pro Life Campaign
In an important visit to Ireland, co-hosted by the Pro-Life Campaign and Family and Life, Professor Robert George of Princeton University and Professor William Hurlbut of Stanford University were in Dublin last week meeting with politicians, academics and pro-life supporters to discuss the need for protection of human life at its earliest stages of development and to make the case for ethical stem cell research that does not involve the destruction of human embryos
Professors George and Hurlbut met with members of the Dáil and Seanad and addressed academics and students in the Royal College of Surgeons, DCU and UCD. On Friday evening, they addressed several hundred pro-life supporters in the Davenport Hotel where they outlined to the audience the scientific and philosophical arguments underpinning a respect for human lives from the moment of fertilisation. Professor William Hurlbut , a professor in Human Biology at Stanford University explained the application and potential of adult stem cells in particular the procedure by which pluripotent stem cells (adult stem cells with the capacity to differentiate into different germ layers) can be used in a way that emulates embryonic stem cells. The significance of this is that no embryonic human being need be used for research and at present non-controversial adult stem cell research is having more success at treating diseases. Professor Robert George who is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University picked through the popular arguments used to de-humanise the embryonic human being and explained why the embryonic human life is deserving of full protection of society and the law. The event was chaired by Senator Rónán Mullen.
The three-day visit of the Professors to Ireland was a great success and Professor George was interviewed on Today with Pat Kenny on the morning of Friday 5th March.
Source: Pro Life Campaign
In an important visit to Ireland, co-hosted by the Pro-Life Campaign and Family and Life, Professor Robert George of Princeton University and Professor William Hurlbut of Stanford University were in Dublin last week meeting with politicians, academics and pro-life supporters to discuss the need for protection of human life at its earliest stages of development and to make the case for ethical stem cell research that does not involve the destruction of human embryos
Professors George and Hurlbut met with members of the Dáil and Seanad and addressed academics and students in the Royal College of Surgeons, DCU and UCD. On Friday evening, they addressed several hundred pro-life supporters in the Davenport Hotel where they outlined to the audience the scientific and philosophical arguments underpinning a respect for human lives from the moment of fertilisation. Professor William Hurlbut , a professor in Human Biology at Stanford University explained the application and potential of adult stem cells in particular the procedure by which pluripotent stem cells (adult stem cells with the capacity to differentiate into different germ layers) can be used in a way that emulates embryonic stem cells. The significance of this is that no embryonic human being need be used for research and at present non-controversial adult stem cell research is having more success at treating diseases. Professor Robert George who is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University picked through the popular arguments used to de-humanise the embryonic human being and explained why the embryonic human life is deserving of full protection of society and the law. The event was chaired by Senator Rónán Mullen.
The three-day visit of the Professors to Ireland was a great success and Professor George was interviewed on Today with Pat Kenny on the morning of Friday 5th March.
Abortion in Ireland
Marie Stopes – yet another misleading abortion poll
Source: Pro Life Campaign
When it waddles like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck. Abortion-provider Marie Stopes’ YouGov poll on abortion, released earlier this week, scored high on quackery.
If you ask a loaded question, you get a loaded and so worthless answer. Loaded with what? Loaded with false presuppositions that are never spelt out to the respondent.
The latest Marie Stopes poll claims three quarters of the Irish public support abortion in certain circumstances. The poll makes no distinction between necessary medical interventions in pregnancy and induced abortion, where the life of the unborn baby is directly targeted.
When a poll asks misleading questions, the answers measure how far the questioner has misled the respondents. If your question implies that women’s lives and health are at risk because abortion is not available, then you are inviting the answer, ‘Of course, abortion should be available to save those women’s lives.’ But that’s a loaded question. It is loaded with a false presupposition.
The truth is that Ireland is the safest country on planet earth for a woman having a baby. We have the best, the best, maternal safety for the lives of mothers having babies in the world.
Opinion polls are supposed to be snapshots of public opinion not tools of ideological propaganda. When the public are asked straightforward not misleading questions on abortion the answer is overwhelmingly pro-life. In a 2009 IMS/Millward Brown poll commissioned by the Pro-Life Campaign, 63% of the public supported a prohibition on abortion while ensuring the continuation of existing practice of intervention to save a mother’s life. Only 16% said they were opposed to such a prohibition on abortion.
The pro-life community needs to understand what Marie Stopes and similar abortion advocacy groups are working at. The possibility that their polls may be misleading doesn’t seem to bother them. The fact that a sizable chunk of the media is prepared to run with their polls without asking tough questions about them makes it easier for them to create a public expectation around the idea that abortion legislation is inevitable. This highlights the necessity for groups like the Pro-Life Campaign to avail of every opportunity to set the record straight with the public.
Source: Pro Life Campaign
When it waddles like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck. Abortion-provider Marie Stopes’ YouGov poll on abortion, released earlier this week, scored high on quackery.
If you ask a loaded question, you get a loaded and so worthless answer. Loaded with what? Loaded with false presuppositions that are never spelt out to the respondent.
The latest Marie Stopes poll claims three quarters of the Irish public support abortion in certain circumstances. The poll makes no distinction between necessary medical interventions in pregnancy and induced abortion, where the life of the unborn baby is directly targeted.
When a poll asks misleading questions, the answers measure how far the questioner has misled the respondents. If your question implies that women’s lives and health are at risk because abortion is not available, then you are inviting the answer, ‘Of course, abortion should be available to save those women’s lives.’ But that’s a loaded question. It is loaded with a false presupposition.
The truth is that Ireland is the safest country on planet earth for a woman having a baby. We have the best, the best, maternal safety for the lives of mothers having babies in the world.
Opinion polls are supposed to be snapshots of public opinion not tools of ideological propaganda. When the public are asked straightforward not misleading questions on abortion the answer is overwhelmingly pro-life. In a 2009 IMS/Millward Brown poll commissioned by the Pro-Life Campaign, 63% of the public supported a prohibition on abortion while ensuring the continuation of existing practice of intervention to save a mother’s life. Only 16% said they were opposed to such a prohibition on abortion.
The pro-life community needs to understand what Marie Stopes and similar abortion advocacy groups are working at. The possibility that their polls may be misleading doesn’t seem to bother them. The fact that a sizable chunk of the media is prepared to run with their polls without asking tough questions about them makes it easier for them to create a public expectation around the idea that abortion legislation is inevitable. This highlights the necessity for groups like the Pro-Life Campaign to avail of every opportunity to set the record straight with the public.
Gendercide - The War on Baby Girls - Economist Magazine
11th March 2010
Source: Pro Life Campaign
The current issue of The Economist shows how the personal tragedies of women forced to abort girls, have them destroyed at birth, or let die through neglect, are leading to catastrophic social situations in China. The mass destruction of girls has left a systemic gender imbalance in the population where there are more unmarried young men in China than the entire population of young men in America.
The Economist, as its name suggests, looks at the world through the unsentimental lens of economic realities. It specialises in taking a hard look at the facts and figures that are newsworthy. This makes the cover story on its 6th March 2010 issue, all the more astonishing.
On a full-page funeral-black front cover is a pink pair of baby girl’s shoes and over them in huge pink letters a single-word banner headline, GENDERCIDE* and under that a subheading asking What happened to 100 million baby girls? There is a full-page editorial, again headed Gendercide, and the story runs over 4 full pages and a long review of a new book on the same phenomenon. It’s must-read stuff.
The Economist supports legal abortion. But there is something new. It now acknowledges, that ‘the cumulative consequence of such individual actions is catastrophic’, describing the results as 'carnage’.
It’s a breakthrough article for the pro-life community, mainstreaming information and analysis that has been available for 20 years. The 100 million missing baby girls of The Economist’s front-page comes from an article** by Indian economist, Amarta Sen who won the 1998 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on welfare economics.
So what happened to this unimaginably large number of baby girls? The subheading of the editorial sums it up, ‘Killed, aborted or neglected, at least 100m girls have disappeared – and the number is rising’. They were killed by their parents, or given away by them, or died through selective neglect by their parents, especially the mothers under crushing pressure from the traditions and ideologies of their families and local and national communities.
The lethal cultural bias against girls is concentrated primarily in China but also in India, Taiwan and Singapore, in South Korea until the 1990s, in some ex-communist countries and also seems to be reflected in the gender imbalance among Chinese-Americans and Japanese-Americans.
The huge numbers are due to the mutual reinforcement of false and dysfunctional traditional disvalues and modern ideological disvalues, both communist and those of the emerging middle classes. China’s one-child policy, The Economist says, ‘profoundly perverts family life’.
The harrowing effect on the mothers themselves surfaces in China’s shameful suicide rate for women. The Economist article notes China’s female suicide rates are among the world’s worst. ‘Suicide is the commonest form of death among Chinese rural women aged 15-34; young mothers kill themselves by drinking agricultural fertilizers which are easy to come by. The journalist Xinran Xue thinks they cannot live with the knowledge that they have aborted or killed their baby daughters.’
Every pro-life person needs to study this article and the accompanying editorial. You can read The Economist headline article here
* The dramatic word ‘gendercide’ is from Mary Anne Warren’s 1985 book, Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Selection. ** Amarta Sen, ‘More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing’, The New York Review of Books, (Vol. 37, No. 20, 20th December 1990; http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/gender/Sen100M.html, accessed 11th March 2010)
Source: Pro Life Campaign
The current issue of The Economist shows how the personal tragedies of women forced to abort girls, have them destroyed at birth, or let die through neglect, are leading to catastrophic social situations in China. The mass destruction of girls has left a systemic gender imbalance in the population where there are more unmarried young men in China than the entire population of young men in America.
The Economist, as its name suggests, looks at the world through the unsentimental lens of economic realities. It specialises in taking a hard look at the facts and figures that are newsworthy. This makes the cover story on its 6th March 2010 issue, all the more astonishing.
On a full-page funeral-black front cover is a pink pair of baby girl’s shoes and over them in huge pink letters a single-word banner headline, GENDERCIDE* and under that a subheading asking What happened to 100 million baby girls? There is a full-page editorial, again headed Gendercide, and the story runs over 4 full pages and a long review of a new book on the same phenomenon. It’s must-read stuff.
The Economist supports legal abortion. But there is something new. It now acknowledges, that ‘the cumulative consequence of such individual actions is catastrophic’, describing the results as 'carnage’.
It’s a breakthrough article for the pro-life community, mainstreaming information and analysis that has been available for 20 years. The 100 million missing baby girls of The Economist’s front-page comes from an article** by Indian economist, Amarta Sen who won the 1998 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on welfare economics.
So what happened to this unimaginably large number of baby girls? The subheading of the editorial sums it up, ‘Killed, aborted or neglected, at least 100m girls have disappeared – and the number is rising’. They were killed by their parents, or given away by them, or died through selective neglect by their parents, especially the mothers under crushing pressure from the traditions and ideologies of their families and local and national communities.
The lethal cultural bias against girls is concentrated primarily in China but also in India, Taiwan and Singapore, in South Korea until the 1990s, in some ex-communist countries and also seems to be reflected in the gender imbalance among Chinese-Americans and Japanese-Americans.
The huge numbers are due to the mutual reinforcement of false and dysfunctional traditional disvalues and modern ideological disvalues, both communist and those of the emerging middle classes. China’s one-child policy, The Economist says, ‘profoundly perverts family life’.
The harrowing effect on the mothers themselves surfaces in China’s shameful suicide rate for women. The Economist article notes China’s female suicide rates are among the world’s worst. ‘Suicide is the commonest form of death among Chinese rural women aged 15-34; young mothers kill themselves by drinking agricultural fertilizers which are easy to come by. The journalist Xinran Xue thinks they cannot live with the knowledge that they have aborted or killed their baby daughters.’
Every pro-life person needs to study this article and the accompanying editorial. You can read The Economist headline article here
* The dramatic word ‘gendercide’ is from Mary Anne Warren’s 1985 book, Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Selection. ** Amarta Sen, ‘More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing’, The New York Review of Books, (Vol. 37, No. 20, 20th December 1990; http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/gender/Sen100M.html, accessed 11th March 2010)
Monday, March 8, 2010
Abortion and Ireland
IFPA 'Poll' Claims Nonsense
The Pro Life Campaign has dismissed claims by the Irish Family Planning Association that attitudes to abortion in Ireland have changed dramatically in recent years. The IFPA made its claim based on the findings of a YouGov poll commissioned by Marie Stopes, one of the largest abortion providers in Britain, which alleged that two-thirds of the public support abortion in certain circumstances.
Responding to the IFPA's take on the poll, Dr Ruth Cullen of the Pro Life Campaign said that the latest Marie Stopes sponsored poll is in keeping with all its previous polls. It makes no distinction between necessary medical interventions in pregnancy and induced abortion (which directly targets the baby).
Any survey that ignores this vital distinction is meaningless and adds nothing to the debate. It is complete nonsense therefore for the IFPA to claim the latest findings represent a dramatic shift in public opinion in favour of abortion.
The IFPA also claims that Ireland's abortion laws are out of step with most of Europe as though the laws in these countries were exemplars of human rights. Abortion in Britain, for example, is legal up to birth. Presumably the IFPA supports this barbaric situation, which completely ignores the humanity of the unborn child.
If we are going to debate abortion laws in Ireland, then let's also debate the laws in other countries and the latest peer-reviewed studies showing the negative consequences of abortion for women.
The Pro Life Campaign has dismissed claims by the Irish Family Planning Association that attitudes to abortion in Ireland have changed dramatically in recent years. The IFPA made its claim based on the findings of a YouGov poll commissioned by Marie Stopes, one of the largest abortion providers in Britain, which alleged that two-thirds of the public support abortion in certain circumstances.
Responding to the IFPA's take on the poll, Dr Ruth Cullen of the Pro Life Campaign said that the latest Marie Stopes sponsored poll is in keeping with all its previous polls. It makes no distinction between necessary medical interventions in pregnancy and induced abortion (which directly targets the baby).
Any survey that ignores this vital distinction is meaningless and adds nothing to the debate. It is complete nonsense therefore for the IFPA to claim the latest findings represent a dramatic shift in public opinion in favour of abortion.
The IFPA also claims that Ireland's abortion laws are out of step with most of Europe as though the laws in these countries were exemplars of human rights. Abortion in Britain, for example, is legal up to birth. Presumably the IFPA supports this barbaric situation, which completely ignores the humanity of the unborn child.
If we are going to debate abortion laws in Ireland, then let's also debate the laws in other countries and the latest peer-reviewed studies showing the negative consequences of abortion for women.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Medical care not abortion improves maternal mortality rates in developing countries
Since the late 1960s deaths of mothers having children have fallen dramatically -- “current rates for developed countries are between one-fortieth and one-fiftieth of the rates that prevailed 60 years ago”, a peer reviewed article by Irvine Loudon published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found.[1]
What brought about this ‘dramatic’ improvement in the safety of mothers in pregnancy and birth? Was it permissive abortion laws? Loudon’s survey of the relevant factors concludes, “The main factors that led to thisdecline seem to have been successive improvements in maternalcare rather than higher standards of living.”
This suggests that the way to improve safety for mothers and their children during pregnancy and birth is not the introduction of permissive abortion laws, but improving the availability and quality of care and education for mothers having children.
This is confirmed by preliminary findings presented by Chilean epidemiologist, Dr Elard Koch, of the University of Chile faculty of medicine. He was addressing the inaugural meeting of the International Group for Global Women’s Health Research in Washington DC last month.[2]
Maternal mortality in Chile fell from 275 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 1960 to 18.7 in 2000, the largest fall in any Latin American country. What caused this dramatic improvement?
Dr Koch said, ‘From 1960 onwards, there has been a breakthrough in the public health system and primary care’ in Chile. Resources, he added, were put into the development of ‘highly trained personnel, the construction of many primary health centres and the increase of schooling of the population.’
Chile protects unborn life in its constitution and laws - the improvement in maternal safety was not brought about by legalising abortion.
In Latin America, Chile which has pro-life legislation also has the lowest maternal mortality rate, while Guyana which brought in more liberal abortion laws in the mid-1990s putatively because of high maternal mortality rates, has the highest maternal rates, suggesting that they are applying the wrong solution to the problem, wider abortion instead of improving maternal care and education.
While International Planned Parenthood, the international abortion advocacy multinational, recently noted ‘a huge surge in maternal deaths’ in South Africa between 2007 and 2007 .[3]
They quoted the South African Report, ‘Saving Mothers 2005 – 2007’ which accepted a 20% increase in maternal deaths over the period, and acknowledged that nearly 4 out of every 10 of these deaths ‘were clearly avoidable within the health care system’.
Also mentioned in the report are ‘deaths due to complications of abortion’. South Africa has a permissive abortion legislation so it is not unreasonable to see in here a wrong solution becoming part of the problem.
It is becoming clearer by the day that the way to improve maternal mortality rates in developing countries is to improve the availability and quality of maternal care and education, and that legalising abortion in developing countries is part of the problem not part of the solution.
________________
[1] Maternal mortality in the past and its relevance to developing countries today’ American Journal of
Clinical Nutrition, Vol. 72, No. 1, 241S-246s, July 2000
[2] Friday Fax, the C-Fam Institute, Vol. 13, No. 9, 11th February 2010, http://www.c-fam.org/publications/id.1571/pub_detail.asp,
accessed on 23rd February 2010.)
[3] http://www.ippf.org/en/News/Intl+news/South+Africa+Huge+surge+in+maternal+deaths.htm
What brought about this ‘dramatic’ improvement in the safety of mothers in pregnancy and birth? Was it permissive abortion laws? Loudon’s survey of the relevant factors concludes, “The main factors that led to thisdecline seem to have been successive improvements in maternalcare rather than higher standards of living.”
This suggests that the way to improve safety for mothers and their children during pregnancy and birth is not the introduction of permissive abortion laws, but improving the availability and quality of care and education for mothers having children.
This is confirmed by preliminary findings presented by Chilean epidemiologist, Dr Elard Koch, of the University of Chile faculty of medicine. He was addressing the inaugural meeting of the International Group for Global Women’s Health Research in Washington DC last month.[2]
Maternal mortality in Chile fell from 275 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 1960 to 18.7 in 2000, the largest fall in any Latin American country. What caused this dramatic improvement?
Dr Koch said, ‘From 1960 onwards, there has been a breakthrough in the public health system and primary care’ in Chile. Resources, he added, were put into the development of ‘highly trained personnel, the construction of many primary health centres and the increase of schooling of the population.’
Chile protects unborn life in its constitution and laws - the improvement in maternal safety was not brought about by legalising abortion.
In Latin America, Chile which has pro-life legislation also has the lowest maternal mortality rate, while Guyana which brought in more liberal abortion laws in the mid-1990s putatively because of high maternal mortality rates, has the highest maternal rates, suggesting that they are applying the wrong solution to the problem, wider abortion instead of improving maternal care and education.
While International Planned Parenthood, the international abortion advocacy multinational, recently noted ‘a huge surge in maternal deaths’ in South Africa between 2007 and 2007 .[3]
They quoted the South African Report, ‘Saving Mothers 2005 – 2007’ which accepted a 20% increase in maternal deaths over the period, and acknowledged that nearly 4 out of every 10 of these deaths ‘were clearly avoidable within the health care system’.
Also mentioned in the report are ‘deaths due to complications of abortion’. South Africa has a permissive abortion legislation so it is not unreasonable to see in here a wrong solution becoming part of the problem.
It is becoming clearer by the day that the way to improve maternal mortality rates in developing countries is to improve the availability and quality of maternal care and education, and that legalising abortion in developing countries is part of the problem not part of the solution.
________________
[1] Maternal mortality in the past and its relevance to developing countries today’ American Journal of
Clinical Nutrition, Vol. 72, No. 1, 241S-246s, July 2000
[2] Friday Fax, the C-Fam Institute, Vol. 13, No. 9, 11th February 2010, http://www.c-fam.org/publications/id.1571/pub_detail.asp,
accessed on 23rd February 2010.)
[3] http://www.ippf.org/en/News/Intl+news/South+Africa+Huge+surge+in+maternal+deaths.htm
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Abortion and Racism
New Project shows abortion as part of the history of racial oppression
The Endangered Species Project is a bold new multi-media campaign launched last week in the US State of Georgia to raise public awareness about the way groups like Planned Parenthood disproportionately target African American communities when locating their abortion clinics. The new project involves high profile media events, political lobbying and advertising - including a striking billboard campaign throughout the State. The project is a collaborative effort between the Radiance Foundation, an educational group that uses the media to illuminate the intrinsic value of each person, and Georgia's Operation Outrage.
It is mainly the brainchild of Radiance Foundation Director Ryan Bomberger, himself born as a result of rape. He hopes the project will make fellow African Americans much more conscious of the fact that the abortion industry specifically targets their communities.
Using well-documented statistics, historical perspectives, highly effective videos and personal testimonies, the Endangered Species Project brings home to African-Americans the shockingly disproportionate impact of abortion on Black neighbourhoods. The initiative is causing quite a stir in the US and putting abortion advocacy groups like Planned Parenthood on the defensive. It's about time too!
The figures are shocking indeed:
Nearly 40% of all black pregnancies in the US end in induced abortion.
That’s over three times the rate for white women
And twice the rate of all other races combined.
Since 1973 more than fourteen million black babies have died by abortion in the US.
The word ‘project’ in the name the Endangered Species Project echoes the name of the infamous Negro Project established by Planned Parenthood founder and eugenicist, Margaret Sanger in 1939. The aim of Sanger’s vile Negro Project was to ensure that poor black families were not reproducing. As she herself shamefully stated:
“…we are paying for and even submitting to the dictates of an ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.”
–Margaret Sanger, Pivot of Civilization, Chapter 8, p. 187.
Needless to say abortion advocacy groups are attacking the Endangered Species Project fearing it will lead African American women especially, to reject their claim that access to abortion is part of ‘reproductive justice’. Thankfully, the initiative is causing quite a stir in the US and the shocking facts it reveals is putting pro-abortion groups like Planned Parenthood on the defensive despite their protests.
The Endangered Species Project is a bold new multi-media campaign launched last week in the US State of Georgia to raise public awareness about the way groups like Planned Parenthood disproportionately target African American communities when locating their abortion clinics. The new project involves high profile media events, political lobbying and advertising - including a striking billboard campaign throughout the State. The project is a collaborative effort between the Radiance Foundation, an educational group that uses the media to illuminate the intrinsic value of each person, and Georgia's Operation Outrage.
It is mainly the brainchild of Radiance Foundation Director Ryan Bomberger, himself born as a result of rape. He hopes the project will make fellow African Americans much more conscious of the fact that the abortion industry specifically targets their communities.
Using well-documented statistics, historical perspectives, highly effective videos and personal testimonies, the Endangered Species Project brings home to African-Americans the shockingly disproportionate impact of abortion on Black neighbourhoods. The initiative is causing quite a stir in the US and putting abortion advocacy groups like Planned Parenthood on the defensive. It's about time too!
The figures are shocking indeed:
Nearly 40% of all black pregnancies in the US end in induced abortion.
That’s over three times the rate for white women
And twice the rate of all other races combined.
Since 1973 more than fourteen million black babies have died by abortion in the US.
The word ‘project’ in the name the Endangered Species Project echoes the name of the infamous Negro Project established by Planned Parenthood founder and eugenicist, Margaret Sanger in 1939. The aim of Sanger’s vile Negro Project was to ensure that poor black families were not reproducing. As she herself shamefully stated:
“…we are paying for and even submitting to the dictates of an ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.”
–Margaret Sanger, Pivot of Civilization, Chapter 8, p. 187.
Needless to say abortion advocacy groups are attacking the Endangered Species Project fearing it will lead African American women especially, to reject their claim that access to abortion is part of ‘reproductive justice’. Thankfully, the initiative is causing quite a stir in the US and the shocking facts it reveals is putting pro-abortion groups like Planned Parenthood on the defensive despite their protests.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
RTE Bias on Abortion
Scannal Programme was a Blatant Pro-Abortion Promo
24ú Feabhra 2010
RTÉ - Mícothrom agus claonta i ngaeilge agus i mbéarla araon.
It's no secret that RTÉ the tax-funded State broadcaster is openly hostile to the pro-life position. The station doesn’t even bother anymore to create the pretence of balance when covering life issues. The latest manifestation of this was on Scannal, broadcast on RTÉ 1 last Monday, 22nd February at 7.30pm. You can watch it on the RTÉ player if you care to.
Even the description of the programme on the RTÉ website lets the cat out of the bag. It states: “Scannal looks back at a story that gripped the nation and raised the issue of abortion once again, an issue subsequent Governments have failed to fully deal with through legislation”
The so-called failure to deal with the issue through legislation might have something to do with the fact that the majority of Irish people are opposed to abortion and that the controversial X case decision by the Supreme Court in 1992 failed to set any time limits for abortion and if legislated for would have to allow abortion up to birth.
Were the producers of Scannal remotely interested in balance they could have invited reasoned pro-life voices to make these and other points in defence of the right to life.
RTÉ insists on turning a blind eye to the compelling arguments against abortion. Whilst we heard about the difficult circumstances surrounding the X case and the injunction sought by the Attorney General at the time - and nobody belittles the emotional difficulties that faced Miss X and her family - we heard nothing on Scannal about the fact that the X case judges heard no medical evidence to justify the Supreme Court decision.
Similarly, we heard nothing about the health of women in the wider context of the abortion issue. For example in recent years, several studies have been published, and in particular a study from Finland in 2005, showing that women are more likely to commit suicide after having an abortion than whilst pregnant. One horrifying case that illustrates this is that of Emma Beck, a 31 year old English artist who committed suicide in 2007 after aborting her twins. Emma's suicide note read: "I told everyone I didn't want to do it, even at the hospital. I was frightened, now it is too late. I died when my babies died. I want to be with my babies: they need me, no-one else does."
In fact the link between abortion and negative mental health consequences has become so clear that the British Royal College of Psychiatrists recommended that abortion counselling leaflets be updated to include information about the latest studies showing the negative effects of abortion on women. Separately, research published in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2008, concluded that induced abortion is linked to an increased risk of mental illness in later life.
Importantly, the fact that Irish women receive all necessary medical treatments during pregnancy here - even if it unintentionally results in the loss of the unborn - was not highlighted on Scannal. Nor was the fact that despite having no abortion in this country, Ireland is rated number one in the world in protecting women’s lives during pregnancy, according to the latest UN/WHO report on maternal mortality. Ireland, for example, is a much safer country in which to be pregnant than say Britain or Holland, where unrestricted abortion regimes exist.
But RTÉ didn't see fit to take on board any of that. Why? Because it wouldn't have helped the agenda that RTÉ constantly pushes in favour of abortion.
RTÉ never reports on the brutality of what abortion regimes entail in other countries, like for example the fact that abortion is legal up to birth in Britain. Do we want to follow England's abortion regime - one of the most liberal in the world - where babies are aborted simply because they have 'disabilities' like hare lips and cleft palates? RTÉ seems to think we should considering the open way it promotes abortion without limits.
RTÉ has never once presented a programme that set out to challenge abortion advocates who believe that unborn children are deserving of absolutely no protection throughout the entire nine months of pregnancy. Surely there is something very suspect here?
On every occasion without exception RTÉ builds it coverage of the issue around challenging the pro-life side to justify its position. This is a genuine scandal that the programme Scannal, if it was doing its job would investigate!
The way RTÉ treats the pro-life issue is becoming a major story in itself. If the station continues along the path of openly promoting abortion, pro-life activists will have no choice but to devote all their energies into making the public aware of the culture of ideological bias in RTÉ in favour of abortion.
24ú Feabhra 2010
RTÉ - Mícothrom agus claonta i ngaeilge agus i mbéarla araon.
It's no secret that RTÉ the tax-funded State broadcaster is openly hostile to the pro-life position. The station doesn’t even bother anymore to create the pretence of balance when covering life issues. The latest manifestation of this was on Scannal, broadcast on RTÉ 1 last Monday, 22nd February at 7.30pm. You can watch it on the RTÉ player if you care to.
Even the description of the programme on the RTÉ website lets the cat out of the bag. It states: “Scannal looks back at a story that gripped the nation and raised the issue of abortion once again, an issue subsequent Governments have failed to fully deal with through legislation”
The so-called failure to deal with the issue through legislation might have something to do with the fact that the majority of Irish people are opposed to abortion and that the controversial X case decision by the Supreme Court in 1992 failed to set any time limits for abortion and if legislated for would have to allow abortion up to birth.
Were the producers of Scannal remotely interested in balance they could have invited reasoned pro-life voices to make these and other points in defence of the right to life.
RTÉ insists on turning a blind eye to the compelling arguments against abortion. Whilst we heard about the difficult circumstances surrounding the X case and the injunction sought by the Attorney General at the time - and nobody belittles the emotional difficulties that faced Miss X and her family - we heard nothing on Scannal about the fact that the X case judges heard no medical evidence to justify the Supreme Court decision.
Similarly, we heard nothing about the health of women in the wider context of the abortion issue. For example in recent years, several studies have been published, and in particular a study from Finland in 2005, showing that women are more likely to commit suicide after having an abortion than whilst pregnant. One horrifying case that illustrates this is that of Emma Beck, a 31 year old English artist who committed suicide in 2007 after aborting her twins. Emma's suicide note read: "I told everyone I didn't want to do it, even at the hospital. I was frightened, now it is too late. I died when my babies died. I want to be with my babies: they need me, no-one else does."
In fact the link between abortion and negative mental health consequences has become so clear that the British Royal College of Psychiatrists recommended that abortion counselling leaflets be updated to include information about the latest studies showing the negative effects of abortion on women. Separately, research published in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2008, concluded that induced abortion is linked to an increased risk of mental illness in later life.
Importantly, the fact that Irish women receive all necessary medical treatments during pregnancy here - even if it unintentionally results in the loss of the unborn - was not highlighted on Scannal. Nor was the fact that despite having no abortion in this country, Ireland is rated number one in the world in protecting women’s lives during pregnancy, according to the latest UN/WHO report on maternal mortality. Ireland, for example, is a much safer country in which to be pregnant than say Britain or Holland, where unrestricted abortion regimes exist.
But RTÉ didn't see fit to take on board any of that. Why? Because it wouldn't have helped the agenda that RTÉ constantly pushes in favour of abortion.
RTÉ never reports on the brutality of what abortion regimes entail in other countries, like for example the fact that abortion is legal up to birth in Britain. Do we want to follow England's abortion regime - one of the most liberal in the world - where babies are aborted simply because they have 'disabilities' like hare lips and cleft palates? RTÉ seems to think we should considering the open way it promotes abortion without limits.
RTÉ has never once presented a programme that set out to challenge abortion advocates who believe that unborn children are deserving of absolutely no protection throughout the entire nine months of pregnancy. Surely there is something very suspect here?
On every occasion without exception RTÉ builds it coverage of the issue around challenging the pro-life side to justify its position. This is a genuine scandal that the programme Scannal, if it was doing its job would investigate!
The way RTÉ treats the pro-life issue is becoming a major story in itself. If the station continues along the path of openly promoting abortion, pro-life activists will have no choice but to devote all their energies into making the public aware of the culture of ideological bias in RTÉ in favour of abortion.
Monday, February 22, 2010
Ireland and Stem Cell Research
Killing Embryos in Stem Cell Research Unnecessary, Expert Says : 22nd Feb 10
Professor Tommie McCarthy of the Department of Biochemistry, University College Cork (UCC), has taken issue with Dr Dolores Dooley’s recent dismissal of adult and induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) research as more effective and ethical alternatives to human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research.
Writing in "The Irish Times", he said a search of the world’s largest registry of clinical trials shows more than 1,900 current trials using adult stem cells, compared to only three hESC transplantation trials. Dr Dooley, who headed the recently disbanded Irish Council for Bioethics, had argued that hESCs are required as controls for adult stem cell research.
But Prof McCarthy said that was incorrect, because adult stem cell research has been in progress for decades without hESCs. Dr Dooley’s argument about hESCs as controls is purely relative because human iPSC research (which emanated from equivalent research in mice) will advance rapidly with or without hESCs.
“The justification that ‘all forms of stem-cell research need to continue and all are important’ is only academic, and academic endeavour, in my view, should never undermine the dignity of human life”, Prof McCarthy concluded.
The Irish Times. February 3.
Source: Family and Life
Professor Tommie McCarthy of the Department of Biochemistry, University College Cork (UCC), has taken issue with Dr Dolores Dooley’s recent dismissal of adult and induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) research as more effective and ethical alternatives to human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research.
Writing in "The Irish Times", he said a search of the world’s largest registry of clinical trials shows more than 1,900 current trials using adult stem cells, compared to only three hESC transplantation trials. Dr Dooley, who headed the recently disbanded Irish Council for Bioethics, had argued that hESCs are required as controls for adult stem cell research.
But Prof McCarthy said that was incorrect, because adult stem cell research has been in progress for decades without hESCs. Dr Dooley’s argument about hESCs as controls is purely relative because human iPSC research (which emanated from equivalent research in mice) will advance rapidly with or without hESCs.
“The justification that ‘all forms of stem-cell research need to continue and all are important’ is only academic, and academic endeavour, in my view, should never undermine the dignity of human life”, Prof McCarthy concluded.
The Irish Times. February 3.
Source: Family and Life
Monday, February 15, 2010
Minister Harney should learn from California's experience - Money spent on embryonic stem cell research is money wasted.
Source : Pro Life Campaign
There are three billion reasons not to allow the Supreme Court ruling in R v. R to be used as a cover to legalise research here involving human embryo destruction.
In 2004, Californian taxpayers agreed to fund embryo stem cell research to the tune of $3 billion in the hope of finding cures for chronic diseases and disabilities. But since then, not a single breakthrough has taken place.
Now the Los Angeles-based Investor’s Business Daily magazine is reporting that the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine set up to administer the $3b has started diverting the funds earmarked for embryo research into the ethically non-controversial adult stem cell research.
In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling in Ireland stripping Constitutional protection from human embryos in vitro, the latest developments from California take on a significant added meaning. With her experience in other ministries, Minister Harney is in a position to appreciate the economic as well as the medical knock-on effects of making Ireland an international centre of excellence for the ethically non-controversial adult stem cell research.
Minister For Health Mary Harney may well try to rush through a regulatory framework allowing embryo destruction to meet the interests of the IVF and embryo research industries. She is on record as saying she has asked her officials to prepare heads of legislation and it is expected the proposed legislation will follow the recommendations of the Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction’s 2005 Report. The membership of this Commission was outrageously biased in favour of allowing embryo destruction – they voted 24 to 1 for it, only Professor Gerard Whyte of TCD dissenting, click here to see his closely reasoned dissent.
Clearly the recommendations of such a biased body are not a fitting basis for legislation in a democracy, all the more so when such run contrary to the balance of opinion among the general public, measured time and again in professionally carried out opinion polls every year since the biased Report was issued, which have found a majority of around 70% support the Dáil passing legislation protecting embryos against destruction in clinics and laboratories.
But Minister Mary Harney may also defend legislation allowing the destruction of human embryos in vitro on the grounds that embryo destruction is needed to provide embryonic stem cells for research to produce new medical treatments.
This argument, however, has turned out to be as flawed as an appeal to the biased Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction Report. For years we have been bombarded by propaganda saying killing human embryos has to be allowed so research using stem cells got by that way may lead to new medical treatments. But now we are finding out this simply ain’t so. It’s been all promise, but no product.
In 2004 California approved Proposition 71, a ballot measure allowing the State to borrow US $3 billion to fund stem cell research using stem cells obtained by destroying human embryos. The money was to be used, its proponents said, to develop new treatments based on embryonic stem cell research. The State agency set up to manage this was the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.
On 12th January this year, the Los Angeles-based Investor’s Business Daily magazine reported that because the research using stem cells obtained by killing human embryos has not produced any breakthroughs in medical treatments, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine ‘is diverting funds’ to the research approach that ‘has produced actual therapies and treatments : adult stem cell research.’
Adult stem cell research, the Investor’s Business Daily comments, ‘not only has treated real people with real results it also does not come with the moral baggage embryonic stem cell research does.
It goes on to comment that advocates of embryonic stem cell research have engaged in a sort of three card trick:
To us this is a classic bait and switch, an attempt to snatch success from the jaws of failure and take credit for discoveries and advances achieved by research (which) Proposition 71 supporters once cavalierly dismissed. We have noted how over the years that when funding was needed, the phrase “embryonic stem cells” was used. When actual progress was discussed, the word “embryonic” was dropped because embryonic stem cell research never got out of the lab. Click here to read the Investor's Business Daily article in full.
So if Minister Mary Harney or the voices of the IVF and embryo research industries in Ireland start arguing that we need a regulatory framework allowing embryo destruction in order to open the door for research promising breakthroughs in medical treatment, the answer is we already know what lies down that path. California three US $ 3 billion at it and there were no results and now the agency set up to get results is diverting the money into adult stem cell research so it will have some results to show.
The real message of the Californian experience, then is that Ireland has a golden opportunity to put substantial resources into adult stem cell research to make Ireland an international centre of excellence in this field of research which is actually producing the goods.
There are three billion reasons not to allow the Supreme Court ruling in R v. R to be used as a cover to legalise research here involving human embryo destruction.
In 2004, Californian taxpayers agreed to fund embryo stem cell research to the tune of $3 billion in the hope of finding cures for chronic diseases and disabilities. But since then, not a single breakthrough has taken place.
Now the Los Angeles-based Investor’s Business Daily magazine is reporting that the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine set up to administer the $3b has started diverting the funds earmarked for embryo research into the ethically non-controversial adult stem cell research.
In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling in Ireland stripping Constitutional protection from human embryos in vitro, the latest developments from California take on a significant added meaning. With her experience in other ministries, Minister Harney is in a position to appreciate the economic as well as the medical knock-on effects of making Ireland an international centre of excellence for the ethically non-controversial adult stem cell research.
Minister For Health Mary Harney may well try to rush through a regulatory framework allowing embryo destruction to meet the interests of the IVF and embryo research industries. She is on record as saying she has asked her officials to prepare heads of legislation and it is expected the proposed legislation will follow the recommendations of the Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction’s 2005 Report. The membership of this Commission was outrageously biased in favour of allowing embryo destruction – they voted 24 to 1 for it, only Professor Gerard Whyte of TCD dissenting, click here to see his closely reasoned dissent.
Clearly the recommendations of such a biased body are not a fitting basis for legislation in a democracy, all the more so when such run contrary to the balance of opinion among the general public, measured time and again in professionally carried out opinion polls every year since the biased Report was issued, which have found a majority of around 70% support the Dáil passing legislation protecting embryos against destruction in clinics and laboratories.
But Minister Mary Harney may also defend legislation allowing the destruction of human embryos in vitro on the grounds that embryo destruction is needed to provide embryonic stem cells for research to produce new medical treatments.
This argument, however, has turned out to be as flawed as an appeal to the biased Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction Report. For years we have been bombarded by propaganda saying killing human embryos has to be allowed so research using stem cells got by that way may lead to new medical treatments. But now we are finding out this simply ain’t so. It’s been all promise, but no product.
In 2004 California approved Proposition 71, a ballot measure allowing the State to borrow US $3 billion to fund stem cell research using stem cells obtained by destroying human embryos. The money was to be used, its proponents said, to develop new treatments based on embryonic stem cell research. The State agency set up to manage this was the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.
On 12th January this year, the Los Angeles-based Investor’s Business Daily magazine reported that because the research using stem cells obtained by killing human embryos has not produced any breakthroughs in medical treatments, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine ‘is diverting funds’ to the research approach that ‘has produced actual therapies and treatments : adult stem cell research.’
Adult stem cell research, the Investor’s Business Daily comments, ‘not only has treated real people with real results it also does not come with the moral baggage embryonic stem cell research does.
It goes on to comment that advocates of embryonic stem cell research have engaged in a sort of three card trick:
To us this is a classic bait and switch, an attempt to snatch success from the jaws of failure and take credit for discoveries and advances achieved by research (which) Proposition 71 supporters once cavalierly dismissed. We have noted how over the years that when funding was needed, the phrase “embryonic stem cells” was used. When actual progress was discussed, the word “embryonic” was dropped because embryonic stem cell research never got out of the lab. Click here to read the Investor's Business Daily article in full.
So if Minister Mary Harney or the voices of the IVF and embryo research industries in Ireland start arguing that we need a regulatory framework allowing embryo destruction in order to open the door for research promising breakthroughs in medical treatment, the answer is we already know what lies down that path. California three US $ 3 billion at it and there were no results and now the agency set up to get results is diverting the money into adult stem cell research so it will have some results to show.
The real message of the Californian experience, then is that Ireland has a golden opportunity to put substantial resources into adult stem cell research to make Ireland an international centre of excellence in this field of research which is actually producing the goods.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
On the abortion debate
Mugged by Ultrasound : Why so many abortion workers have turned pro-life.
BY David Daleiden and Jon A. Shields
Source: The Weekly Standard
January 25, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 18
Abortion rights activists have long preferred to hold themselves at some remove from the practice they promote; rather than naming it, they speak of “choice” and “reproductive freedom.” But those who perform abortions have no such luxury. Instead, advances in ultrasound imaging and abortion procedures have forced providers ever closer to the nub of their work. Especially in abortions performed far enough along in gestation that the fetus is recognizably a tiny baby, this intimacy exacts an emotional toll, stirring sentiments for which doctors, nurses, and aides are sometimes unprepared. Most apparently have managed to reconcile their belief in the right to abortion with their revulsion at dying and dead fetuses, but a noteworthy number have found the conflict unbearable and have defected to the pro-life cause.
In the aftermath of Roe v. Wade, second-trimester abortions were usually performed by saline injection. The doctor simply replaced the amniotic fluid in the patient’s uterus with a saline solution and induced labor, leaving it to nurses to dispose of the expelled fetus. That changed in the late 1970s, when “dilation and evacuation” (D&E) emerged as a safer method. Today D&E is the most common second-trimester procedure. It has been performed millions of times in the United States.
But although D&E is better for the patient, it brings emotional distress for the abortionist, who, after inserting laminaria that cause the cervix to dilate, must dismember and remove the fetus with forceps. One early study, by abortionists Warren Hern and Billie Corrigan, found that although all of their staff members “approved of second trimester abortion in principle,” there “were few positive comments about D&E itself.” Reactions included “shock, dismay, amazement, disgust, fear, and sadness.” A more ambitious study published the following year, in the September 1979 issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, confirmed Hern and Corrigan’s findings. It found “strong emotional reactions during or following the procedures and occasional disquieting dreams.”
Another study, published in the October 1989 issue of Social Science and Medicine noted that abortion providers were pained by encounters with the fetus regardless of how committed they were to abortion rights. It seems that no amount of ideological conviction can inoculate providers against negative emotional reactions to abortion. Such studies are few. In general, abortion providers have censored their own emotional trauma out of concern to protect abortion rights.
In 2008, however, abortionist Lisa Harris endeavored to begin “breaking the silence” in the pages of the journal Reproductive Health Matters. When she herself was 18 weeks pregnant, Dr. Harris performed a D&E abortion on an 18-week-old fetus. Harris felt her own child kick precisely at the moment that she ripped a fetal leg off with her forceps:
Instantly, tears were streaming from my eyes—without me—meaning my conscious brain—even being aware of what was going on. I felt as if my response had come entirely from my body, bypassing my usual cognitive processing completely. A message seemed to travel from my hand and my uterus to my tear ducts. It was an overwhelming feeling—a brutally visceral response—heartfelt and unmediated by my training or my feminist pro-choice politics. It was one of the more raw moments in my life.
Harris concluded her piece by lamenting that the pro-choice movement has left providers to suffer in silence because it has “not owned up to the reality of the fetus, or the reality of fetal parts.” Indeed, it often insists that images used by the pro-life movement are faked. Pro-choice advocates also falsely insist that second-trimester abortions are confined almost exclusively to tragic “hard” cases such as fetal malformation.
Yet a review of the literature in the April 2009 issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology found that most abortions performed after the first trimester are sought for the same reasons as first-trimester abortions, they’re just delayed. This reality only intensifies the guilt pangs of abortion providers.)
Hern and Harris chose to stay in the abortion business; one of the first doctors to change his allegiance was Paul Jarrett, who quit after only 23 abortions. His turning point came in 1974, when he performed an abortion on a fetus at 14 weeks’ gestation: “As I brought out the rib cage, I looked and saw a tiny, beating heart,” he would recall. “And when I found the head of the baby, I looked squarely in the face of another human being—a human being that I just killed.”
In 1990 Judith Fetrow, an aide at a Planned Parenthood clinic, found that disposing of fetal bodies as medical waste was more than she could bear. Soon after she left her position, Fetrow described her experiences: “No one at Planned Parenthood wanted this job. I had to look at the tiny hands and feet. There were times when I wanted to cry.”
Finally persuaded to quit by a pro-life protester outside her clinic, Fetrow is now involved in the American Life League.Kathy Sparks is another convert formerly responsible for disposing of fetal remains, this time at an Illinois abortion clinic. Her account of the experience that led her to exit the abortion industry (taken from the Pro-Life Action League website in 2004) reads in part:The baby’s bones were far too developed to rip them up with [the doctor’s] curette, so he had to pull the baby out with forceps. He brought out three or four major pieces. I took the baby to the clean up room, I set him down and I began weeping uncontrollably. I cried and cried. This little face was perfectly formed. A recovery nurse rebuked Sparks for her unprofessional behavior. She quit the next day. Sparks is now the director of a crisis pregnancy center with more than 20 pro-life volunteers.
Handling fetal remains can be especially difficult in late-term clinics. Until George Tiller was assassinated by a pro-life radical last summer, his clinic in Wichita specialized in third-trimester abortions. To handle the large volume of biological waste Tiller had a crematorium on the premises. One day when hauling a heavy container of fetal waste, Tiller asked his secretary, Luhra Tivis, to assist him. She found the experience devastating. The “most horrible thing,” Tivis later recounted, was that she “could smell those babies burning.” Tivis, a former NOW activist, soon left her secretarial position at the clinic to volunteer for Operation Rescue, a radical pro-life organization.
Other converts were driven into the pro-life movement by advances in ultrasound technology. The most recent example is Abby Johnson, the former director of Dallas-area Planned Parenthood. After watching, via ultrasound, an embryo “crumple” as it was suctioned out of its mother’s womb, Johnson reported a “conversion in my heart.” Likewise, Joan Appleton was the head nurse at a large abortion facility in Falls Church, Virginia, and a NOW activist. Appleton performed thousands of abortions with aplomb until a single ultrasound-assisted abortion rattled her. As Appleton remembers, “I was watching the screen. I saw the baby pull away. I saw the baby open his mouth. After the procedure I was shaking, literally.”
The most famous abortion provider to be converted by ultrasound technology, decades ago, is Bernard Nathanson, cofounder of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, the original NARAL. In the early 1970s, Nathanson was the largest abortion provider in the Western world. By his own reckoning he performed more than 60,000 abortions, including one on his own child. Nathanson’s exit from the industry was slow and tortured. In Aborting America (1979), he expressed anxiety over the possibility that he was complicit in a great evil. He was especially troubled by ultrasound images. When he finally left his profession for pro-life activism, he produced The Silent Scream (1984), a documentary of an ultrasound abortion that showed the fetus scrambling vainly to escape dismemberment. This handful of stories is representative of many more.
In fact, with the exception of communism, we can think of few other movements from which so many activists have defected to the opposition. Nonetheless, the vast majority of clinic workers remain committed to the pro-choice cause. Perhaps some of those who stay behind are haunted by their work. Most, however, find a way to cope with the dissonance.
Pro-choice advocates like to point out that abortion has existed in all times and places. Yet that observation tends to obscure the radicalism of the present abortion regime in the United States. Until very recently, no one in the history of the world has had the routine job of killing well-developed fetuses quite so up close and personal. It is an experiment that was bound to stir pro-life sentiments even in the hearts of those staunchly devoted to abortion rights. Ultrasound and D&E bring workers closer to the beings they destroy. Hern and Corrigan concluded their study by noting that D&E leaves “no possibility of denying an act of destruction.” As they wrote, “It is before one’s eyes. The sensations of dismemberment run through the forceps like an electric current.”Jon A. Shields is assistant professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. David Daleiden is a student there.
BY David Daleiden and Jon A. Shields
Source: The Weekly Standard
January 25, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 18
Abortion rights activists have long preferred to hold themselves at some remove from the practice they promote; rather than naming it, they speak of “choice” and “reproductive freedom.” But those who perform abortions have no such luxury. Instead, advances in ultrasound imaging and abortion procedures have forced providers ever closer to the nub of their work. Especially in abortions performed far enough along in gestation that the fetus is recognizably a tiny baby, this intimacy exacts an emotional toll, stirring sentiments for which doctors, nurses, and aides are sometimes unprepared. Most apparently have managed to reconcile their belief in the right to abortion with their revulsion at dying and dead fetuses, but a noteworthy number have found the conflict unbearable and have defected to the pro-life cause.
In the aftermath of Roe v. Wade, second-trimester abortions were usually performed by saline injection. The doctor simply replaced the amniotic fluid in the patient’s uterus with a saline solution and induced labor, leaving it to nurses to dispose of the expelled fetus. That changed in the late 1970s, when “dilation and evacuation” (D&E) emerged as a safer method. Today D&E is the most common second-trimester procedure. It has been performed millions of times in the United States.
But although D&E is better for the patient, it brings emotional distress for the abortionist, who, after inserting laminaria that cause the cervix to dilate, must dismember and remove the fetus with forceps. One early study, by abortionists Warren Hern and Billie Corrigan, found that although all of their staff members “approved of second trimester abortion in principle,” there “were few positive comments about D&E itself.” Reactions included “shock, dismay, amazement, disgust, fear, and sadness.” A more ambitious study published the following year, in the September 1979 issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, confirmed Hern and Corrigan’s findings. It found “strong emotional reactions during or following the procedures and occasional disquieting dreams.”
Another study, published in the October 1989 issue of Social Science and Medicine noted that abortion providers were pained by encounters with the fetus regardless of how committed they were to abortion rights. It seems that no amount of ideological conviction can inoculate providers against negative emotional reactions to abortion. Such studies are few. In general, abortion providers have censored their own emotional trauma out of concern to protect abortion rights.
In 2008, however, abortionist Lisa Harris endeavored to begin “breaking the silence” in the pages of the journal Reproductive Health Matters. When she herself was 18 weeks pregnant, Dr. Harris performed a D&E abortion on an 18-week-old fetus. Harris felt her own child kick precisely at the moment that she ripped a fetal leg off with her forceps:
Instantly, tears were streaming from my eyes—without me—meaning my conscious brain—even being aware of what was going on. I felt as if my response had come entirely from my body, bypassing my usual cognitive processing completely. A message seemed to travel from my hand and my uterus to my tear ducts. It was an overwhelming feeling—a brutally visceral response—heartfelt and unmediated by my training or my feminist pro-choice politics. It was one of the more raw moments in my life.
Harris concluded her piece by lamenting that the pro-choice movement has left providers to suffer in silence because it has “not owned up to the reality of the fetus, or the reality of fetal parts.” Indeed, it often insists that images used by the pro-life movement are faked. Pro-choice advocates also falsely insist that second-trimester abortions are confined almost exclusively to tragic “hard” cases such as fetal malformation.
Yet a review of the literature in the April 2009 issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology found that most abortions performed after the first trimester are sought for the same reasons as first-trimester abortions, they’re just delayed. This reality only intensifies the guilt pangs of abortion providers.)
Hern and Harris chose to stay in the abortion business; one of the first doctors to change his allegiance was Paul Jarrett, who quit after only 23 abortions. His turning point came in 1974, when he performed an abortion on a fetus at 14 weeks’ gestation: “As I brought out the rib cage, I looked and saw a tiny, beating heart,” he would recall. “And when I found the head of the baby, I looked squarely in the face of another human being—a human being that I just killed.”
In 1990 Judith Fetrow, an aide at a Planned Parenthood clinic, found that disposing of fetal bodies as medical waste was more than she could bear. Soon after she left her position, Fetrow described her experiences: “No one at Planned Parenthood wanted this job. I had to look at the tiny hands and feet. There were times when I wanted to cry.”
Finally persuaded to quit by a pro-life protester outside her clinic, Fetrow is now involved in the American Life League.Kathy Sparks is another convert formerly responsible for disposing of fetal remains, this time at an Illinois abortion clinic. Her account of the experience that led her to exit the abortion industry (taken from the Pro-Life Action League website in 2004) reads in part:The baby’s bones were far too developed to rip them up with [the doctor’s] curette, so he had to pull the baby out with forceps. He brought out three or four major pieces. I took the baby to the clean up room, I set him down and I began weeping uncontrollably. I cried and cried. This little face was perfectly formed. A recovery nurse rebuked Sparks for her unprofessional behavior. She quit the next day. Sparks is now the director of a crisis pregnancy center with more than 20 pro-life volunteers.
Handling fetal remains can be especially difficult in late-term clinics. Until George Tiller was assassinated by a pro-life radical last summer, his clinic in Wichita specialized in third-trimester abortions. To handle the large volume of biological waste Tiller had a crematorium on the premises. One day when hauling a heavy container of fetal waste, Tiller asked his secretary, Luhra Tivis, to assist him. She found the experience devastating. The “most horrible thing,” Tivis later recounted, was that she “could smell those babies burning.” Tivis, a former NOW activist, soon left her secretarial position at the clinic to volunteer for Operation Rescue, a radical pro-life organization.
Other converts were driven into the pro-life movement by advances in ultrasound technology. The most recent example is Abby Johnson, the former director of Dallas-area Planned Parenthood. After watching, via ultrasound, an embryo “crumple” as it was suctioned out of its mother’s womb, Johnson reported a “conversion in my heart.” Likewise, Joan Appleton was the head nurse at a large abortion facility in Falls Church, Virginia, and a NOW activist. Appleton performed thousands of abortions with aplomb until a single ultrasound-assisted abortion rattled her. As Appleton remembers, “I was watching the screen. I saw the baby pull away. I saw the baby open his mouth. After the procedure I was shaking, literally.”
The most famous abortion provider to be converted by ultrasound technology, decades ago, is Bernard Nathanson, cofounder of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, the original NARAL. In the early 1970s, Nathanson was the largest abortion provider in the Western world. By his own reckoning he performed more than 60,000 abortions, including one on his own child. Nathanson’s exit from the industry was slow and tortured. In Aborting America (1979), he expressed anxiety over the possibility that he was complicit in a great evil. He was especially troubled by ultrasound images. When he finally left his profession for pro-life activism, he produced The Silent Scream (1984), a documentary of an ultrasound abortion that showed the fetus scrambling vainly to escape dismemberment. This handful of stories is representative of many more.
In fact, with the exception of communism, we can think of few other movements from which so many activists have defected to the opposition. Nonetheless, the vast majority of clinic workers remain committed to the pro-choice cause. Perhaps some of those who stay behind are haunted by their work. Most, however, find a way to cope with the dissonance.
Pro-choice advocates like to point out that abortion has existed in all times and places. Yet that observation tends to obscure the radicalism of the present abortion regime in the United States. Until very recently, no one in the history of the world has had the routine job of killing well-developed fetuses quite so up close and personal. It is an experiment that was bound to stir pro-life sentiments even in the hearts of those staunchly devoted to abortion rights. Ultrasound and D&E bring workers closer to the beings they destroy. Hern and Corrigan concluded their study by noting that D&E leaves “no possibility of denying an act of destruction.” As they wrote, “It is before one’s eyes. The sensations of dismemberment run through the forceps like an electric current.”Jon A. Shields is assistant professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. David Daleiden is a student there.
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