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.
Showing posts with label facts on abortion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label facts on abortion. Show all posts
Monday, May 31, 2010
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.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Abortion and Ireland : Irish Examiner looks for headline in poll and ignores facts
A Red C online survey on abortion published in the Irish Examiner on the 21st January 2010 claims that 60% of 18-35 year olds support legalised abortion in Ireland.
Given the question posed, the results are not at all surprising. The survey makes no distinction between necessary medical treatments in pregnancy and induced abortion, (where the life of the unborn child is directly targeted). This in effect makes the findings meaningless and sheds no new light on public attitudes to abortion.
Polls, including one in 2009, that distinguish between standard medical treatments and induced abortion consistently show majority opposition to legal abortion.*
The latest Red C survey confines its interviews to 18-35 year olds. Clearly then the findings are not representative of the general population. Also, only 36% of the 18-35 year olds interviewed 'strongly' approve of legal abortion and not 60% as the Irish Examiner claimed.
The report also failed to draw attention to the known fact that 18-35 year olds start to increasingly identify with the pro-life position as they get older. This is borne out in all surveys on the issue.
All things considered, it was extremely misleading for the paper to run with today's front page headline declaring: 60% In Favour of Legal Abortion
The abortion debate is a very serious one and deserves more objective treatment than it received in today's Irish Examiner.
Given the question posed, the results are not at all surprising. The survey makes no distinction between necessary medical treatments in pregnancy and induced abortion, (where the life of the unborn child is directly targeted). This in effect makes the findings meaningless and sheds no new light on public attitudes to abortion.
Polls, including one in 2009, that distinguish between standard medical treatments and induced abortion consistently show majority opposition to legal abortion.*
The latest Red C survey confines its interviews to 18-35 year olds. Clearly then the findings are not representative of the general population. Also, only 36% of the 18-35 year olds interviewed 'strongly' approve of legal abortion and not 60% as the Irish Examiner claimed.
The report also failed to draw attention to the known fact that 18-35 year olds start to increasingly identify with the pro-life position as they get older. This is borne out in all surveys on the issue.
All things considered, it was extremely misleading for the paper to run with today's front page headline declaring: 60% In Favour of Legal Abortion
The abortion debate is a very serious one and deserves more objective treatment than it received in today's Irish Examiner.
An amazing video that will demolish any pro-abortion argument
This is truly an amazing video on the miracle that is life in the womb.
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